From Practice to Theory

Charles R. Beitz
In the years since the collapse of communism we have seen an expansion in the normative scope and political vitality of the international practice of human rights. The subject has therefore attracted renewed philosophical attention. This of course is all to the good. I believe, however, that some philosophical discussion of human rights has suffered from a kind of misdirection of emphasis and occasionally some normative distortion as a result of trying to interpret the practice in light of traditional ideas of natural or fundamental rights. My aim here is to outline another way of thinking about human rights, or more precisely, about the kinds of things that human rights are, that takes guidance more directly from the practice. These remarks draw on the view I present in my book, The Idea of Human Rights [henceforth IHR], where the main points are developed in what I hope is less dogmatic if not more persuasive detail.1 I will comment on three related subjects: first, the value of what I call a practical approach to thinking about human rights; second, the conception of human rights that suggests itself when we pursue such an approach; finally, the difference this makes, or might make, in our thinking about the normative contents of human rights doctrine. In this connection I take up briefly and as an illustration the case of domestic violence as a subject of human rights.

I. A Practical Approach
The elaboration of an international doctrine and practice of human rights is one of the most impressive of the legacies of the settlement of World War II. Yet it is now a commonplace that the discourse of human rights is in various ways troubled. For example, the normative content of human rights is expanding and it is unclear on what basis the expansion should (if it should) be constrained. Particularly in view of its normative breadth, it is unclear whether a unified account of the moral foundations of human rights is possible, and if so what it would be like. And it is unclear how international responsibilities to act in the face of local violations should be allocated or what moral considerations might explain why agents with the capacity to act should do so. These are the main questions that a philosophical theory of human rights should address, but I will only comment about them briefly, and at the end. There is a prior question, an answer to which is presupposed by all three of the problems Ive just listed. This is the question of the nature of human rights. What does it mean to say of some value that it is a human right? One way to answer this question would be to think of human rights as the expression in international moral discourse of an abstract philosophical idea that can be found in the history of political and legal thought. You might think, for example, that human rights can be understood on the model of the natural rights that were prominent in the political thought of the 17th and 18th centuries and that informed the French and American Revolutions and the declarations of rights they produced. It is true, of course, that the natural rights tradition was an important influence on more recent thought about human rights. But it can be misleading

