8. Can Moral Desert Qualify or Justify Human Rights 9. A Social Ontology of Human Rights推荐.pdf

8 Can Moral Desert Qualify or Justify Human Rights? Zofia Stemplowska I. Introduction A person is morally deserving of some treatment when this is the morally fitting response to her desert basis.1 The thought here is that such a ‘fitting’ response is intrin- sically valuable and it is impersonally valuable—ie, it is valuable even if it does not benefit anyone.2 Thus a world in which everyone is treated as they deserve would be in one respect better than a world in which the same people were all better off unde- servedly. The idea of moral desert requires that only the features that can form the basis for moral appraisal qualify as desert bases. Typical candidates, all embraced by Nickel (this volume, Chapter 7), include a person’s actions, attitudes, and character. For example, we may think that a wrongdoer who commits a crime deserves to be imprisoned while an honest lawyer deserves to be rewarded for her work.3 Can personal moral desert, as Nickel argues, qualify the scope of (some) human rights and play a role in justifying (some) human rights? That is, can the treatment that a person deserves amount to the withdrawal of a human right or conferring of reward as a matter of human right? A right is qualified when there are restrictions based on personal features regarding who can hold it. As Nickel puts it, ‘[q]ualifications use personal characteristics to make a universal right available to only part of the human population’ (159). So if desert affects who is entitled to a given human right X, then 1 I am grateful for comments to Matthew Clayton, Ben Jackson, S. Matthew Liao, and Andrea Sangiovanni as well as to the participants of the Warwick–Oxford joint seminar on human rights, May 2013. 2