Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

162 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
human right. It has a much weaker moral urgency than the right to a fair
trial, let alone the right to life. Human rights thus correspond to a subset
of the domain of justice, and focus on those questions that are of utter
importance, the protection of which should have a greater urgency than
the support of other normative claims. The second threshold — social
influenceability — implies that even if something valuable is hugely
important, as long as there is no or very limited social influenceability,
its protection cannot be a human right. For example, it makes no sense
to speak of a human right to be protected from volcano eruptions, or
a human right to be protected from cancer. However, one can say that
there is a human right to be warned about volcano eruptions if the
government has the relevant information. To the extent that there is
more social influenceability, the scope to speak coherently of human
rights increases.
Human rights have corresponding duties. But on whom do those
duties fall and what kind of duties are they? A broad, inclusive account
of duties is given by Pablo Gilabert (2009, 673) who writes:
[Human rights impose] a duty of the highest priority for individuals
and governments to identify ways to protect certain important interests
through (a) specific rights and entitlements, but also, when these
are insufficient or not presently feasible, through (b) urgent goals of
institution-building.
Note that this definition does not limit the duty to protect human rights
to governments only, and that it does include institution-building as an
important path towards protecting human rights. 28
The human rights literature is, just like the capability approach, deeply
multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. The philosophy of human rights
“addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality,
justification, and legal status of human rights” (Nickel 2014, 1). How
can human rights exist in the first place? What should be the content of
28 This relates to a complex discussion in legal and political philosophy on whether
human rights can be protected by so-called ‘imperfect duties’ or ‘imperfect
obligations’ which is beyond the scope of this book. See, amongst others, Polly
Vizard (2006, 84–91) and Frances Kamm (2011) for further discussion.