3. Human Rights as Fundamental Conditions for a Good Life 4. From a Good Life to Human Rights Some Complications推荐.pdfVIP

3 Human Rights as Fundamental Conditions for a Good Life S. Matthew Liao I. Introduction Human rights can offer powerful protection to those who possess them. As such, human rights are frequently invoked in contemporary political discourses. At the same time, many people question whether many purported human rights claims are genuine human rights. For example, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) lists such rights as the right to employment and peri- odic holidays with pay. Or, some claim that there is a human right to assisted suicide.1 Also, many international declarations on the rights of the child proclaim that children have a right to be loved.2 And, more recently, the Director-General of UNESCO announced that there is a human right to peace. Are all these claims genuine human rights? To determine whether a human rights claim is genuine or not, we need a substan- tive account of human rights, that is, an account that tells us what human rights we have and why we have these rights.3 But what gives content to a substantive account of human rights? In this paper, I offer a new answer: human beings have human rights to what I  call the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. I  call this the Fundamental Conditions Approach. To articulate and defend this approach, I shall do five things. First, I shall explain what I mean by the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life and why human beings have human rights to these conditions. Second, I shall demonstrate how this approach can explain many of the rights found in the UDHR. At the same time, I shall illustrate how this approach can explain why some of the claims in the UDHR are not genuine human rights. Third, James Griffin has