we need to step back from the overuse of human rights concepts and ask ourselves when and where it is most useful to use rights language to tackle a particular problem.
The more that a particular situation involves highly diffuse human goods in which all participate, and is the result of complex interrelationships among multiple different causal factors that make it difficult to clearly individuate both claims of right and their correlative duties, the less will the structure of rights-talk be a helpful tool to delineate the demands of justice. Climate change is a paradigmatic example of this, in my view. It is certainly an urgent and vital concern, but I don’t see human rights as being a particularly useful instrument for addressing it.
At the same time, we should not dismiss the “classical” political and civil liberties as somehow passé or less relevant today, or think that the problems of liberty and democratic self-governance are behind us. A massive proportion of the human family still lives in conditions of authoritarian rule, and as much as we like to think of gross and systematic violations like genocide and concentration camps as being of another era, in fact they are still with us – witness for instance the systematic suppression of the Uighurs by the Chinese Communist Party, or the complete collapse of Venezuela from a functional, however imperfectly democracy into an authoritarian dictatorship. The advent of the technocratic surveillance state only exacerbates those problems. We should not become passive about the need for vigilance regarding such rights as freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief, rights to political participation, rights essential to the rule of law, and so on.
However, the rising impact of non-governmental entities, including large transnational corporations and platform based businesses, on human rights might pose a new challenge. For historical reasons, we are used to thinking that human rights are designed to impose limits solely on the regulatory reach of governments that exercise public powers. However, especially in light of the emergence of economic and information globalization, this reading might turn out to be a bit misleading. How do you see the growing impacts of companies on human rights?
Human rights arose principally as constraints on the state both because the modern state embodied an extraordinary and unprecedented concentration of power – and with that power comes, inevitably, the tendency of human beings to abuse it – and also because in the modern era the nation-state is the paradigmatic “complete” community for exercising authority to and coordinating all aspects of the common good of their people.