The Structure of Human Rights: A Philosophical Investigation

Abstract

There is a tendency for human rights bodies—at the international, regional, and national level—to take each human right to correspond to multiple duties. It has become almost a mantra of human rights institutions that human rights correlate with duties to ‘respect, protect, and fulfil’. This view of the structure of human rights—the Multiple Duty View—is echoed in much of the philosophical literature on human rights—and particularly the accounts of Henry Shue, John Tasioulas, and Rowan Cruft. These philosophers reject outright the claim that there is a one-to-one relationship between human rights and their duties. Instead—on their accounts— correlating to each human right are any and all of ..