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to think of the human rights we encounter in the discourse of contemporary global political life as coming from the same mold and sharing the same features. For one thing, it mischaracterizes the intentions of the founders of modern human rights. The original Commission on Human Rightsthe committee that drafted the 1948 declarationactually considered whether to present human rights as belonging to human beings by nature. They decided not to, on the grounds that this would be parochial. They did not believe that a public international doctrine of human rights should embed a strong view about the basis of human rights. They thought of human rights, as Jacques Maritain put it, as practical conclusions which, although justified in different ways by different persons, are principles of action with a common ground of similarity for everyone.2 Maritains observation suggests a second point. Human rights are public principles, created to do a certain kind of work in the discourse of global politics. They are not presented as principles for a state of nature or for a generic form of society abstracted in time and space. They are principles for the public life of global politics in a modern world. Human rights are not the same thing as principles of justice, but they aim to play a similar public role: they function as a public basis of political criticism in a morally diverse world. This is part of what makes modern human rights a revolutionary idea. I will not say more here about the appropriateness of the natural rights model as a basis for conceiving of human rights as we find them in contemporary international doctrine.3 The essential point is that, although we might believe that natural rights-like considerations serve as normative foundations of human rights, or anyway of some of them, nothing compels us to adopt this model for answering what I called the prior question of the nature of human rights. This is important once we recognize the (perhaps non-obvious) ways that the natural rights paradigm can exert pressure to constrain the normative content of human rights and to shape the kinds of reasons for action to which violations might give rise. I believe we do better to abandon philosophical preconceptions about the nature of human rights and think of them sui generis, as the norms of an actually existing global practice. We should try to answer the question What are human rights? by inspecting the practice and working up a model of the idea of a human right from a grasp of the roles the idea plays within the practice. I call this a practical approach. This is an unorthodox way to think about human rights. I was led to it by reflecting on the conception of human rights presented by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples.4 Rawls describes human rights as a special kind of norm for a Society of Peoples. Their role is to set a limit to international toleration: a society whose government respects the human rights of its people is entitled to be treated by other societies as an independent locus of self-determination, whereas a society whose government violates its peoples human rights makes itself vulnerable to forceful intervention to protect the people against their government (and perhaps each other). In Rawlss view, human rights are not to be confused with natural or fundamental rights; they do not, as he writes, embody any comprehensive doctrine. They are a special class of urgent rights designed to play a certain role in the public discourse of the Society of Peoples.5 Some people might regard Rawlss conception of human rights as objectionable in various ways. For example, without much argument he restricts the substantive content of human rights to only some of the protections found in contemporary international human rights doctrine. He has very little to say about the moral basis of human rights. And the idea that coercive intervention is the only international remedy for violations of human rights is plainly unrealistic.6 All three objections have some force. But I believe the idea of human rights as sui generis norms for global politics survives them.
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To develop this idea let me comment first about the claim that human rights is a global practice and then about the significance of this fact for conceiving of human rights. The global human rights enterprise constitutes a normative practice in this sense: it consists of a set of rules for the regulation of the behavior of a class of agents, a more-or-less widespread belief that these rules ought to be complied with, and some institutions, quasiinstitutions and informal processes for their propagation and implementation. It is a social practice, in the sense that it exists within a discursive community whose members recognize the practices norms as reason-giving and use them in deliberating and arguing about how to act. For human rights, the community is global in scope and consists of a heterogeneous group of agents. They include the governments of states, international organizations, participants in the processes of international law, economic actors such as business firms, members of nongovernmental organizations and participants in domestic and transnational political networks and social movements. The practice is not as well formed as normative practices of longer standing; we might describe it as emergent. This fact introduces some difficulties for the approach I am suggesting (for example, it complicates the task of discerning the boundaries of the practice), but for now I will leave them aside. A practical approach tries to grasp the concept of a human right by examining the role or function this concept plays within the discursive practice. Human rights claims are supposed to be reason-giving for various kinds of political action that are open to a range of agents. We try to understand the idea of a human right by asking for what kinds of actions, in which kinds of circumstances, human rights claims are typically understood as giving reasons. The aim is to make explicit what one would be committed to believing, if one accepted a claim to the effect that people have human rights to this or that kind of protection. It is important to remember that the question about the nature of human rights is only one of several questions that a good theory should try to answer. Some other things we might want to know are which values should count as human rights and what kinds of actions would be justified in case of various kinds of infringements. The significance of the practice, in my view, is to inform an answer to the first question, about the nature or character of a human right. Once we have a grasp of this, we can ask what kinds of considerations would be relevant to a judgment about the value of such a practice and about its normative content. But I dont say, and it would be a mistake to believe, that an inspection of the practice can tell us which specific values should count as human rights or what an agent would be justified in doing in response to an infringement. To believe this would be to abandon the aspiration for a basis on which to criticize the existing practice. A grasp of the idea of a human right will constrain what we can say about these further questions, but it will not answer them.

II. A Model of Human Rights

Even if we restrict ourselves to the question of the nature of human rights, the task of answering it generates a substantial research agenda, most of which is still to be carried out. For now, I can only give a brief sketch of what a plausible reply might be like.7 I believe that a practical model of the idea of a human right would have three elements: 1. Human rights are requirements which aim to protect urgent individual human interests against predictable dangers to which they are vulnerable under the general circumstances of modern life. 2. Human rights are primarily requirements for institutions, which apply in the first instance to states. Each state is responsible for protecting the human rights of persons
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residing in its territory. The term used in the human rights community is implementation: states have the primary responsibility to implement the human rights of those subject to their jurisdiction. In this sense, human rights are a revisionist appurtenance of the system of states, not something alien to it. 3. Human rights are matters of international concern. This is what is distinctive of them, considered as a special class of norms. When a state violates or fails to protect the human rights of people within its jurisdiction, the failure is a reasonmore precisely, a pro tanto reasonfor outside agents to take action. These agents are mainly international organizations, state governments and coalitions of the willing, and non-governmental actors. We might say that all of these actors operate as agents of the international community, though in a community lacking an effective capacity to authorize agents to act we face familiar difficulties accounting for the sense of such a characterization.

