The idea that human beings have rights as humans is a staple of contemporary world politics. International conventions, both global and regional, state it, at length and in relation to a large number of rights. People speaking for states proclaim it. Groups other than states assert it in its collective form, sometimes as a way of becoming states themselves, sometimes as a bid for recognition of their group-ness by states. Non-governmental organizations make its observance their raison d'être. Individuals in extremis appeal to it. Reporters presume it. And scholars try to make sense of it, the more so as more use is made of it in the world they seek to understand.

But it is not an obvious idea, however much its proponents may appeal to its supposed self-evidence as a way of entrenching it. As part of moral discourse, duty might seem more obvious, and is certainly more ancient, than right. Until quite recently, the utilitarian doctrine of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has been taken as a more obvious criterion of moral rectitude than the idea of individual rights. And, as a sociological point, it seems more obvious that individuals are gathered together as members of communities that are less than global in extent, than that they stand together as equal members of the society of all humankind.

The history of East—West relations in the modern sense of that expression, as the contact between socialist countries and western liberal democracies, is in an important sense the history of a dispute about human rights. In doctrine, equality is opposed to liberty, group rights to those of individuals, economic and social rights to civil and political rights. In practice, the East claims superiority in the actual provision of such rights as that to work, and to an adequate standard of living for all, while the West claims to do better on individual freedom, civil liberties, freedom of information and the other values associated with an ‘open society’. The debate continues, at the level of both theory and practice, and it may be argued that it is the different priorities of East and West in the matter of human rights, and therefore their different modes of organizing society to meet them, that provide the reason for the dispute between them.

The dispute, in our modern sense, begins with the Bolshevik Revolution. It is true that some roots of contemporary Soviet human rights doctrine can be traced to the communalism of Russian village society necessary to individual survival. It is also true that the Decree on Peace of the revolutionaries in power in November 1917 recalled the attachment of the French Revolution to the principle of national self-determination.

A characteristic part of the claim that there are such things as human rights has been that they are universal, and that they are not subject to change over time — since they express the essential nature of human beings. In fact, there have always been difficulties with the notion of the universality of human rights. These will be examined in relation to contemporary world politics in Chapter 3, and in relation to the debate within a western tradition in this chapter. But the chief concern of this chapter is with the fact of change over time. Human rights did not just happen, they had to be invented; and their proponents had constantly to defend them against the view that they were chimerical. Even the naturalist account, according to which what we now call human rights were not invented but discovered (or, in an earlier period, revealed), accommodates change by suggesting that the process of discovery is not once and for all. And whether it is a story of discovery or of invention, it is the evolution of the idea of human rights in western thought that is the main subject-matter of this chapter.

This involves going into the history of ideas, but not in Sir Herbert Butterfield's exhausting sense of analysing ‘all the mediations by which the past was turned into the present’.

The debate about human rights in North—South relations is to some extent a rehearsal of the issues in dispute between East and West. Once more individualism and liberty are ranged against collectivism and equality; civil and political rights against economic and social rights. The difference is that the East—West debate takes place between established systems, two varieties of ‘have’ countries, whereas the North—South dispute is between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Because of this, there is arguably more vitality in the North—South dispute on human rights. It is not a mere conversation, but a project from which one side looks to gain materially at the expense of the other.

‘North’ and ‘South’ are now terms established in the contemporary vocabulary of international politics, but the membership of each group is not always clear. A view from the South might see East and West coalescing into a North which bears all the distinguishing marks of modernity — industrialization, a high standard of living, urbanization, high technology — and which is more remarkable for what its members have in common than for what divides them. But within the North, East and West, and countries within these categories, might be more preoccupied with what sets them apart from each other than what unites them. Certainly, the Soviet Union is anxious to distance itself from the exploitative North.

