32. Human Needs, Human Rights-33. Liberty Rights and the Limits of Liberal Democracy推荐.pdf

32 Human Needs, Human Rights* Massimo Renzo I. Human Rights: Naturalistic and Political Conceptions The language of human rights has become the main currency in which all the most important issues of international justice are normally cashed out. The need to protect human rights is invoked, among other things, to defend the legitimacy of military intervention, to justify the institution of international courts and tribunals, and to assess the eligibility of countries to be part of international agreements or to receive aid they desperately need. The role played by human rights at the domestic level tends to get less attention, but is equally significant. All of the most important human rights are embodied in domestic law, and states bear primary responsibility for their protec- tion and their enforcement. Indeed, according to many, it is precisely the task of pro- tecting and enforcing human rights that ultimately justifies whatever authority states have.1 A notion that plays such a pervasive role both at the domestic and at the international level is in need of justification, and to this task philosophers have turned in recent years. Initially, the obvious move in explaining what human rights are and what justifies their existence has been to look at the natural law tradition, and in particular at the notion of natural rights: rights that all human beings possess simply in virtue of their human nature.2 The crucial element of this “naturalistic” approach, whose root can be found in the thought of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke, is the claim that human rights are enti- tlements that every human being has against every other human being, independently of the existence of institutional arrangements or specific practices. Although the specific form that human rights will take in different socio-historical contexts migh