1 On the Foundations of Human Rights-2 Response to John Tasioulas推荐.pdfVIP

1 On the Foundations of Human Rights John Tasioulas I. Foundations Without Foundationalism The nature of human rights, the subject we are talking about when we invoke this globally resonant category of practical standards, is a distinct matter from their foun- dations or grounds. On the former question there is disagreement as to the merits of the orthodox view, according to which human rights are moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity.1 Even for those with orthodox sym- pathies, however, the question of grounds remains to be faced: what are the conditions that make it the case that anything is a right of this kind, and are they ever satisfied?2 At most, orthodoxy about the nature of human rights is committed to the thesis that the satisfaction of the relevant conditions is a matter for natural reason and hence underwrites the objective truth or correctness of positive human rights claims. But the nature of those conditions is notoriously the subject of deep and persistent disa- greement. Some philosophers echo contemporary human rights instruments by pre- senting human dignity as the foundation, others appeal to a schedule of basic human needs or universal interests, yet others to the value of personhood or some combina- tion of these factors. And of course there are still those who insist, against all secular doctrines of the kind just listed, that a compelling grounding of human rights is ines- capably theistic in character. I distinguish the contention that human rights have foundations , a version of which I defend in this chapter, from certain foundationalist deformations it is lia- ble to undergo. Foundationalism, which elaborates erroneously on the bare ortho - dox thesis that human rights have objective grounds, comes in both meta-ethical and