Giving Up the Goods: Rethinking Human Rights to 'Subsistence', Institutional Justice, and Imperfect Duties

Abstract

In this paper I challenge the idea that there can be rights the rationale and content of which is securing subsistence goods for people. I do not question whether sometimes one can be entitled to minimum provisions on a different basis. For example, social justice standards entitle us to a fair share of the social product; in certain circumstances this might imply the minimum necessary to enjoy one’s equal rights as a citizen. Yet the same standards can entitle us to more than this in other circumstances. By contrast human rights aim to articulate minimal entitlements that do not vary with social circumstances. I argue that the minimum they aim to articulate is not best understood as an entitlement to an amount of some goods, even a subsistence amount, but rather as a minimum treatment. I then show how this notion of minimum treatment does not challenge the idea that we have social and economic rights — it just makes their basis and content more nuanced.I pose the following dilemma. Either a person’s claim to subsistence goods is against social institutions equipped to distribute social benefits and burdens fairly and equitably or it is made regardless of such a social scheme. If the former, then one’s claim is best understood as based on principles the content of which is not a minimum goods entitlement, but rather an equitable social distribution — a fair share. However, if the claim is not against a social scheme, there will be no plausible principle defining what counts as a reasonable burden for any of the available agents to secure subsistence. That means there is no justified principle implying perfect duties any agent could clearly follow or clearly breach that secure subsistence conditions for others. At best we can justify perfect, but singular, rescue duties under very specific conditions, or general but imperfect duties (allowing a degree of personal discretion concerning what any of us must do). Neither of these obviously correlates with human rights standards, for reasons I shall give. For more than singular duties such as rescue duties and imperfect duties to apply an institutional social agent with special redistributive powers is needed. But this reintroduces the first horn of the dilemma above: for that kind of agent the relevant standard is a fair share, not a minimal right. Attempts in the literature to overcome the second horn of the dilemma through claims that basic rights can correlate with imperfect duties or that basic rights can generate duties to work towards institutions that ‘perfect’ our imperfect duties, are shown to be faulty.My conclusion is that our entitlement to specific goods distributions is a different kind of question from entitlements based in rescue or imperfect duties of assistance. They are more appropriately addressed in an institutional context and in those contexts it is the standards of social justice/fairness that apply. Human rights standards engage with distributive questions in a different way: they define impermissible reasons on which to base distributive policies, ones implying negligent disregard. They are better understood as standards of minimum treatment rather than entitlement to minimum goods provision.