Why Respect for Freedom Cannot Explain the Content and Grounds of Human Rights

• Author: David Thunder
• Published date: 01 August 2014
• Date: 01 August 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591714531494
• Subject Matter: Response

531494PTXXXX10.1177/0090591714531494Political TheoryThunder
research-article2014
Responses
Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(4) 490 –497
Why Respect for
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714531494
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the Content and Grounds
of Human Rights: A
Response to Valentini
David Thunder1
Abstract
In a recent article in Political Theory (40, 5: 573–601), entitled “Human
Rights, Freedom, and Political Authority,” Laura Valentini proposes a
“freedom-centered” account of human rights. On this account, “human
rights are derived from the universal right to freedom, namely each
person’s innate right to a sphere of agency within which to pursue her
ends and goals without being subject to the will of others” (574). In spite
of its prima facie appeal, I argue that Valentini’s theory does not do a
good job at explaining some of our settled convictions about the content
of human rights and that she offers an implausibly restrictive view of our
reasons for respecting human rights. I conclude by very briefly presenting
the main elements of a broader perfectionist and dignitarian account of
human rights, which seems more consistent with our settled convictions
on these matters.
Keywords
freedom, perfectionism, human rights, dignity, Valentini
1University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Corresponding Author:
David Thunder, University of Navarra, Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Religion and
Civil Society Project, Edificio de Bibliotecas, Campus Universitario, 31009 Pamplona, Spain.
Email: dthunder@unav.es

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Thunder
491
Modern theories of justice were forged in the crucible of the social contract
tradition, in which the norms of social and political life are viewed as the
product of a hypothetical agreement among equals on shared terms of coop-
eration. In this context, political communities are viewed paradigmatically as
communities of rational agents, that is, communities of persons capable of
deliberating rationally and concluding agreements.1 If political communities
are viewed in these terms, then it is natural to view the subject of rights in its
purest form as a rational, self-determining agent, and to view anyone outside
this category as an aberration rather than as a typical case of the subject of
rights. This is borne out by the work of the leading social contract thinker of
the twentieth century, John Rawls, who stipulates that a “person,” the bearer
of rights and duties within a political community, is someone who enjoys the
“two moral powers,” namely, the capacity for a sense of justice and the capac-
ity to hold and revise a conception of the good.2 Rawls and his successors
rarely speak about humans who lack the two moral powers, whether infants,
the cognitively impaired, or the mentally infirm, and the few times they do
mention them, they seem to view them as imperfect specimens of rational
adults, whose dignity stems from their potential or progressive acquisition of
the moral powers.3
Neither Rawls nor other liberal thinkers who give theoretical primacy to
individual liberty have managed to produce a clear and cogent rationale for
extending the dignity of autonomous agents to those who fall on the fringes
of the social contract, those who, far from being autonomous agents with a
developed conception of the good, are totally dependent on their caregivers
and either temporarily or permanently disabled from making their own
choices about how to live. Any theory of rights premised on the equal dignity
of autonomous rational agents must properly explain how or to what extent
we can ascribe dignity to radically heteronomous and/or cognitively impaired
human beings. Otherwise the case of children, the mentally disabled, and the
insane will continue to be treated as puzzling “outliers” in the “penumbra” of
the theory of rights.4 But they are human beings, and if they do indeed have
rights, as most of us would recognize, then they surely deserve better.
The tendency of liberal thinkers to place exclusive or near-exclusive value
on rational, autonomous forms of life while glossing over the value of less
rational and less autonomous forms of life is reflected quite clearly in a recent
article in Political Theory, which attempts to ground human rights exclu-
sively in the value of freedom. In her article “Human Rights, Freedom, and
...