The Debasement of Human Rights

The international community’s concept of human rights lacks intellectual and moral integrity. It is corrupted by political ideas. A debased and contradictory understanding of human rights has allowed the concept to be exploited by authoritarian states to justify their denial of liberties and to denigrate free societies, and has encouraged ideologues to pursue political agendas under the cover of human rights. While the struggle to protect individual freedom is increasingly marginalized, the idea of human rights has been so loosely applied and so distorted that it is now used to justify restrictions on basic individual freedoms and to advocate the global regulation of an immense range of social and economic activity. The concept of human rights is now rarely informed by the ideas and principles that originally gave it meaning. It has become so much associated with ideological agendas and frivolous demands that few take it seriously anymore. The idea of human rights has been emptied of the moral force that once inspired people around the world seeking freedom and democracy.

The result is profoundly deleterious to the way we think about human rights and apply the concept through international law and institutions. To have any hope of addressing the problem, we must identify the source: the falsehood at the heart of the international community’s definition of human rights. It is a definition that mingles protections of basic individual freedoms with guaranteed state entitlements. It mixes natural rights with those established by positive law. It blurs the line between what is and is not a human right; it degrades the idea of natural rights, thus eroding the moral foundation upon which the entire edifice of human rights rests.

In this book, I show why economic and social human rights, so named under international law, are not universal human rights. Economic and social rights such as the “right to social security” and the “right to an adequate standard of living” are not simply different kinds of human rights; they are demonstrably not human rights at all, for they are based on different principles. They are rights granted by states, reflecting particular political values, not intrinsic to human beings; they are collective, not individual rights; they embody political values and goals, and do not accord with the essential nonpolitical and nonpartisan character of authentic, universal human rights. They derive from particular political interests and passions, while authentic human rights are based on our common human nature and on reason, the basis of their universality.