Which practice? – Rescuing the practical conception of human rights

Abstract

In his The Idea of Human Rights, Charles Beitz offers a criticism of what he calls ‘naturalistic’ conceptions of human rights that has since become seminal. He argues that philosophers have largely ignored the actual practice of human rights for the purpose of their theories. As an alternative to these views, he develops a novel practical conception of human rights, whose methods take seriously the role human rights play within our international practice. While his criticism of naturalistic views remains brilliant, Beitz’s alternative proposal has its own problems: it fails to explain the normative authority of human rights as a special class of rights, and it gives too much authority to contingent facts, thereby making human rights inherently static. It might at first seem as if these problems stem from the particular methodology Beitz employs. However, I show that this is not the case. The problems can be circumvented, I argue, by sticking to Beitz’s methodology, but shifting the focus onto a different type of social practice that human rights function to govern. In order to make sense of human rights, we ought to regard them as necessary conditions of any scheme of just social cooperation.