“Freedom is the goal rather than the ground of human rights. But freedom is also essentially dependent on others and other cultures. Achieving the conditions for freedom - human rights - is humanity’s overriding moral obligation.”
“The question I want to explore is the nature of the relationship between these two types of rights. Their differences are clear. Civil and political rights, in abstracting from specific content, are value-neutral. As such, they express an abstract freedom, generally understood as a freedom from government interference.”
“Economic, cultural and social rights, by contrast, are value-laden. The freedom that they embody is not abstract since it is, by definition, directed towards specific societal goals. Given this, can we really call both types “rights”? Civil and political rights, because of their abstract quality, claim to be universal. Can the same be said of value-laden rights? Since values are necessarily embedded in a culture, does not the inclusion of such rights relativize them to specific cultures? Doesn’t it thereby undermine any claim they might have toward universality?”
“rights are ultimately rights to freedom”
“Understanding freedom as the goal rather than the ground of rights gives us an insight into how the two types of rights function together.”
“In society, we no longer have a “perfect liberty” to use our power to defend our lives and interests. We cede part of this to the state, i.e., to its laws, judges, and forces of public order, in exchange for its defense of our freedoms. Such freedoms, such as those of expression, assembly, petition, etc., are maintained by us as rights. The ideal here is the maximum amount of individual freedom consistent with the limitations imposed by our living together.”
“Given that others provide us with the choices that make up freedom’s content, and given as well that the very language that we use to communicate these choices is provided by them, we cannot speak of the freedom of an abstractly isolated person. Human freedom, the freedom that goes beyond instinctively directed animal desire, is an intersubjective construct.”
“As such, it is vulnerable to the actions of others. Our exposure to the choices they offer can be limited by our political, economic, cultural and social circumstances. Politically, limitations can be placed on speech and assembly, thus limiting our exposure to alternate ways of being and behaving. Tyrannies, for example, strive to produce a populous that has no idea of such alternatives. Their ideal is a citizenry that thinks, acts and discloses the world according to a limited number of state approved projects. So disclosed, this world cannot offer any evidence running counter to the claims of the state. Freedom in such a world operates within a limited set of options, each of which, when enacted, confirms the others in disclosing a single reality, one with no evident alternatives. Such limitations, of course, need not be only political. They can just as well be economic, cultural and social. Thus, our exposure to alternatives can be limited by cultural and social norms.”
“To speak of rights in this context is to recognize that both notions of rights—both the value-neutral and the value-laden—are not the expressions of an original abstract freedom. They rather state the requirements for freedom’s concrete realization.”
“freedom is socially constituted”
“the rights associated with freedom are both negative and positive”
“Negative rights are the restraints on power that are required to keep open for us the various possibilities of being human.”
“Positive rights involve our ability to achieve the possibilities presented to us by others.”
“our third implication, which is that human rights are not based on some original, abstract freedom. They are not the remnants of it reserved to us after the foundation of the state. They are rather the means by which we first achieve our human freedom. Freedom, in other words, is the goal rather than the ground of human rights. As socially constructed, it is a teleological concept.”
“freedom is the correlate of the possibilities open to the self. It expresses the richness of the intersubjective realm and, hence, the richness of the lives of the subjects that constitute this realm”
“the fourth implication, which is that rights are not per se absolute; they are rather relative to this goal. Their claim to universality must, in other words, be evaluated in terms of their serving as conditions for its realization.”
“both value-neutral and value-laden rights are human rights since both are required for the realization of our freedom. Their claim to universality is actually to the universality of this goal. If we take freedom as essential for our being human, then the requirements for its realization are human rights in the sense that they are required by our humanity. The point, however, is to see such humanity as a goal, not a given. Rather than something we are born with, it is, along with the freedom that characterizes it, something we have to achieve. This achievement is, in fact, our overriding moral obligation.[3] To be human is to obligate ourselves to accomplish our humanity.”