Abstract
This paper addresses the question of the normative domains of human rights and social justice. Today, the dominant view in political philosophy is that they occupy largely distinct spheres, with social justice being a set of stronger egalitarian norms and human rights functioning as baseline protections against common threats posed by states to the general interests of persons subjected to them. Reflecting on current human rights practice and discourse, this paper develops a reconstructed normative model of social justice and human rights as nested membership norms in political societies. By connecting membership to processes of political legitimacy, human rights are conceptualized as increasingly functioning as the language of contesting and reforming barriers of exclusion to that status. This leads to an understanding of the possible content of human rights that is dynamic and relational, bringing it closer in line with the egalitarianism of social justice.
Highlights
Domestic and international human rights documents and discourses are characterized by conceptual and normative links between the aims of human rights and social justice
It may be objected that the cost of a more egalitarian conception of human rights, nested in the requirements of social justice, is that it becomes an inappropriate standard of internal legitimacy as it will be too demanding to be a realistically achievable condition of political legitimacy
Human rights connect membership claims within a political association to an external egalitarian status that bears on its legitimacy
Summary
Domestic and international human rights documents and discourses are characterized by conceptual and normative links between the aims of human rights and social justice. The aim of this paper is to push back against the dominant, discontinuous, view of the relationship between the normative domains of human rights and social justice, and to outline a normative model of human rights that overlaps more fully with an egalitarian conception of social justice This reformed normative model of human rights is ‘political’ in the sense of being based on a reflection on current human rights practice, understood to consist of both institutional and discursive elements The final section defends this view against the objection that the distinctive aspect of human rights as international concern marks them off from many of the demands of social justice that are not coherently matters of international concern
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