Centre for Contemporary Political Theory Seminar: Justifying Human Rights as the Rights of Humans

Join the CCPT for Dr Jesse Tomalty (Bergen) and Dr Kerri Woods (Leeds)'s paper, 'Justifying Human Rights as the Rights of Humans'.

Who are the bearers of human rights? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: all humans. We can add to this the commonsensical thought that human rights are held only by humans. They are, after all, human rights. While seemingly intuitive, this idea of human rights as the rights of all and only humans has proven remarkably difficult to defend. Within the philosophy of human rights, attempts to justify the scope of human rights as including only humans end up excluding many humans as bearers of human rights, notably infants and adults with severe cognitive impairments. By contrast, attempts to justify the scope of human rights as including all humans struggle to explain why they do not also extend to at least some non-human animals.  

In this paper, we begin from the premise that the idea of human rights as the rights of all and only humans is worth preserving, and we explore options for justifying this commitment. We argue that doing so requires a move away from the idea of human rights as grounded exclusively in “inner” properties of humans. We then consider an approach that has been comparatively neglected in the extensive literature on the grounds of human rights, namely, conferralism, exemplified by Suzy Killmister’s so-called “warty” conception of human rights. While this approach can surmount some of the challenges that plague other arguments, we show that it cannot fully address the problems already encountered. We move from there to sketch a plausible alternative grounded in an account of human well-being. In so doing, we identify the conditions that an adequate theory of human rights as the rights of all and only humans would need to satisfy, and the costs to human rights theory of failing to confront these challenges.