Publication Details

Abstract

Human rights, as a special kind of moral rights, have traditionally been seen as guides for legally institutionalized human rights practice. However, there are several problems with this conception. It seems that not every moral right makes sense to translate into a legal form, and at the same time not all legal rights have a moral antecedent. Thus, human rights ethics requires some supplementation in order to justify institutionalized rights. At the same time, it is not usually seen as final, but we expect it to be supported by further justification, for example by its relation to normative agency, basic needs or capabilities. This raises the question of whether it is redundant, whether its role could be superseded by elements that further justify it. The article defends the thesis that as such it can be superseded by utilitarian reasons. Using them, we can reach the same conclusions, but with several significant advantages over competing approaches. Utilitarianism is not only an analytically clear theory that minimizes the normative basis of our reasoning, but it can offer a justification for that practice without having to be supplemented by some other approach. At the same time, it can easily deal with the redundancy objection.