Chapter Eight: Human Rights
by John R Searle
This book is mostly about the nature of, and the relations between, institutions,
institutional facts, status functions, and deontic powers. Prominent among the nouns
in English that name these deontic powers is “right,” along with others such as
“obligation,” “duty,” “entitlement,” and “authorization.” Most of the rights that one
can think of, exist within institutions: the rights of property owners and university
students, for example.
But now we reach a peculiar apparent anomaly. It is generally agreed that
there are such things as
human rights that I do not have
in virtue of my institutional memberships, such as the rights of a citizen, a professor
or a husband; but rights that I have solely in virtue of being a human being. How can
there be such things? Does it really make sense to talk about human
rights as distinct
from the rights of husbands, professors and citizens? People talk comfortably about
universal human rights, but I have not heard much, nor indeed any, talk about
universal human obligations. As we will see later in this chapter, if there are such
things as universal human rights, it follows logically that there are universal human
obligations. But if you pose the question, “Are there universal human obligations?” it
certainly sounds different from the question, “Are there universal human rights?”
There is a peculiar intellectual hole in current discussions of human rights.
philosophers, and indeed most people, seem to find nothing problematic in the notion
of universal human rights.
Indeed Bernard Williams tells us that there is no problem
with the existence of human rights, only with their implementation and enforcement.
He writes, “We have a good idea of what human rights are. The most important
problem is not that of identifying them but that of getting them enforced.”
is a skeptical tradition founded by Jeremy Bentham and continued by Alasdair
MacIntyre that finds the whole idea of universal human rights absurd.
If we are going
to make sense of the notion of rights we have to answer the question what exactly is
their ontological status?
The ontological status of property rights and citizenship
rights is much less problematic, and indeed one of the aims of this book is this lay out
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in the Political Argument
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005. p62