Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- 85 Happiness
- 86 Harsanyi, John C.
- 87 Hart, H. L. A.
- 88 Health and health care
- 89 Hedonism
- 90 Hegel, G. W. F.
- 91 Higher-order interests
- 92 Hobbes, Thomas
- 93 Human rights
- 94 Hume, David
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
93 - Human rights
from H
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- 85 Happiness
- 86 Harsanyi, John C.
- 87 Hart, H. L. A.
- 88 Health and health care
- 89 Hedonism
- 90 Hegel, G. W. F.
- 91 Higher-order interests
- 92 Hobbes, Thomas
- 93 Human rights
- 94 Hume, David
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The notion of human rights plays an important role in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples. Respecting human rights is not only a core principle of political justice and legitimacy, it also assists in determining which people are well-ordered and when sanctions or even military intervention might be permissible.
To understand Rawls’s position on human rights, we should note some key ideas that compose crucial elements of his account. In LP, §10, Rawls outlines what he takes to be the role human rights play in the Law of Peoples:
Human rights are a class of rights that play a special role in a reasonable Law of Peoples: they restrict the justifying reasons for war and its conduct, and they specify limits to a regime’s internal autonomy. In this way they relect the two basic and historically profound changes in how the powers of sovereignty have been conceived since World War II. First, war is no longer an admissible means of government policy and is justiied only in self-defense, or in grave cases of intervention to protect human rights. And second, a government’s internal autonomy is now limited. (LP 79)
Human rights set necessary but not suficient standards for decent domestic political and social institutions. In setting these standards, human rights limit admissible domestic law of all societies and help determine which peoples are in good standing in the Society of Peoples. Furthermore, fulillment of human rights is suficient to exclude justiied and forceful intervention by other peoples.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 349 - 353Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014