Human rights and equality

Abstract

Human rights are often thought to express an egalitarian idea. This chapter argues that the connection between human rights and equality is more tenuous than it first seems and a robust egalitarianism is neither the input nor the output of human rights, as currently conceived. Inasmuch as human rights might be thought to rest on a substantive notion of moral equality between human beings, this is not supported by strong arguments or existing philosophical justifications for moral human rights. Inasmuch as they may be thought to lead to a form of equality of condition, current philosophical justifications cannot support a genuinely egalitarian, rather than sufficientarian or prioritarian, distribution.