THE IDEA OF RIGHTS IN INTERNATIONAL ETHICS

Abstract

If, in our search for the most pervasive ethical tradition, we were to take currently popular usage as our guide, then rights would have a strong claim to the prize. Talk of rights is so widespread and, some would say, so shrill that it sometimes seems to be all, in the popular mind, that ethics is about. To the rights of man have been added the rights of women and of children, including unborn children. To the rights of states have been added the rights of nations and peoples, of races and classes. To the rights of human beings and the associations they form among them have been added the rights of animals, and of trees, and of stones. Rights talk, as it is now often called, is also a popular activity in international relations, where, as will be set out below, human rights have become part of the everyday language of diplomacy. Whether this popularity justifies elevating rights to the status of one of the great categories of ethical discourse along with (in Nardin's formulation in Chapter 1) political realism, common morality, consequentialism, and international law is another question. It may be argued that rights, read as interests, are assimilable to realism. It may also be argued that rights are an aspect of common morality, one of the principles we have in mind when we think of ethics as fidelity to moral principle.

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