Human Rights and Partial Compliance

EDUARDO RIVERA LÓPEZ

Workshop; UK-Latin America Political Philosophy Network Workshop 3; 2019

University College London

Fulfilling human rights often has costs, which are typically distributed among individuals in the form of legal or moral duties. When some individuals don?t comply with these duties, human rights can only be fulfilled if other individuals take on additional duties. Can the imposition of these additional duties be justified? After introducing some terminology, we present a possible argument against imposing additional duties on compliers. Compliers can object that allowing for such imposition subjects them to domination by potential noncompliers. We show that people whose human rights would be left unfulfilled can argue that it is them who would be subject to domination if compliers aren?t required to take on additional duties. Everything hinges on which baseline is used for assessing whether additional duties have been imposed, so 4 we argue for one particular baseline which doesn?t take the current circumstances as given. According to this alternative baseline, allowing for the imposition of additional human rights duties on compliers does not count as allowing for domination over them. Then we argue that even if the argument for the alternative baseline doesn?t work, the kind of domination that is allowed for if we allow for additional duties on compliers isn?t as worrying as the kind of domination that is allowed over those whose human rights would be left unfulfilled if imposing additional duties over compliers is not allowed.