these reasons, the claim that our human rights include a maximal right to private property is difficult to maintain. The following difficulties may also be noted.
1. The claim of a maximal right to private property is not self-evident, but must be plausibly derived from human values and interests. Recall that the historically most influential defense of private property emphasized the universal benefits it provides. According to John Locke, private appropriation is permitted only if “enough and as good” is left for others, a condition satisfied in commercial society, Locke thought, because the resulting gains in productivity operate to the benefit of everyone, particularly the worst-off. Thus Locke claimed that the rural poor derive more benefit from ten fertile acres in commercial England than one hundred fertile acres in precommercial America. Even then, the property owner must acknowledge the right of the starving man to the “surplusage of his goods, so that it cannot justly be denied him, when his pressing wants call for it,” for “charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.”41 Locke makes the legitimacy of private property depend on its ability to guarantee universal subsistence; if modifications of that right are necessary to better guarantee universal subsistence, those modifications are morally required.
2. It is not plausible to defend a maximal right to private property in the name of self-ownership, because moderate taxation is compatible with autonomy and because our pre-tax holdings do not flow from our choices alone. As Kateb writes, it seems “impossible to conceive of us as having nerve endings in every dollar of our estate. A person’s holdings and level of income are so bound up with the changeable and culturally contingent rules and arrangements of the system of property, with the channels and opportunities for activity created by state action or permission, that it should be strange to look on all one’s dollars as exactly and entirely one’s own.”42
3. No one came by his or her present possessions through a pure sequence of free market transactions. Preceding centuries of conquest, plunder, slavery, and government intervention shape current holdings. Until we enact a massive redistribution of goods to rectify past involuntary transfers, it is doubtful to suppose on libertarian grounds that your pre-tax holdings are more genuinely yours than your post-tax holdings.
4. Wealth creation is a social process. I did not create my own clothes, food, shelter, office space, computer, Internet service, car, train service, or medical care. My money has value only because of the labor of vast numbers of people, past and present (much of that labor performed under exploitive conditions). This undermines the claim that I am entitled to maximum control of my current holdings.43
It may be claimed that recognition of socioeconomic rights undermines individual self-reliance. It transfers the responsibility of guaranteeing subsistence from the individual to society, thereby weakening the sources of personal effort and initiative. This argument moves too swiftly. To assert a right to subsistence is not to exempt the ablebodied from the necessity of working for such subsistence. As Stuart White notes, the right to subsistence must be understood as a right to “reasonable access” to subsistence.44 Moreover, since most people are not satisfied with subsistence alone, they will have ample incentive to struggle for higher levels of economic well-being not guaranteed to them as a human right. It is only an extreme view which holds that individuals benefit from the self-reliance learned by struggling to subsist when there is not enough work for everyone or some of the available jobs provide too little to live on. The notion that malnourished children and adults are better treated for having no one come to their assistance is a reductio ad absurdum. And if self-reliance is this important, there is no reason to stop here. Why not let people fight for physical safety as well as economic subsistence? No doubt the necessity of single-handedly fending off attackers may sharpen one’s wits and build up one’s courage, but that is no reason to reinstate the law of the jungle. We lose sight of human rights when self-reliance becomes our ruling ideal.
Why do some Americans resist the idea of socioeconomic rights? One reason is that their education often leads them to think about rights in terms of the U.S. Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights emphasizes civil-political rights to the neglect of socioeconomic rights. Americans often forget that the constitutions of all fifty states establish a right to education. They overlook the fact, too, that socioeconomic rights are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, several international treaties, and an increasing number of national constitutions. Countries whose bills of rights enshrine socioeconomic rights have developed a growing jurisprudence on the legal implications of such rights. Though some theorists deny the practicality of constitutionalized socioeconomic rights, experience is proving them wrong. Courts have articulated interpretive guidelines and principles, and governments have adjusted their policies in response. In Kim Scheppele’s words, “what isn’t supposed to work in theory actually does seem to work in practice.”45
It would be foolish to claim that civil-political and socioeconomic rights are indistinguishable. They are different in several ways. What they have in common is that their acknowledgement is a necessary component of treating one another with respect. If there are any human rights, they include socioeconomic as well as civil-political rights.
Who Is Responsible?
For a harm or deprivation to count as a human rights violation, does it matter who the agent is? If a police officer beats a prisoner in his custody, we would all agree that a human rights violation has occurred. What if a husband beats his wife? What if a hoodlum beats a stranger on the street? Are these human rights violations, too?
There are, broadly speaking, three views. On one view, human rights are claims against governments and their agents only, so that only governments and their agents can violate human rights. On a second view, human rights are claims against institutions more broadly defined, including not only governments but also (for example) insurgencies, criminal organizations, businesses, families, intergovernmental organizations, religious institutions, voluntary associations, and cultural practices, so that all individuals acting as part of an institution can violate human rights. On a third view, human rights are claims not only against governments and other institutions but against individuals in general, so that all persons whether or not they act as part of an institution can violate human rights. We may call these the state-centric,46 the broad institutional,47 and the institutional-and-interpersonal48 conceptions respectively. I shall sometimes refer to “institutional” versus “inclusive” conceptions to contrast the first and second with the third.
I believe that the simplest and most inclusive view is the best one. If we are interested in human rights because we want to protect human beings from grave injuries and indignities, we should recognize that the relevant injuries and indignities may count as human rights violations whether caused by governments, institutions, or individuals. A celebrated quote by Eleanor Roosevelt captures the heart of the matter:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.49
In John Tasioulas’s apt words, “what is in question is not merely a legal-institutional structure, but a human rights ethos that pervades our lives, cutting across boundaries between public and private, society and state.”50
Though institutional conceptions do not (I claim) represent the best understanding of human rights, one can understand their persistent