I call this a two-level model because it expresses a kind of division of labor. To put it broadly, states have the primary responsibility to protect human rights. When they fail, the international community and those acting as its agents have pro tanto reasons to take protective or remedial action. (There are further questions about the nature and aims of action and the allocation of responsibilities to act in an imperfectly organized international human rights system.) Several aspects of the two-level model need explication, and even if they were filled in, it might be controversial in various ways. Let me make four remarks by way of explanation. First remark: I have said that human rights are requirements that aim to protect urgent individual interests. But it might seem that this is too general. One might think, for example, that human rights protect only interests that are shared by all human beings or that they protect interests of only one particular kind (perhaps those associated with autonomy or human dignity, for example). The trouble is that neither kind of restriction fits very well with human rights doctrine as we find it in the main international documents. Without taking these up in any detail, I note several features of the human rights found in international doctrine: 1. They have broad normative reach: they are not accurately described in minimalist termse.g., as minimum conditions for any kind of life at all or as protections against the most unambiguous kinds of abuse of power.8 2. They are heterogeneous in type. For example, some describe structural features of acceptable institutions whereas others are standards for policy and action that can be satisfied differently in different contexts. 3. They cannot all be peremptory: it may not always be possible to satisfy some human rights and there may be circumstances in which some can be satisfied only at the cost of not satisfying others. (This does not exclude the possibility that some may have a certain priority, as in the case of the rights identified in the treaties as non-derogable.) 4. They are not timeless. Many of the threats protected against (e.g., unfair pay, lack of educational opportunity, lack of access to medical care, loss of nationality) arise distinctively in modern or modernizing societies. 5. Finally, human rights doctrine has not been static, even since 1948. It has developed as the practical enterprise of human rights has evolved. We see this, for example, in the Womens Convention and the Childrens Convention, both of which expand the range of human rights beyond the declaration and early treaties; they do not in any straightforward sense simply elaborate rights already recognized.

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I do not suggest that we should take the declaration and treaties as definitive about the normative contents of human rights. As Ive said, a theory of human rights should aim to be critical. But a theory should not make its job too easy, by beginning with a conception of human rights that excludes, so to speak, by fiat some of the protections found in international doctrine. This is why I believe the broader formulation of the normative aim of human rights that is, to protect urgent interests against predictable threatsis better than a more restrictive interpretation. It is more clearly compatible with international human rights doctrine while still allowing questions about the proper contents of that doctrine to be treated as substantive questions of political theory. It is not inconsistent with the broader formulation to hold that some distinctive valuesfor example, human dignity, referred to twice in the Preamble to the 1948 Declarationmay play an especially prominent role in explaining the importance of the interests protected by at least some international human rights. As I have suggested, I myself doubt that an appeal to human dignity in any reasonably determinate sense can justify an international doctrine that approaches in normative breadth the doctrine we find in the existing practice; but that, of course, needs to be argued. The point to be made here is that there is no contradiction between the conception of human rights conveyed in the two-level model and the thought that substantive moral values like that of human dignity might enter into our reasoning about the proper contents of human rights doctrine. The aim, as I have said, is to describe the idea of a human right in a way that allows us to see questions of this kind as first-order problems in political theory. Second remark: Some people, perhaps influenced by Rawlss view, believe that the definitive expression of international concern for human rights is coercive intervention. This is a mistake. In practice, we find international concern for human rights expressed in many ways and by a range of agents. Coercive intervention is an important possibility, but it is exceptional, the limiting case rather than the modal one. Human rights infringements usually attract less dramatic remedial measures. A rough inventory based on casual observation would include at least the six paradigms I list here in summary form: 1. Accountability, in the attenuated form characteristic of the treaty monitoring systems of the UN human rights treaty bodies. 2. Inducement, for example, the use of incentives by states and international organizations to motivate change in government policies. 3. Assistance, particularly in the development of legal and economic capabilities and infrastructure that would build a governments capacity to satisfy human rights norms. 4. Domestic contestation and engagementefforts by outsiders, typically NGOs, to influence domestic actors by affecting their normative beliefs and capacities for action. 5. Compulsion, for example, the use of economic sanctions and, in extremis, humanitarian military intervention. Each of these five paradigms of implementation is a form of (not necessarily coercive) interference in the life of a society and in the order presented they define something like a continuum from the least to the most intrusive. There is also a sixth paradigm that is hard to locate on the continuum at all because it does not involve intrusion in any familiar sense: 6. External adaptationchanges in the policies of external actors aimed at removing obstacles to a governments capacity to satisfy its peoples human rights. (Think, for example, about removing barriers to trade in agricultural products.)

