Human Rights and Positive Duties (Review)

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Positive Duties

Human Rights and Positive Duties

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Cruft
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Significant Risk ◽  
Reverse Order ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Thomas Pogge ◽  
World Poverty ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duties ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Policy Proposals

In World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequentialist grounds as likely to promote collective welfare. Perhaps they could even be justified on virtue-theoretic grounds as proposals that a just or benevolent person would endorse. But Pogge presents them as a response to the violation of negative duties; this makes the need for such remedial policies especially morally urgent—on a par with the obligations of killers to take measures to stop killing.In this essay, I focus on the claim that responsibility for world poverty should be conceived in terms of a violation of negative duties. I follow Pogge in distinguishing two questions (p. 134): What kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) would we be subject to in a just global society where everyone fulfilled their duty and there was no significant risk of injustice? And what kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) do we face given that our global society falls short of the just society?I tackle these questions in reverse order below. I argue, in contrast to Pogge, that positive duties are relevant to our answers to both questions.

Human Dignity and Human Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Gilabert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
National Origin ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Normative Status

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is it, and why is it important? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it develops the network of concepts associated with dignity, highlighting the notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, generating both negative duties not to undermine, and positive duties to facilitate, people’s pursuit of a flourishing life in which they develop and exercise their valuable capacities. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, the book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific and contested human rights, such as the rights to democratic political participation and decent labor conditions. Finally, the book’s dignitarian framework illuminates the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between basic human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

scholarly journals Vaccine Equity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shalu Nigam
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Low Income Countries ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Vaccine Distribution ◽  
Health Rights

COVID-19 has shown that today the world is more interconnected, yet it is more hierarchical and stratified riddled with disproportionate systemic structural socio-economic inequalities. The global humanitarian disaster has highlighted the despair state of human rights affairs across the planet. It has exposed the supremacy of the neoliberal, nationalist paradigm that is deeply entrenched affecting the poorest of the poor. The pandemic has also indicated how capitalism is eroding democratic values endangering the lives of billions. Today, the high-income countries and the pharmaceutical companies are advancing their strategic interest, whereas the persons in the middle and low-income countries are being deprived of their basic requirements. Inequities in vaccine distribution are obstructing the effective response to the pandemic at the global level. Discrimination in access to the vaccine is adversely affecting the marginalized. This essay argues for respecting human rights as global health justice and suggests for affordable, accessible, and quality vaccination and treatment to all in line with reasoning that health inequalities and cross border issues are morally and ethically troubling and therefore are morally justified. Based on positive duties to create conditions for the availability of health rights for all humans, it argues that no rich country or resourceful persons will be safe until the last person is safe. These moral duties, in turn, generate duties of cooperation and obligations at international and domestic levels to better align with values in line with the principles of global health governance. Leaving a large section of the population in the Third world behind is not going to eliminate the threats of the spread of the epidemic.

Understanding Human Dignity in Human Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-140
Author(s):  
Pablo Gilabert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Conceptual Network ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

This chapter offers an interpretation of the idea of human dignity that explains how it can play certain valuable roles in human rights discourse. The idea contributes to the articulation of a distinctive set of norms that are universalist and humanist, the justification of specific human rights, the grounding of the great normative force of these rights, the combined generation of both negative and positive duties correlative to them, the explanation of the significance of political struggles against their violation, and the illumination of the arc of humanist justice running from basic requirements mandating people’s access to a decent life to maximal requirements to support people’s access to a flourishing life. The idea of human dignity is articulated through a conceptual network that includes an organic set of more specific ideas. These ideas include status-dignity, condition-dignity, dignitarian norms, the basis of dignity, the circumstances of dignity, and dignitarian virtue.

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