Chapter 3: Is There a Basic Right to Political Membership?
3.1 The Logic of Basic Rights
Henry Shue’s idea of Basic Rights was originally conceived as a
counterpoint to the position, commonly associated with Maurice Cranston, that human rights could only be negative rights. Cranston argued that the
expansion of rights in the Universal Declaration to include ‘social rights’ was philosophically incoherent5 (Cranston 1983). Shue makes the argument that certain social rights, specifically the right to the necessities of life, are
necessary for the enjoyment of the negative rights that Cranston espoused.
According to Shue, it is these ‘basic rights’ that should be accorded first priority in any morally just foreign policy.
Basic rights… are everyone’s minimum reasonable demands upon the rest of humanity. They are the rational basis for justified demands the denial of which no self-respecting person can reasonably be expected to accept. Why should anything be so important? The reason is that rights are basic in the sense used here only if the enjoyment of them is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights. This is what is distinctive about a basic right. When a right is genuinely basic, any attempt to enjoy any other right by sacrificing the basic right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the ground from beneath itself.6
So if we believe that rights are important, Shue argues, then we must accept that certain basic rights, in this case, the right to personal security and to sustenance, must first be guaranteed because without these rights, none of the others could be reliably enjoyed. The right to free speech is of little value
5 M. Cranston, What are Human Rights?, (Bodley Head, London, 1973).
6 H. Shue, op cit. p. 19
to an individual if that person is unable to procure enough food and water to stay alive. Shue therefore cautions against a purely formal conception of rights that doesn't take into account the social and economic conditions of their enjoyment.
A similar logic can be seen at play in Arendt’s description of a Right to have Rights. Rights are important, but there are some things that are required for rights to be enjoyed. As Frank Michalman puts it, “The fundamental
Arendtian right is the right of political inclusion...Why is the right to inclusion fundamental – ‘much more fundamental,’ indeed, than ‘freedom and justice?’
Because from it flows the very possibility of having (further) rights.”7 Once one is stripped of membership within a political group, rights as they have
traditionally been conceived are revealed as relying upon this status of
belonging to a political community. When this belonging has been called into question, all other rights cease to be reliable. One may have freedom of movement, freedom of thought or freedom of expression, but these rights no longer have the proper context in which they can be exercised. As a result, they are susceptible to being taken away at any time for any reason. In short, the ‘ground has been cut beneath them,’ they have ceased to be rights at all.
This is not say that Shue and Arendt are making the same claim. Shue is making an argument about the nature of rights themselves. For him, rights are
7 F. Michalman, op cit. p. 205-206
a fundamental component to the dignified treatment of human beings.8 Arendt was concerned with the historical circumstance in which the rights of
individuals were tied to a nation-state system that was breaking down under the onslaught of totalitarianism. It is the difference between the negative assertion: that when certain claims are denied that all rights cease to be effective, and the positive assertion: that these claims must therefore make up the basis for a more fundamental set of rights.
Basic rights establish a building block approach to political justification.
There are fundamental human rights, to which every human being is entitled, at the base. If a state is able to protect those rights, other deviations from liberal justice may be tolerated. These are justifiable both on the grounds of practical applicability, liberal states can't go around remaking other states in their image without causing more damage than they might repair, and because it is consistent with the liberal value of toleration. Just as liberal states tolerate different conceptions of the good life in their domestic conception of Justice, they need to be able to tolerate some plurality in the way communities
organize their political systems. The role of human rights in this approach is to set the limits to liberal toleration in the international system. When basic human rights are violated a good case can be made for international intervention to protect the people at risk.
The practical consequence of the idea of basic rights is that a more
8 H. Shue, op. cit. p. 14
restricted list of fundamental rights that must be defended internationally while a more expansive set of rights apply within liberal states. This approach can be seen in other liberal human rights thinkers such as John Rawls and Michael Ignatieff. Rawls considers human rights as a special class of ‘urgent rights’
that define the limits of toleration within international politics. Those states that violate human rights forfeit the right of non-interference in their affairs by
‘decent’ states that respect human rights.9 Other liberal thinkers such as Charles Beitz and Joshua Cohen have developed more detailed approaches based on Rawls's thinking. Ignatieff defends a ‘minimalist’ conception of rights on practical grounds, arguing that a more restricted list is easier to defend and has a better chance of achieving agreement from people coming from different cultures and political traditions.10 Both these thinkers establish a prioritisation of rights with basic human rights at the base and other rights resting on the support provided by them. There may be dispute over which rights should be prioritised and why, but the structure is the same.
For the most part, none of these thinkers can be said to explicitly include membership among the basic rights to which they believe everyone is entitled.
However, it seems that most believe that once basic human rights are guaranteed, the recognition of political membership will already be guaranteed. Their approach is to establish a certain set of rights using philosophical argumentation and then argue that these are the rights that should be defended internationally. The political conditions under which they
9 See J, Rawls, The Law of Peoples, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1999)
10 See M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001)
might be attained are not explicitly considered. The suggestion is that if the current international system is not capable of supporting these basic rights, then efforts should be directed at reforming it until it does.