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This list may not be complete and obviously it needs to be explained. But even a telegraphic list should be enough to illustrate that implementation within the practice is considerably more complex than the idea of intervention suggests. This is important for a theory of human rights because it relaxes one kind of pressure for what Joshua Cohen calls substantive minimalismthe view that the contents of human rights doctrine should be confined to a smaller range of protections than those found in international doctrine.9 One might be tempted to adopt such a view by the thought that human rights violations should be sufficiently grave to justify the use of coercive force. Realism about the array of measures actually available to respond to violations helps to resist that temptation. Third remark: Not everyone agrees that human rights violations, even when egregious, are properly matters for international action. The most prominent source of disagreement is the government of the Peoples Republic of China, which has taken the view that local infringements of human rights do not justify remedial or preventative action by external actors, except, possibly, to express concern in the human rights treaty bodies.10 The question is whether disagreement about implementation counts against the two-level model. One has to take the question seriously. As I have described it, a practical approach tries to frame a conception of human rights based on an examination of the functional role the idea plays within an existing discursive practice. But if there is disagreement among members of the discursive community about what the model presents as a basic element of the practice, one may wonder if the model gets the practice right. There are two observations in response. The first is an argument of history. Part of the motivation of the post-war human rights movement was a determination that the international community should never again permit Nazi-style atrocities to take place. International enforcement was central to the deliberations of the original Human Rights Commission and was particularly pressed by the small and non-European countries (including, by the way, the representative of China). There was disagreement about how human rights should be enforced, but there was widespread if not unanimous agreement that serious violations should be subjects of some form of action at the international level. Second, one has to consider the development of the practice itself, particularly since the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The implementation regime imagined by many of the framers of modern human rightsa regime we might describe as legalist or juridicalhas not developed as they hoped. Many states have not incorporated internationally recognized human rights into their constitutions or basic laws and, leaving aside the special case of the International Criminal Court, there is no international judicial mechanism for adjudication and enforcement. However, it also clear that a different kind of practicepolitical rather than juridicalhas developed alongside the implementation procedures established by treaty. This is primarily what the six paradigms of implementation are meant to describe. It is a reasonable question whether these kinds of action are generally effective in improving respect for human rights, but it seems to me indisputable that most participants in this practice take infringements of human rights to be reasons for the kinds of actions these paradigms describe. It is better to characterize disagreement about implementation as disagreement within the practice than as disagreement about the practice: it is disagreement about what counts as permissible action in the face of violations of various kinds.11 For this reason I do not believe that disagreement about implementation is a reason to reject the two-level model. Fourth remark: According to the model, the primary responsibility to protect human rights belongs to states; when a state fails in its responsibility, this is a reason for outside (and, implicitly, collective) agents to act. There is no reference to individuals either as potential violators or as potential protectors of human rights. But it is clear that individual persons
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can violate human rights and that there might be circumstances in which violations can be reasons for individuals to take preventive or remedial action. In both respects, the model might seem to be myopically state-centric. There is certainly a sense in which the model is state-centric, but I do not believe it is myopically so. The model is meant to characterize the idea of human rights found in the practice, and it is difficult to resist regarding the practice, as I put it earlier, as a revisionist appurtenance of the states system.12 It is true that the 1948 Declaration styles itself as universal rather than international13 and that its Preamble calls on every individual as well as every organ of society to promote respect for human rights. But there is no doubt that the drafters were principally concerned to articulate standards for states. And this, of course, is how the substantive provisions of the Declaration have in fact been interpreted in the covenants and conventions that give these standards legal effect. More to the point, the sense in which the model is state-centric does not exclude that individuals have responsibilities to respect and to promote respect for human rights. The requirement that states protect the human rights of persons within their territories is in part a requirement that states protect human rights against violations by individuals. Moreover, for reasons that may become clearer in the following section, I believe that the moral considerations that justify claims about the substantive requirements of human rights doctrine will also provide reasons why individuals should respect those requirements, to the extent that it is open to them to do so. The question whether individuals (and for that matter other agents) have duties to act when the human rights of third parties are violated is more complicated, because considerations of capacity, cost and risk must be taken into account, but offhand there is no reason to deny that violations might provide pro tanto reasons to act to individuals as well as to external agents. Still, we miss a defining element of the post-war human rights regime as well as a principal source of theoretical complexity if we neglect the primarily institutional character of international human rights.14

