Human Rights and Social Justice - Lecture Notes

Human Rights and Social Justice

Introduction

• Human rights documents and discourses often link human rights and social justice.

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) includes justice among human rights, covering procedural and distributive justice.

• Examples from UDHR:

  • Article 7: Equal protection against discrimination (ensuring everyone is treated the same under the law, regardless of race, gender, religion, etc.).

  • Article 10: Procedural justice (right to a fair trial and impartial tribunal).

  • Article 21.2: Equal access to public service (all citizens should have the same opportunities to work in government positions).

  • Article 21.3: Democratic rights (the right to vote and participate in the political process).

  • Article 23.2: Equal pay for equal work (men and women should receive the same compensation for performing the same job).

  • Article 23.3: Right to just remuneration (fair wages that allow workers and their families to live a decent life).

  • Article 26: Educational and opportunity rights (access to education and opportunities for personal and professional development).

• These aims are reiterated in other international documents and by human rights advocacy groups.

• The dominant philosophical view sees human rights and social justice as distinct normative domains.

• Social justice requires greater distributive equality than human rights, except for constitutionally essential civil and political rights.

• This dominant view presents a discontinuous conception: social justice includes human rights but contains a further conception of equality rights that are not human rights.

The Discontinuous Conception

• Charles Jones frames the dominant view: social justice includes further specifications on the range of legitimate inequality of basic goods that are compatible with universal rights protections.

• This paper challenges the discontinuous view and proposes a normative model where human rights overlap more fully with egalitarian social justice.

• The reformed model is political, based on current human rights practice (institutional and discursive elements).

• Normative model: reconstructed account of norms and ideals implicit in practices.

• Current human rights practice is emergent and contested, with disagreement over basic norms and values.

• The development of human rights practice reflects a growing convergence on the egalitarian understanding of social justice.

• Goal: outline an account of how social justice and human rights increasingly share normative space based on membership in a political society, functioning at different levels to protect against exclusions from that status.

Dominant Philosophical View

• Social justice is characterized as a strongly egalitarian norm.

• Ronald Dworkin: all plausible political philosophy is egalitarian, with theories of social justice evaluated by their correspondence to the idea that people are equals.

• Members of a political society are entitled to equal respect and consideration in the design and administration of political institutions.

• Kymlicka refers to an egalitarian plateau in contemporary political philosophy.

• Egalitarian theories of social justice require significant distributive equality, like John Rawls’ equal distributions of primary goods.This emphasis on equality raises important questions about how to achieve a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, which is essential for fostering a just society.