Global Basic Rights
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 019960438X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Politically, as well as philosophically, concerns with human rights have permeated many of the most important debates on social justice worldwide for fully a half-century. Henry Shue's 1980 book on Basic Rights proved to be a pioneering contribution to those debates, and one that continues to elicit both critical and constructive comment. Global Basic Rights brings together many of the most influential contemporary writers in political philosophy and international relations--Charles Beitz, Robert Goodin, Christian Reus-Smit, Andrew Hurrell, Judith Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Ashford, Thomas Pooge, Neta Crawford, Richard Miller, David Luban, Jeremy Waldron and Simon Caney--to explore some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions that Shue's work provokes. These range from the question of the responsibilities of the global rich to redress severe poverty to the permissibility of using torture to gain information to fight international terrorism. The contributors explore the continuing value of the idea of "basic rights" in understanding moral challenges as diverse as child labor and global climate change.
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UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, issued in December 2004, identified five “basic criteria for legitimacy” before the use of force should be authorized: seriousness of the threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportionate means, and the balance of consequences. Yet, as the international debates surrounding the responsibility to protect made clear, many states were resistant to any set of guidelines that could open the door to unilateral military intervention. As Bellamy points
Decision Theory and Environmental Policy,” in Behavioral Foundations of Policy, ed. Eldar Shafir, forthcoming. 90 Are There Any Basic Rights? and behavioral economics offer useful lessons—for instance, about the role of default options in influencing what people do. A striking example is organ donation policy. In some countries, including the United States, one must choose to become an organ donor; the default is not to donate. In many European countries, the policy is the reverse: consent to
adequately respected until the right to subsistence has been secured. 112 6 Shue on Rights and Dutiesà Thomas Pogge First published in 1980, Henry Shue’s Basic Rights has remained influential for an unusually long time.1 It is still frequently cited today in works on rights, development economics, global ethics, and justice. And it is widely read and referred to also among practitioners in NGOs and governmental foreign aid departments. More than any other, Shue’s book has played a significant
or else deny the corresponding basic right. But one need not accept Shue’s account, and one might challenge, in particular, his central claim that any basic right is “an inseparable mixture of positive and negative elements” (p. 192). Why should this “mixture” be so inseparable on the basic-rights side, given that Shue has managed to separate things so neatly on the correlative-duties side? Using the helpful differentiations Shue has introduced on the side of duties—distinguishing duties to avoid
and Obstacles While a route through general beneficence was certainly worth exploring, the duty of responsiveness to neediness as such, apart from specific relationships, seems too moderate and flexible to sustain a vast, demanding responsibility to the global poor. On one moderate account, which I have defended, one must display an underlying concern for neediness sufficiently great that more concern would impose a significant risk of worsening one’s life if one met one’s other responsibilities. But