III. What Difference Does It Make?

So far I have made two sets of comments: First, I suggested that a familiar way of thinking about human rightsnamely that which identifies them with a prior philosophical conception of fundamental rightscan produce distortions in our perceptions of the international human rights enterprise as we observe it. It is better to think of human rights sui generis, as norms that play a certain functional role in the public normative discourse of global life. Second, I proposed a two-level model of human rights and claimed that the model describes this functional role. According to the model, the distinctive feature of human rights is that failures by states to respect or protect them are reasons for an international response. But that response need not be, and usually is not, coercive; human rights infringements can justify various less intrusive modes of action. With these very brief remarks as background, I would like to offer two comments about the difference it makes to think about human rights this way. The first is a general observation; the second is an attempt to illustrate it. The general point involves the justification of individual human rights. When someone claims that international human rights doctrine should include some protectionlets say, phow should we decide whether to agree? To answer this question, we must consider the role that human rights play in political discourse. This is what the two-level model tries to describe. It shows what one would be committed to believe if one accepted the claim
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that there is a human right to p. In The Idea of Human Rights, I propose three schematic contentions that an argument for such a claim should sustain. These derive from the three parts of the model. In rough outline, they are: 1. That the interest protected by p is sufficiently important when reasonably regarded from the perspective of those protected that it would be reasonable to consider its protection to be a political priority. 2. That it would be advantageous to protect the underlying interest by means of legal or policy instruments available to the state. 3. That in the central range of cases in which a state might fail to provide p, the failure would be a suitable object of international concern. All three elements of the schema need elaboration, but for present purposes I will comment only on the third. It poses this question: What conditions should be satisfied for a states failure to provide pthat is, to violate or fail to protect the proposed human rightto constitute a suitable object of international concern? I believe there are several conditions. First, a states failure to provide p should be correctable by some set of actions that could be carried out by agents beyond the state. Second, these actions should be permissible: they should not be ruled out by general principles of political morality. Third, in typical cases, there should be agents that have the location, capacity, and resources to carry out these actions. Finally, again in typical cases, at least some of these agents should have reason to bear the burdens involved in taking action. These reasons will vary with the protection in question; in the general case, they include the nature and importance of the threatened interests, the origin and gravity of the anticipated threats, the cost of the actions that might be taken to protect against it, the probability of damage to the interests of both beneficiaries and third parties and the relationships, if any, between beneficiaries and eligible contributors. If a proposed human right does not satisfy these conditions, it could not be regarded as a suitable object of international concern and we should resist a proposal to recognize it as a genuine human right. These remarks may seem unhelpfully abstract, so let me illustrate how this approach would organize an argument in a specific case. The case is the right to protection by the state against gender-related violence and related forms of mistreatment within the household. The Womens Convention of 1979 has been criticized for failing to include this protection.15 On the other hand, proposals to make such a right an explicit part of human rights doctrine are open to the objection that in some societies this would constitute interference in longstanding and deeply-embedded cultural practices, some of which may be resistant to local regulation by law, to implement norms that may be deeply contested within the culture in which their application is sought. The interference can be made to appear to be objectionably paternalistic: it might seem to be an interference in existing social practices not justifiable on the basis of principles the participants in those practices accept. I will return in a moment to the question of whether we ought to accept the anti-paternalism objection. But first we should observe that if we were to accept it, then, according to the view I have sketched, we should resist the proposal that there is or should be a human right against domestic abuse. This would be because, by hypothesis, the feasible kinds of international action that would protect such a right in the case of a failure of a domestic government to do so would be morally impermissible. I advance this observation to explain why I chose this example: it nicely illustrates how a practical approach to human rights organizes argument about what the content of human rights doctrine ought to be. The objection I have

