Hard Cases: Philosophy, Public Health, and Women’s Human Rights

Abstract

The idea of human rights has a home in multiple domains: human rights are the subject of a vibrant international activist movement, of a growing body of international law, and of a burgeoning branch of moral and political philosophy. Given this fact, how should philosophers understand the appropriate relationship between a philosophical theory of human rights and the existing international human rights practices? There is a general sense among philosophers that ‘‘human rights’’ is, as James Griffin puts it, ‘‘a theoretical term,’’ one developed (albeit without what Griffin calls ‘‘sufficient determinateness of sense’’) by political theorists and moral philosophers, and that the point of human rights law and activism is to attempt to realize the idea expressed by this term. On this view, philosophy’s contribution to existing human rights practice is to provide a theory of moral human rights – as Griffin would put it, a ‘‘completion’’ of the incomplete theoretical term. For such a purpose, philosophers only need to do the kind of theoretical work they have always done; engagement with any of the human rights practices is unnecessary. Charles Beitz, in his recent book, The Idea of Human Rights, explicitly rejects this view of what the philosophy of human rights is for; on his view, the philosophy of human rights should ‘‘treat international human rights as a normative practice to be grasped sui generis and consider how the idea of a human rights functions within it.’’ Beitz aims to develop a ‘‘practical conception’’ of human rights, according to