that Mao Zedong’s grain requisitions in the Great Leap Forward killed millions of Chinese; that crushing taxes and shredding of local safety nets by agents of the British Empire caused severe famines in colonial India; that as many as a half million children died from UN sanctions against Iraq between 1990 and 2003; or that food blockages to starving civilians are still used as a method of war in Africa.32 Evictions and housing demolitions cause widespread homelessness, often depriving those affected of access to employment and basic social services.33 Large numbers of people lose access to safe drinking water through government or private company diversion of traditional water sources or through the industrial pollution of the water supply.34
The deprivation of socioeconomic goods, in other words, often takes an active rather than a passive form. But, in addition, the very distinction between active and passive deprivation is systematically misperceived. In all societies, property, whether private or communal, is constituted by norms that are coercively enforced.35 The authorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union did not permit agricultural workers to dissolve collective farms into private plots, just as U.S. authorities today do not permit landless farmhands to establish their own plots on large commercial estates. What looks superficially like passive deprivation—people not owning or not being able to purchase or not being given particular resources—is in fact a case of active deprivation whereby human agents use force or the threat of force to enforce institutionalized rules determining who owns what. The wealthy landowner who evicts the starving poacher from his orchard, or the baker who hauls Jean Valjean to the police for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children, may not be perceived as engaging in an act of positive deprivation, but that is exactly what they do. Similarly for all those who assisted the export of grain from famine-stricken Ireland, India, Ukraine, and rural China while local people died from hunger. Institutions are human arrangements and therefore involve human agency and choice, however much we take them for granted. To prevent someone from taking something (or to force him to return what he has taken) is a form of action. If we think that individuals who lack some good should be prevented from taking it, we must make our case on grounds other than the distinction between active and passive behavior. (For example, we might argue on other grounds that the good is the rightful property of the current possessor. The appeal to private property as a reason for rejecting socioeconomic rights is discussed below.)
Other alleged differences between civil-political and socioeconomic rights fare no better. Consider the socioeconomic right to safe working conditions. This right is legally enforceable. It creates obligations for individual employers and managers (obligations that are often negative in character, for example, not to expose workers to dangerous chemicals or block safety exits). It is less costly to guarantee than several civil-political rights, such as the right to a fair trial. And it can be specified with some precision.
It has been claimed that physical scarcity makes it impossible for certain socioeconomic rights such as the right to food to be universally fulfilled. If such rights cannot be universally fulfilled, some argue, then calling them universal human rights cheapens the meaning of the term. This argument may be criticized on both empirical and conceptual grounds. The view that the world cannot produce enough food for its inhabitants finds little acceptance among contemporary experts. Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen has convincingly argued that world hunger does not result from a global shortfall in food production but rather from the inability of vulnerable populations, under existing institutions, to command access to sufficient food.36 How to distribute the blame between domestic and global institutions is a matter of continuing dispute; plausibly, both levels of institutional failure are intertwined.37
But let us accept that, for whatever combination of institutional and natural causes, it would be difficult to quickly supply all the world’s inhabitants with sufficient food. To say that this disproves a universal human right to food rests on a conceptual confusion. The need for food makes access to food a morally urgent matter and establishes it as a universal human right. That right generates various duties on the part of individuals and institutions to help ensure that everyone has enough food. The human right to food is cashed out in terms of those duties. That does not mean, however, that if someone lacks sufficient food you and I are necessarily guilty of having violated that person’s right to food, for you and I may have done everything that could reasonably be expected of us to guarantee that person sufficient food. As Henry Shue writes, human rights call for “some reasonable level of guarantee.”38 We recognize this well enough in the case of civil-political rights. The right not to be enslaved is enshrined in international law and in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even so, there are several million slaves in the world, and several thousand in the United States. Even if every government did all that could be reasonably expected of it to end slavery, its complete elimination would be unlikely. These facts do not negate the right not to be enslaved. The right not to be enslaved gives institutions and individuals a package of negative and positive duties whose underlying rationale is the prevention of slavery. The equivalent is true of the right to food. Some of these duties are more absolute than others: the duty not to practice slavery or deprive someone of food is more absolute than the duty to prevent slavery or prevent hunger (though, as explained above, we tend to draw the line between inflicting and not preventing hunger in a confused manner). The crucial point is that an individual or institution may fully respect the human right not to be enslaved and the human right to food even if slavery and hunger are not fully eliminated.
It may be objected at this point that socioeconomic rights are excessively vague. We may have a clearer image of what is meant by the duty to prevent slavery, say, than the duty to prevent hunger. There is some merit to this challenge, because the duties implied by many welfare rights are still being worked out: the jurisprudence on socioeconomic rights is younger than that on, say, the right to a fair trial. We should not exaggerate the contrast, however. No human rights are perfectly transparent, which is why their meaning is continually reexamined in court decisions and why those decisions are themselves subjected to critical scrutiny. Some civil-political rights are famously vague: for example, the right to liberty, to equal protection of the laws, to the presumption of innocence, and to be spared cruel and unusual punishment. The task of specifying these rights—that is, clarifying the content of their correlative duties—is an immense labor both intellectual and political, and one that is never at an end. Considerable progress has been made in specifying the duties implied by socioeconomic rights, thanks to the rulings of national courts; treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter; the general comments and concluding observations of the International Committee for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and Amnesty International; and international law commissions and conferences.39 But there is no doubt that far more progress is needed, especially in clarifying those correlative duties that are transnational in scope.40
Socioeconomic rights place restrictions on the right to private property. They authorize taxes for education and basic welfare, and limit the conditions employers may impose on workers. Opposition to socioeconomic rights has therefore come from those who believe in what I shall call a maximal right to private property—one that excludes taxation for most (or all) functions other than the military, courts, and police and forbids most forms of regulation. Some even claim this as a human right.
As a general proposition, the claim that we have a maximal right to private property is not credible. It implies that Jean Valjean should let his sister’s children starve rather than steal a loaf of bread. With regard to the present discussion, it implies that the tax policies of almost all existing governments—certainly those of all economically advanced countries—are violations of human rights. But the idea that taxes levied for education or food stamps or Medicare (or, for that matter, roads or medical research or the arts) constitute human rights violations is difficult to take seriously. Democratically authorized, nonarbitrary taxes do not jeopardize people’s safety or deny them the chance to live autonomously. Deprivation of food, shelter, education, and basic health care, on the other hand, does have these effects. To deny the latter rights in the name of a maximal right to private property is a grotesque