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imagined has the correct form: it holds that it would be inappropriate to consider protection against domestic violence to be a human right because international action in the case of a noncompliant government would be unacceptably intrusive. What should we say about the objection? One response would be that objections of this kind typically rely on unrealistic assumptions about the extent of agreement within a culture about local norms, particularly among those whose interests are not well served by those norms. This is very likely true in the case of domestic violence, as we know from anthropological studies of cultures where it seems to be sanctioned by local norms. When the society is divided, interference may be often better understood as protective than as paternalistic. Another response (compatible with the first) is to point out that even where there appears to be widespread agreement among the victims of abusive or other harmful treatment about social norms that license this treatment, the agreement may have emerged from a process of adaptation of belief under conditions likely to distort judgment.16 In that case we might be justified in discounting the victims acceptance of the norms. There is force in both responses, but I want to leave them aside in order to advance a different observation about the antipaternalism objection. It trades on an excessively simple conception of the kinds of international action that infringements of a human right could justify. The image in the background is that of an external agent using coercive means to impose a change on a recalcitrant local culture. This is a we versus they picture in which the only forms of action available involve infringing the liberties of the apparent beneficiaries. If I am right about the nature of human rights practice, however, this is too crude. As I observed, human rights operate, not only as legal standards and as objectives for foreign policy, but also as political values that inform and motivate non-coercive action by nongovernmental group agents. This is importantly true for certain womens human rights for example, protections against domestic abusewhose implementation in some societies will require cultural change. In these cases, the agents are more likely to be nongovernmental organizations and social movement activists rather than international organizations or other states. These agents may function more as translators, interpreting the meaning of human rights doctrine for local circumstances, than as independent actors.17 Their actions more likely involve discursive interaction, political communication and mobilization rather than threats. The structure of interaction is better seen as collaborative than as adversarial. As a result, neither the distinction between local and external agents nor the liberty-limiting character of the interference have the significance attributed to them in my imagined antipaternalist objection. Earlier I noted that one effect of taking the practice seriously might be to influence our judgments about the proper contents of human rights doctrine. This might seem to be incompatible with something else I claimed: that the aim of a practical approach is to explicate the idea of a human right, not to settle normative questions about what are or are not genuine human rights. But there is not really an inconsistency. We look to the practice for help in understanding what it means for a value to count as a human right. We look at the functions the idea of a human right plays in discourse, and we find that a distinctive use of claims about human rights is to call for or to justify international or transnational political action: human rights are matters of international concern. That fact influences judgments about the proper contents of human rights in two related ways. First, it points to a problem that these judgments must face: they must explain why international action to protect this or that human right would be permissible. Second, it characterizes the range of actions that might count as international action: there should be some kind of action actually availablea mode of implementationthat is both reasonably likely to succeed and acceptable as a
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matter of political morality. The antipaternalism objection I mentioned invokes the second kind of concern when it claims that the type of action that would be required to implement protections against domestic abuse would be unacceptably intrusive. A realistic practical model of human rights shows that this need not be the case. By itself it doesnt settle the normative question whether human rights doctrine should include these protections, since a judgment about this would also have to take into account other considerations of the kinds I mentioned earlier. On the other hand, it makes clear what the controversy is about, and in a public discourse so open to misunderstanding, this is a good thing.
NOTES This paper expands on a presentation given at the conference, Human Rights Today: Foundations and Politics, sponsored by the Cluster of Excellence Foundations of Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt am Maine, in June 2010. I have retained the informality of the talk. I am grateful to members of the conference audience for comments, and particularly to my co-panelist John Tasioulas, and to Pablo Gilabert for comments later. 1. Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: University Press, 2009). 2. Jacques Maritain, Introduction in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (London: Allan Wingate, 1949), 10. Maritain was not, himself, among the drafters. For the deliberations of the drafting committee and the General Assemblys Third Committee, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), esp. chs. 79. See also John P. Humphrey, Human Rights and the United Nations (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Transnational, 1984), esp. 3749, 6377. 3. I say more in The Idea of Human Rights, ch. 3. 4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3638, 6568, 7881. 5. Ibid., 79. 6. As James Nickel argues in Making Sense of Human Rights, 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), ch. 4. Also see John Tasioulas, Are Human Rights Essentially Triggers for Intervention? Philosophy Compass 6 (2009), 93943. 7. Again, there is more detail in The Idea of Human Rights, ch. 5. 8. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 56; Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed in In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19. 9. Joshua Cohen, Minimalism About Human Rights: The Most We Can Hope For? Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004), 192. 10. See China, Information Office of the State Council, Human Rights in China (Beijing: Information Office of the State Council, 1991). 11. Even the Chinese government agrees that the international community should interfere and stop human rights violations that endanger world peace and security. China, Information Office of the State Council, Human Rights in China. 12. For reasons discussed in The Idea of Human Rights, secs. 19 and 20. 13. A change made late in the drafting process. Glendon, A World Made New, 161. 14. Thomas Pogge also calls attention to the institutional character of human rights in World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 4448, 6467. He is surely correct to do so, though I do not accept the whole of his view about the inference to be drawn for the justification of some human rights. See The Idea of Human Rights, 11415. 15. See, for example, Charlotte Bunch, Womens Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights, Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990), 48792. The General Assemblys Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (23 February 1994, A/RES/48/104) tries to remedy the omission, but of course it lacks the force of a treaty. 16. See Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13642. 17. Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. ch. 7. Also see the discussion of the NGO Tostans efforts to reduce female genital cutting in Senegal in William J. Talbott, Which Rights Should Be Universal? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10810.

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Charles R. Beitz is Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton. He is the author of Political Theory and International Relations (rev. ed. 1999), Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory (1989) and The Idea of Human Rights (2009) and of articles and papers on global political theory, democratic theory, and other topics in political philosophy. In 2010 he completed a decade as editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs. He is now director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.

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