The Range of Social Human Rights

Abstract

Even though poverty and poverty-related deaths are still increasing worldwide, too little has been undertaken against them. The question addressed in this article is whether citizens in the industrial countries who are better off have a duty to mitigate or stop the misery of the poor; and if so, what kind of duty is it. One could assume that social human rights offer an adequate answer to this question but their content, justification and implementation are highly contested from a legal as well as philosophical point of view. Different approaches to justifying social human rights and corresponding obligations are discussed in this contribution, and it is argued that neither focussing solely on a concept of “negative” obligations nor on a concept of “positive” obligations is sufficient. Moreover, it is pointed out that it is not convincing to deny social rights the status of human rights on the grounds that they do not correspond to negative universal duties. Instead liberal rights as well as social rights are both correlated with “waves of duties,” “negative” and “positive.”