ill-treatment. Several of these duties are spelled out in the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
In ordinary discourse, if it is accepted that a policy violates human rights, this means that the matter is settled, morally speaking: the policy is wrong and must be ended. One implication of this is that human rights cannot (except very rarely) conflict with one another. Since violating human rights is morally unacceptable, it must be possible to live our individual and collective lives in ways that do not (except very rarely) violate human rights. If human rights routinely conflicted, violating human rights would become unavoidable, and we would lose the sense that doing so is morally unacceptable. So we must work out a conception of human rights in which the enumerated rights are mutually compatible. If we discover routine conflicts between human rights as we have conceived them, our conception needs to be revised, perhaps by pruning the correlative duties attached to certain rights, or by removing some rights from the catalog altogether.
It is sometimes said that courts are asked to resolve conflicts between human rights. I think it is more helpful to say that courts are called on to determine the contours of rights, where this sometimes entails tracing the boundary between rights. Suppose that a court denies a request from parents on religious grounds to deny a life-saving blood transfusion to their young child. Assuming that we agree with the ruling, how should we characterize it? Some might say that in this case the child’s right to life overrides the parents’ right to freedom of religion, but I think it is clearer to say that the parents’ right to freedom of religion does not include the right to deny a life-saving blood transfusion to their young child. I suggest that other apparent “conflicting rights” cases should be redescribed in this way.
The only occasion that could justify talk of conflicting human rights is a tragic conflict between two immovable moral considerations. The clearest case would be a conflict, in extreme cases, between two duties such that any action you choose would be morally wrong. In such a case, it is not just that each of the available actions has bad consequences, but that each act itself deserves moral condemnation: you cannot emerge from the situation morally unscathed. Perhaps there also exist, in extreme cases, conflicts between an undefeated obligation (e.g., not to harm another) and an undefeated moral permission (e.g., not to sacrifice a core interest). Some people deny, while others accept, that morality admits irresolvable conflicts of these kinds. If there are ever conflicts between human rights, they would manifest themselves in such situations.27
Tragic conflicts aside, human rights do not conflict. The more general point is that human rights should be asserted only with caution. Something’s being morally desirable does not make it a human right. Something can be a human right only if its violation is morally wrong (and of course not every wrong act is correlated to a human right).
Some writers have disputed this picture.28 They say we should become used to the idea of human rights being in conflict, that the identification of a human right marks the beginning, not the end, of a moral discussion. We should (in this view) recognize the existence of plural and competing values and the moral quandaries in which they land us; human rights discourse should incorporate the truth of moral pluralism into its own terms. But this proposal represents too abrupt a departure from ordinary usage. It drains the concept of human rights of its moral force. Sooner or later we would have to coin a new term to do the work now done by “human rights,” and such linguistic reshuffling would be an unnecessary invitation to confusion and misunderstanding. The concept of human rights does not deny (or affirm) that values conflict. It merely says that some ways of treating human beings are morally unacceptable. Since that happens to be true, the existing usage is worth preserving.
Socioeconomic Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts several social and economic rights. They include economic subsistence (adequate provision of food, clothing, housing, and health care); security against destitution from old age, disease, disability, and unemployment; safe and dignified conditions of work (with the right to form trade unions as a necessary protection of this right); opportunities for rest and leisure; and education.
The existence of socioeconomic rights has been denied. The only true human rights, some claim, are civil and political. The skeptical position has been strongly rebutted in philosophical arguments made over the past forty years.29 Here I confine myself to some cursory remarks. Note that I am not interested in challenging economic libertarianism in general, but only the strong version of it that denies that there are any socioeconomic rights.
We should first notice the extreme nature of the skeptical position. It implies that no one’s human rights are violated if children are deprived of an education, or workers are subjected to unsafe working conditions, or trauma victims are denied emergency medical services, or orphans, the severely disabled, the unemployed, or the unemployable are left to starve.
Socioeconomic rights are grounded in the same values as civil-political rights. They are necessary to a minimally decent existence; some of them (such as food and basic health services) are necessary to any existence at all. Like protection from violent assault, they honor our fundamental interest in security. They are also necessary for autonomy: their deprivation confines one to a set of severely reduced, often grim opportunities, or no opportunities at all. To deny people these goods—to let them go hungry, or permit their deterioration from easily cured disease, or leave them unattended when no cure is available, or refuse them shelter, or subject them to slave-like work, or keep them illiterate—is to deny their basic dignity.
Skeptics posit fundamental differences between civil-political and socioeconomic rights. It is claimed, for example, that civil-political rights imply negative duties (duties not to inflict harm) whereas socioeconomic rights imply positive duties (duties to provide help); or that civil-political rights are less demanding than socioeconomic rights; or that unlike socioeconomic rights they can be universally fulfilled; or that they lend themselves more easily to legal enforcement; or that civil-political rights imply individual duties whereas socioeconomic rights imply collective ones; or that the duties implied by civil-political rights are clear and determinate while those implied by socioeconomic rights are vague and indeterminate. These differences, it is claimed, constitute the line between genuine and spurious human rights.
If the differences seem real at first glance, they fade on closer inspection. Begin with the alleged distinction between negative and positive rights. As several scholars have shown, all human rights imply a package of both negative and positive duties. The right not to be violently assaulted entails more than a moral obligation of fellow citizens and government agents not to commit assault. It requires positive measures by government to protect citizens from assault. When governments leave certain private groups free to terrorize a particular segment of the population, those governments are properly accused of violating human rights.30 An effective police force, functioning system of criminal and civil justice, and competent regulatory regime are measures necessitated by our rights to physical safety and security of property. And while the negative duty of governments not to harm the innocent and not to inflict excessive harm on the guilty is central to any human rights conception, this obligation is reinforced by an elaborate system of positive duties, including habeas corpus and the numerous undertakings that constitute the guarantee to a fair trial. Moreover, rights imply remedies. If there are no rights without a remedy, then civil-political rights no less than socioeconomic ones entail positive duties.31
Just as civil-political rights imply positive duties, so socioeconomic rights imply negative duties. One reason for emphasizing socioeconomic rights is precisely that they prohibit grievous inflictions of harm. Humans have long inflicted starvation through blockade, siege, and seizure. During the 1932–33 terror-famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, Soviet officials seized food from the homes of starving peasants. Three-quarters of a million people or more died in the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Nor should we forget that land seizures by white settlers caused vast numbers of American
