The justification of human rights and the basic right to justification. A reflexive approach

Abstract

Human Rights are a complex phenomenon, comprising an array of different aspects. They have a moral life, expressing urgent human concerns and claims that must not be violated or ignored; they also have a legal life, being enshrined in national constitutions and in international declarations; and they have a political life, expressing standards of basic political legitimacy. For a comprehensive philosophical account of human rights, all of these aspects are essential and need to be integrated. Yet when doing so one must not overlook the central social-political aspect of human rights, namely that when and where they have been claimed, it has been because the individuals concerned suffered from and protested against forms of oppression and/or exploitation that they believed disregarded their dignity as human beings. Human rights are first and foremost weapons in combating certain evils that human beings inflict upon one another; they emphasize standards of treatment that no human being could justifiably deny to others. My thesis in what follows is that if this is correct, it implies - reflexively speaking - that one claim underlies all human rights, namely human beings' claim to be respected as agents who have the right not to be subjected to certain actions or institutional norms that cannot be adequately justified to them. In other words, human rights have a common ground in one basic moral right, the right to justification.