Normative Systems and Human Rights

This is a pre-publication draft of my contribution to a symposium in the Emory Law Journal honoring the extraordinary scholarly career of Michael J. Perry. In it I address some of the difficulties presenting themselves in contemporary literature on human rights. It is widely acknowledged that the phrase “human rights” stands badly in need of better definition. Rights only make sense when understood as part of some system of preexisting norms. In this essay, I examine some of the normative systems that appear to be implicated in one or another discussion of human rights. In that connection, I review the distinction between “moral” and “political” interpretations of human rights that has featured prominently in the academic commentary. I attempt to show that these two schools of thought can be understood as referring to two different systems of norms. I also briefly consider some other normative systems which may play some part in explications of human rights. The human rights protections that stem from each of these systems will be different with respect to sources of legitimacy, procedures, and remedies. I then deal with some necessary consequences of recognition of this multiple grounding for human rights discourse and practice. While the resulting plurality of kinds of human rights will often overlap, necessarily they also will sometimes be contradictory. Given this state of affairs, a single conceptual model of human rights will never be able to account for the variety of phenomena that now lay claim to the title of “human rights."