AN INTERNATIONALIST CONCEPTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

I develop and defend a conception of human rights as constituting the answer to a fundamental practical question of foreign policy faced by liberal democracies around the world: When is a government the agent of a determinate people capable of committing that people to this or that by way of treaty or other voluntary undertaking within international law? I do not argue that this is the only important conception of human rights; I do argue that it is a conception that ought to have a certain primacy in a normative theory of international relations.