Better Model?

    On page 54, Beitz says that human rights are like natural rights in that they are "critical standards" not determined by legal rules, but unlike natural rights in that they do not presuppose one view about their justification. He seems to be basing this off of Maritain's conclusion that human rights are a common ground for action despite different reasons for justification for different people. He uses this to say that human rights are not "out there" as natural rights are and continues the argument on 57. He argues that there seems to be no good reason for why we should conceive of human rights as natural ones. 

    Beitz points to natural rights theorists like Locke, conceived of natural rights "formulate constraints on the use of a government’s coercive power in circumstances of religious and moral diversity" (57). While I suspect that Locke would argue that he had other reasons for posing these as natural rigthts and this was a just a desirable consequence, it reminded of our discussion of models in science. Beitz is specifically talking about how we out to think about human rights as a practice and not a natural truth, but I wonder if someone could counter within his own logic that taking some understanding of human rights, for example, that humans have inherent value, produces a "better" outcome. This is not because it is the true nature of human rights, but because everyone agrees prior to defining human rights that certain things are "bad" and that holding to a certain definition would prevent these things from happening, not because the model is "correct" or closer to reality, but because it better models/creates what we want to happen in practice. human rights as inherent in all human might conveniently allows us to best produce the outcomes we want. This seems to acknowledge the degree to which human rights are a practice and something that we define, but also all stem from one base assumption of human rights as a thing. 

    Also, Beitz mentions Milak who says that these rights are “rights of the individual as a member of society” rather than rights “of the individual as such” (57). This sort of came up in tutorial when Beitz claimed his account was based on human rights as an emergent practice. It seems reasonable that some rights are given to people in a society, but human rights are explicitly external to society and global. So, if human rights were rights of an individual as a member of a society, then it would have to be a global society. And, if there were a global society, then there would be laws and enforcement of these laws and then it seems difficult to argue that human rights are still an emergent practice.