Human rights and the natural right to independence

JULIO MONTERO

Savannah

Congreso; 114th Meeting of the American Philosophical Association; 2018

American Philosophical Association

For decades, philosophers tended to understand human rights as claims protecting some key features of human beings that individuals would have against any other agent even in an imaginary state of nature. This account is know as the natural rights approach to human rights. However, in the last decade, this view was challenged by a group of theorists proposing an alternative, political approach to human rights. According to these authors, the function of human rights is to constrain the behavior of sovereign nation-states towards their own residents. In this essay I argue that although human rights are not reducible to natural rights, they can be perfectly grounded on a natural right to independence. This view will succeed at accommodating the main features of current human rights practice, and will help us make sense of the very idea embodied by contemporary human rights practice.