INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I consider another problem with human rights, one that does not feature prominently in the communitarian critiques discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter is concerned about what human rights offer as a way of understanding what it means to suffer and what human suffering entails by way of a response. This question raises two related issues. The first concerns the capacity of human rights to give insight into mass abuses of civil and political and economic and social rights or other injustices and forms of human suffering. In other words, do human rights offer sufficient conceptual resources to assist the proper articulation of suffering and vulnerability?

The second issue has to do with the nature of the human rights claim. It questions the extent to which human rights hinder our ability to recognise and respond to various forms of human suffering by preventing empathic or other more affectionate forms of interaction and relationships between people. In this context, I am referring to the adversarial or antagonistic nature of a human rights claim; that is, the extent to which it prevents the proper appreciation and articulation of human suffering and vulnerability.