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On Human Rights

But what about justice, fairness and honesty?

James Griffin
OUP, 339pp, £25,

Alan Judd

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Alan Judd reads James Griffin's account of human rights

This discourse could be limited and improved, he says, if we

stipulate that only normative agents [responsible persons] bear human rights — no exceptions: not infants, not the seriously mentally disabled, not those in a permanent vegetative state, and so on.
Aspects of distributive and retributive justice should also be excluded. Griffin is no Herod — we would still have the moral responsibility to treat all people well and justly — but he believes that rights should not be allowed to become coextensive with the whole domain of moral obligation. Justice, for example, should always be a bigger and broader concept than rights.

Philosophers usually identify three generations of rights: Enlightenment libertarian, such as freedom of assembly, expression, worship; welfare, such as a right to basic food and shelter (usually regarded as a 20th-century development but actually asserted in the late Middle Ages); and the contemporary group rights mentioned earlier, ‘solidarity’ rights asserted in the past quarter century. It is this last generation that Griffin challenges, essentially on the ground that group rights not ultimately reducible to the individual rights of group members are redundant and misleading. It is better to employ concepts such as justice and fairness than entitlement.

Indeed, some — such as Roger Scruton — now query whether we should ascribe rights to ourselves at all unless in the context of human duties and responsibilities. Griffin acknowledges these arguments but is essentially pro-rights, albeit in a more rigorous, limited and disciplined form than the rights industry would like. It was, I think, Wittgenstein who said that we have a duty to be clear because we have a duty to be honest, and it may be that this thought is the source of Griffin’s unhappiness with current trends. Shrouded in conceptual confusion, our approach to human rights encourages a culture of selfish entitlement in which that which was benign easily becomes malign, undermining broader ethical concepts such as justice, fairness and honesty.

This is not a polemic but an important work of scholarly philosophy, one that may lead to a fundamental reappraisal of something that impinges ever more closely upon us. It is also one of those books that make philosophy matter.

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