This is the first attempt to provide an
in-depth moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise:
the system of international legal human rights. It is international human rights
law-not any philosophical theory of moral human rights or any "folk" conception
of moral human rights-that serves as the lingua franca of modern human rights
practice. Yet contemporary philosophers have had little to say about
international legal human rights. They have tended to assume, rather than to
argue, that international legal human rights, if morally justified, must mirror
or at least help realize moral human rights. But this assumption is mistaken.
International legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified
by several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize
a corresponding moral right is only one. Further, this volume shows that some of
the most important international legal human rights cannot be adequately
justified by appeal to corresponding moral human rights. The problem is that the
content of these international legal human rights-the full set of correlative
duties-is much broader than can be justified by appealing to the morally
important interests of any individual. In addition, it is necessary to examine
the legitimacy of the institutions that create, interpret, and implement
international human rights law and to defend the claim that international human
rights law should "trump" the domestic law of even the most admirable
constitutional democracies
