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Subsistence Needs, Human Rights, and Imperfect Duties
Author(s) -
Hope Simon
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of applied philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.339
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5930
pISSN - 0264-3758
DOI - 10.1111/japp.12006
Subject(s) - subsistence agriculture , duty , imperfect , human rights , dynamism , law and economics , environmental ethics , sociology , natural (archaeology) , economics , epistemology , positive economics , law , political science , philosophy , ecology , agriculture , geography , linguistics , archaeology , biology
I address the usefulness of thinking about a human right to subsistence within conceptions of human rights grounded in ordinary moral reasoning. I argue that that natural rights should be understood as rights in rem , with their dynamism constrained by the requirements of justification and their scope constrained by the distinction between perfect and imperfect duty. I then suggest that many of the most pressing demands which the moral significance of subsistence needs create are plausibly imperfect duties, and so cannot correlate to a natural right to subsistence. This restricts the helpfulness of a human right to subsistence in our reasoning about what we owe to others.