12. Joseph Raz on Human Rights A Critical Appraisal 13. Why International Legal Human Rights推荐.pdfVIP

12 Joseph Raz on Human Rights A Critical Appraisal David Miller The current popularity of human rights talk in legal and political circles has generated a higher level debate among philosophers about how the concept itself should be under- stood.1 Unlike the much earlier debate about social and economic rights, and whether they should qualify as human rights proper, this is not primarily about the substance of human rights—about what should belong on the list of human rights and what should not. Instead the focus is on the kind of claim one is making when one says that such-and-such is a human right, and on how such claims can be justified; although the answer turns out to have implications for what belongs on the list, this is not the main concern. On one side are those who defend ‘humanist’ or ‘naturalistic’ or ‘traditional’ accounts of human rights; on the other side are those who defend ‘political’ or ‘practi- cal’ accounts. Raz places himself, and has been placed by others, in the second camp.2 This is how the landscape is usually described, but recently there have been dissent- ing voices suggesting that the contrast between the two camps is at least overdrawn if not wholly misleading.3 The dissenters argue that the two perspectives are comple- mentary to one another, and both are necessary for a full understanding of human rights. I  am sympathetic to this conciliatory move and will apply it to Raz’s essay in this reply. But first it will be helpful briefly to characterize the two allegedly rival accounts of the nature of human rights. The first, humanist, view holds that the way to understand human rights is to see them as moral rights justified by the role they play in protecting essential human