Feasibility constraints on human rights

The question of which, if any, feasibility constraints should be imposed on normative or evaluative claims is one of the central methodological questions in political theory. As part of that broader question, there is an on-going discussion concerning the feasibility constraints we should impose on claims about human rights. Central to this debate is the question whether we should reject the claim that there is a human right to X if it is not possible to secure the fulfillment of this right for all or most people. Indeed, this kind of feasibility argument has often been used to cast doubt on the existence of socio-economic rights in particular. The paper seeks to contribute to the debate over the feasibility of human rights in three different ways: 1. First, it aims to show that there are two different types of question involved in discussions of the feasibility of human rights. On the one hand, the questions raised concerning feasibility in political theory in general have applications for the feasibility of human rights. In particular, the question of whether feasibility should be seen as synchronic or diachronic is central to solutions to the feasibility challenge proposed by e.g. Amartya Sen and Pablo Gilabert. On the other hand, there are questions that are more specific to the feasibility of human rights, which concern what we may callthe de-composition of human rights. A human right may be de-composed into a cluster of claim rights held by all human beings and in order to settle whether a human right is feasible, one needs to know how to go from claims about the feasibility of individual claim-rights to claims about the feasibility of the human right as such. 2. Next, the paper explores some difficulties in answering both of these questions concerning the feasibility of human rights. Concerning the first question, the paper argues that a diachronic approach to the feasibility of human rights will be insufficiently determinate to settle the question of which human rights people have today. Concerning the second question, the paper suggests that there is no obvious way of going from claims about the feasibility of specific claim-rights to claims about the feasibility of human rights. Common to these difficulties is that the claim that a human right is feasible or not will appear to be to some degree arbitrary. 3. Thirdly, the paper will consider the objection that there is a tension between a common defense of the feasibility of human rights – which consists in saying that a human right is feasible if its fulfillment can be secured by a plurality of actors – and the ideal that a claim about human rights should be action-guiding. From the point of view of an individual agent who seeks to know which human rights there are as a basis for deciding what to do, it will in some cases be indeterminate what human rights there are as long as their feasibility depends on the actions of a large number of actors.