“Human rights are basic moral guarantees that people in all countries and cultures possess, simply because they are people”. Explain the statement. (2008)
The statement reproduces the definition given by James W. Nickel in the Encyclopedia of Ethics (1992), with one qualifier removed. Nickel wrote that people “allegedly have” these guarantees, conceding that their existence must be argued for. Each term makes a separate claim, and the dropped qualifier marks the weak point.
Unpacking the Definition
- Moral. Human rights are standards for judging governments whether or not any law recognises them. Enactment makes them enforceable, not real. Jeremy Bentham denied this: natural rights were nonsense upon stilts (Anarchical Fallacies).
- Guarantees. Individuals can invoke them, and compliance is mandatory, not discretionary. Each right implies a correlative duty, addressed mainly to one’s own government.
- Basic. They are minimal standards, concerned, in Nickel’s words, with avoiding the terrible rather than with achieving the best. They set a high-priority floor, not a full theory of justice.
- All countries and cultures. They are universal and independent of citizenship. Article 2 of the UDHR (1948) forbids distinction “of any kind”.
- Simply because they are people. The title is humanity itself, not merit, membership or contract.
Why Being Human Is Enough
- Immanuel Kant (Groundwork, 1785): persons have dignity, not a price, and are ends, never merely means.
- Alan Gewirth (Reason and Morality, 1978): every agent must claim freedom and well-being as conditions of action, and consistency requires granting them to all agents.
- James Griffin (On Human Rights, 2008): human rights protect normative agency, the capacity to choose and pursue a worthwhile life.
- A political conception questions this grounding. John Rawls (The Law of Peoples, 1999) treats human rights as urgent rights that limit a regime’s internal autonomy, justified without any comprehensive moral doctrine. Charles R. Beitz (The Idea of Human Rights, 2009) defines them by their role in global practice. Here “because they are people” names the protected subject, not the foundation.
Limits of the Statement
- Relativism. The Bangkok Declaration (1993) asked that rights be read against regional particularities, disputing that one list binds “all cultures”.
- The enforcement gap. A guarantee needs a guarantor. Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) observed that the stateless, who were nothing but human, found the rights of man unenforceable. They lacked the right to have rights: membership of a political community.
Indian Illustration
In Chairman, Railway Board v. Chandrima Das (2000), the Supreme Court upheld compensation for a Bangladeshi woman raped by railway employees at Howrah, holding that Article 21 protects every person, citizen or not, and drawing on Article 3 of the UDHR. Yet the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 defines human rights legally, as rights guaranteed by the Constitution or the Covenants and enforceable by Indian courts.
Conclusion
The statement is sound as a claim about justification: no state grants human rights and none may rightfully deny them. As an account of existence it is incomplete, because a guarantee becomes real only through institutions. Nickel’s “allegedly” is the honest word: human rights are universal moral claims that argument and practice must keep making good.