1. PHIL 104 (STOLZE)
Notes on Heather Widdows, Global Ethics: An Introduction, chapter 5

2. Human Rights Theory for Global Ethics
Three Generations of Human Rights
Types of Right
Critiques of the Rights Framework
Example: Human Rights in Saudi Arabia

3. Three Generations of Human Rights
Civil and political rights
Economic, social, and cultural rights
Rights of peoples

4. Types of Right Positive and Negative Rights (concern “what rights do”)
Intrinsic and Instrumental Rights (concern the “justification of rights”)
Basic Rights and Duties
Rights as Trumps

5. Positive and Negative Rights
A negative right is one that requires “only that other people do nothing to violate that right” (p. 113).
A positive right is one that requires “other people to act: actually to do something.” (p. 113).

6. Intrinsic and Instrumental Rights
Intrinsic = rights are valuable because they “recognize and protect the intrinsic value of people: a value people just have and that we must respect, period” (p. 113).
Instrumental = “rights are valuable because of the conditions brought about as a consequence of these rights being upheld” (p. 113).

7. Henry Shue on Basic Rights and Duties
provide minimal protection against “utter helplessness”;
protect the defenseless against devastating threats;
function as a restraint against otherwise overwhelming economic and political forces;
guarantee to meet some basic needs;
provide a minimal standard no one should be permitted to fall below.
Duties:
duties to avoid depriving;
duties to protect from deprivation;
duties to aid the deprived.

8. Rights as Trumps
Some rights—arguably those that are basic—have a special status and therefore trump “other reasons there may be for other courses of action”: “When people cite an action as violating a human right, they mean to ascribe some special force to the claim; namely, that there has been a violation of something valuable to all humans, and that this is a fundamental violation of a right that we think inviolable—full stop, no balancing or trading off with other benefits or reasons” (p. 118).
Objection: The “Ticking Time Bomb” Thought Experiment

9. Critiques of the Rights Framework
Jeremy Bentham
Karl Marx
Feminist
Non-Western

10. Jeremy Bentham on Rights: “Nonsense upon Stilts”
For Bentham all talk about rights is merely an indirect way of talking about interests and preferences; rights aren’t natural, they are merely human social constructs and conventions.
“Bentham claimed that while we might reasonably want the conditions that rights supposedly prescribe—protection from harm and the provision of goods, for example—it is ‘nonsense’ then to move to the claim that there are such rights: that such rights actually exist. In his words, ‘a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right; want is not supply; hunger is not bread” (p. 122).

11. Karl Marx on Rights: Formal vs. Substantive
Marx criticized formal civil, legal, and political rights and argued for more robust substantive protection of human interests against forms of social oppression and economic exploitation.
“Marx is not necessarily critical of the idea of people having certain rights and entitlements per se, but of a particular liberal conception of rights that he sees as the dominant one. That is, Marx was criticizing the concept of rights that emerged from the conditions of liberal bourgeois society. He does think that people are entitled to certain things and should be free from certain constraints. For instance, in his earlier writings…Marx was greatly concerned with the way in which workers under capitalism were prevented from realizing their nature as ‘species beings’, hence prevented from flourishing as humans should in a way that arguably has close parallels with Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia” (p. 123).

12. The Feminist Critique of Rights: Individuals vs. Social Context
“The rights model is concerned primarily with individual rights and it does not easily take account of context and relationships. Feminists critique this as a male model that fails to give due attention to the embedded, historical and relational aspects of human beings. Accordingly, feminist thinkers have sought to amend this model of the person and rights in order to supplement the liberal model. Such thinkers believe that rights should be reframed, revised or supplemented to protect communal and relational goods as well as individual goods” (p. 124).

13. Non-Western Critiques of Rights
Human rights are claimed—for example by defenders of “Asian values”—not to be universal but only to reflect a Western moral perspective:
Western – individual Eastern – communal
Values Autonomy, freedom, choice Community, relationships, family
Persons An autonomous, isolated, A connected, community-defined,
free, choosing individual relational-being
Objections: another form of cultural relativism, with dubious political motives