We have now dealt (in Part One) with the theory of human rights: what they are, their evolution in western political theory, the form of their survival in the transition from European to global international politics. We have dealt also (in Part Two) with the place of human rights in contemporary world politics, and with the extent to which they give expression to the existence of a single world society. The task now is to decide what ought to be done. If there are such things as human rights, even if only in the limited senses discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, what, in the light of our discussion of world politics in Part Two, should be done about them? In this chapter, this is treated as a moral question: what attitude should anyone take up towards the issue of human rights in world politics? Then this discussion informs the directly practical concern of the last chapter, Chapter 8, which is to ask what governments, and particularly western governments, should do about human rights in foreign policy.

There are a number of senses in which it might be said that the theory of world politics — theory here as reflection on the public arrangements that ought to be made for the government of humankind — should start with human rights.

There is an inescapable tension between human rights and foreign policy. Their constituencies are different. The society of all humankind stands opposed to the club of states, and one of the primary rules of the latter has been to deny membership to the former. Foreign policy, according to these rules, should be conducted among states. It should not involve itself either with the communities enclosed by states, or with the notional global community which reformers, revolutionaries and other trouble-makers have called up to justify their enthusiasms. The society of states should and does concern itself with rights, but they are not the rights of individuals, or even of nations, but of states. And one of the points about the rights recognized by the society of states, as we saw in Chapter 8, was to allow political diversity, plural conceptions of the rights that were to apply to individuals and groups within states. The promotion of human rights, from the point of view of the morality of states, turns this doctrine inside out. It has tended to mean the attempt by one community, or group of communities, to make particular values general. This is a form of imperialism — the making of several societies one — even if it is restricted to the establishment of basic rights.

What human rights are is dealt with in Part One of this book. Part Two is concerned with the role they play in contemporary international politics. And Part Three answers the question: what ought to be done about human rights in international relations? The movement is from theoretical analysis, to the judgement of practice, to recommendations about policy. The book speaks of ‘we’ as though for the whole world. It treats human rights as the universal standards their name implies. And it makes reference to all foreign policy, and not merely to the position of this or that state. But it is a study by someone from the West for a western institution. Accordingly, the policy, if not also the theory and the practice, it has chiefly in mind is that of the western powers (and among them mainly the United States and Great Britain).

This does not mean that it seeks merely to find out what western policy is and give it a highbrow academic defence. Indeed, the first chapter of the book accepts a definition of human rights which includes the claims of individuals to subsistence as well as to security, an acceptance the implications of which the western powers themselves have been reluctant to confront.

The argument between those who assert the universality of human rights, at least as claims that ought to be recognized, and those whose tendency it is to see any universalist claim in the context of a particular time and place has carried on in western thought, as we have seen, for at least two centuries. And we sought at the conclusion of the last chapter to defend the notion of a minimum content of universal human rights. The task now is to extend the discussion beyond western political theory to the world as a whole, and to investigate whether a doctrine of the minimum content of universal human rights survives the transition.

The first step in this process is to notice that there is a world beyond the west: namely, that great portion of the globe which is neither west European, nor North American, nor Australasian. And although it is a portion of the globe that may have been westernized, to various degrees, as a result of the dominance of western culture over the past several centuries, this is not a contingency that has emptied all meaning from the distinction between the western and the non-western worlds. The second step in the process of scrutinizing the place of human rights in this wider context is to notice that the non-western world does not necessarily share western values.

For a long time, I have been interested in identifying the respects in which scientific inquiry is and is not value laden and have understood my ideas on this matter as a corrective to views advanced by Charles Peirce and John Dewey, in whose tradition I have located my own outlook. Dewey was also interested in the extent to which questions about values could be addressed in a manner exhibiting central features of scientific inquiry. In this volume, I have taken some first steps towards addressing this side of Dewey's concern.

I have had generous help and encouragement from many sources. Ruth Marcus read and commented copiously on an earlier version of what are now the first two chapters, inducing me to remove many errors. No doubt she will not be satisfied with the result, but I am very grateful for her help.

