When Good Alone Isn’t Enough

Abstract

James Griffin's On Human Rights is a thoughtful, interesting, informa tive, often illuminating, but also often frustrating and not wholly satisfy ing examination of human rights. Griffin theorizes human rights not as legal or political rights but as moral rights (1). As moral rights, he theo rizes them as governing not only or mainly the legal and political treat ment of citizens by the states to which they belong and the relations be tween states, but also as governing interpersonal conduct more generally. This is a large and complex topic. Indeed, it arguably is not a single topic, or, if it is, it is not a single topic best approached by reasoning from morality to law and politics as something like instances of applied ethics, as Griffin does. In any event, to tackle it, Griffin divides his book into three parts. The first offers a general account of human rights as moral rights. The second examines what Griffin takes to be the three most general, basic, or abstract human rights as moral rights. The third considers various issues of extension and application, including the status of several putative derivative or second-order human rights as moral rights (e.g., the right to privacy, the right to bring about one's own death) and the relationship between human rights as moral rights and human rights as a matter of international law and practice. Griffin is drawn to the project by what he characterizes as the trou bling indeterminacy of the idea of human rights within moral thought and practice (14).1 This indeterminacy has, he argues, many sources. They include contemporary skepticism about the theistic and teleological assumptions upon which older theories of natural law and natural rights rested, and the contemporary tendency to invoke human rights whenever