The Heart of Human Rights

by Allen Buchanan

This is the first attempt to provide an in-depth moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise: the system of international legal human rights. It is international human rights law--not any philosophical theory of moral human rights or any "folk" conception of moral human rights--that serves as the lingua franca of modern human rights practice. Yet contemporary philosophers have had little to say about international legal human rights. They have tended to assume, rather than to argue, that international legal human rights, if morally justified, must mirror or at least help realize moral human rights. But this assumption is mistaken. International legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified by several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize a corresponding moral right is only one.
Further, this volume shows that some of the most important international legal human rights cannot be adequately justified by appeal to corresponding moral human rights. The problem is that the content of these international legal human rights--the full set of correlative duties--is much broader than can be justified by appealing to the morally important interests of any individual. In addition, it is necessary to examine the legitimacy of the institutions that create, interpret, and implement international human rights law and to defend the claim that international human rights law should "trump" the domestic law of even the most admirable constitutional democracies.

Genres: Philosophy

332 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Allen Edward Buchanan is the James B. Duke Professor of philosophy at Duke University and also professor of the Philosophy of International Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College, London. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975. He taught at the University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Minnesota before joining Duke's faculty in 2002 as professor of public policy and philosophy. He has written six books covering such topics as Marx, applied ethics (especially bio-medical ethics), social justice, and international justice, including the foundations of international law. Buchanan served as staff philosopher for the President's Commission on Medical Ethics in 1983. From 1996 to 2000 he served on the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.