Norbert Hornstein read the entire manuscript and made several suggestions which, together with the comments of two referees for Cambridge University Press, led to a substantial reorganization of the contents of the book. I wish to thank him and the two referees (one of whom identified himself as Ned McClennen) for their kindness. Hornstein also suggested the title of the book. I am, of course, entirely to blame for accepting his suggestion.

Teddy Seidenfeld not only read a large portion of the manuscript, he participated in its construction through his encouragement and his positive contributions to the elaboration of the ideas contained therein.

What is an agent?

I have been arguing that decision making under unresolved conflict not only is coherent but, on some occasions, may be the rationally sensible response. Some may be prepared to concede the point when it comes to institutions or social groups. These are not, so it may be claimed, agents properly speaking and, hence, should not be expected to meet the standards of rationality personal agents should satisfy. Before turning to the role of unresolved conflict in social choice theory, we shall devote some attention to this question.

Formal analogies between criteria for rational decision making by individuals and rational group or social decision making have been evident to some authors ever since Plato exploited analogies between the organization of the soul and the state in The Republic while expounding his conception of justice. Nonetheless, there is a widespread reluctance to acknowledge the existence of groups and institutions as agents. This leads to some bizarre juxtapositions.

Thus, neoclassical economists are not noted for their sympathy with notions of group mind. Yet in expounding the theory of consumer demand, they often allow families to qualify as consumers. Ideally, at least, such consumers are taken to be maximizers of their preferences or valuations subject to budgetary constraints. Given the indifference maps representing the consumer's preferences and given the budgetary constraints, demand curves are derived. Such analysis applies to any consumer, including families and firms, and is not restricted to persons.

Choice and preference

An agent choosing between options x and y in a state of unresolved conflict might recognize as permissible three distinct value rankings: x better than y, x equal in value to y and y better than x. If the agent's value structure did acknowledge the permissibility of all three rankings, both x and y would be V1-admissible, and if there were no secondary or still higher level value structure, both options would be admissible.

This way of describing the agent's predicament may seem misleading. According to a widely held opinion, if both options are admissible for the agent, he should be considered indifferent between them and both options counted as optimal for him. What in my accounting is regarded as unresolved conflict is nothing more than a situation where two options are best.

Suppose, however, that, in the way of speaking I have been using, the agent has a secondary value structure. Although both x and y are, as before, V1-admissible, x is rated over y according to the secondary structure and, hence, is uniquely admissible. Here too it may seem that what I consider to be a decision problem under unresolved conflict is better seen as a choice situation where the agent ranks x over y and x is counted as uniquely optimal.

According to this rival way of describing matters, an agent's rating of alternatives is determined by how he would choose between any given pair of options or by determining for each pair which is and which is not admissible for the agent.

The sources of conflict

In the previous chapter, I argued that the average benefit principle can be made sensitive to questions of fair distribution if it is embedded in a criterion of abl(i)lex-admissibility. Thus, a currently fashionable complaint leveled against utilitarian and other types of value commitments marked by benevolence for all can be defused to a considerable degree. At the same time, this sensitivity is manifested only in cases of unresolved conflict. When utilitarians boast that their principles can form the basis for resolving conflicts in values, they are claiming that their value commitments are free of such conflict and to this extent cannot manifest the sensitivity to equity which abl(i)lex-admissibility allows.

Perhaps, however, utilitarians should not exhibit the regard for fair distribution their critics insist they should. Their strength resides in their boast that their principles enable us to resolve conflicts in values by appeal to antecedently available general criteria. Can they make good their boast? In this chapter, I shall point to three sources of conflict where, it seems to me, utilitarians should find themselves in considerable difficulty.

Concern and conflict

Utilitarians agree that each member of I ought to be an object of equal concern. This agreement transcends differences in the understanding of utility which divide classical from preference utilitarians or rule utilitarians from act utilitarians. Still, utilitarians often differ concerning the specification of the set I of objects of concern.