Human and Socioeconomic Rights: A Duty-Based Account

The thesis addresses a question of contemporary philosophical debate: What is the philosophical basis of human and socioeconomic rights? This is an important question given the indeterminacy of rights, and the suspicions regarding their universal validity. What I suggest then is the determination of their philosophical basis. Such a philosophical task would provide the grounds for the clarification of the concept of these rights revealing their true nature, and it would show whether or not these rights are universally valid. Further, through the philosophical justification of human and socioeconomic rights we can explain many of the rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. At the same time, through such a justificatory account we can see why some rights are not genuine human rights. Additionally, we can explain why some new rights can be included in the major documents. Finally, such a task brings philosophy at the heart of rights discourse connecting the two disciplines of philosophy and law. Within this context I build my (Kantian) duty-based argument for the justification of human and socioeconomic rights indirectly: 1) by presenting the weaknesses of a number of noteworthy contemporary accounts of how rights are justified, including the justification of them based on the concept of human dignity, and 2) by justifying duties, and then explaining how human and socioeconomic rights can afterwards be generated, or developed, from them. Ultimately, I argue that in our dominant 'rights era', although we should not reject the moral, legal, and political ideas of human and socioeconomic rights, we should put these ideas aside for a while, in order to strengthen the old category of duties, so that eventually both rights and duties could be seen as equal parts in a future account of international justice.