Normative liberal theory and the bifurcation of human rights

Abstract

This article argues that liberal arguments for human rights minimalism, such as those of John Rawls and Michael Ignatieff, contain fundamental inconsistencies in their treatment of core rights to life and liberty. Insofar as their versions of minimalism foreground rights to physical security and basic freedom of movement, they cannot coherently exclude certain social and economic protections and liberties that directly support or are even partly constitutive of these rights. Nor do they have good grounds for putting the social and private realms wholly beyond the purview of international law. ‘New’ human rights that represent an expansion of civil rights in particular beyond the classic conception to encompass, for example, the right to freedom from sexual and gender-based violence, illustrate especially well the extent to which civil, social, and economic rights violations, and their remedies, are deeply interwoven. These emergent rights also directly challenge the dichotomy between the public/political and private/social realms, and the corollary assumption that human rights violations occur mainly or exclusively in the former sphere. While the concerns that motivate arguments for human rights minimalism—considerations of pluralism and prudence—are legitimate, proponents would do best to reconsider the multiple roles that human rights in fact play, in spite of their essentially contested status.