Hey guys! I was really interested in Beitz’s considerations of whether values with a collective dimension (right to participate in certain cultural practices, etc.) ought to be bound up in human rights. In short, Beitz acknowledges that some theorists—particularly Marx—criticized the “excessively individualistic” conception of human rights and the ensuing emphasis on interests like personal property and religious freedom over “forms of public action to which a high priority should be given,” like a baseline standard of living (112). To prove that his model of human rights does not exclude conceptions of collective rights at the outset, Beitz shows that any collective dimension of a right, which “cannot be explained without reference to their group membership” is accompanied by a value for the individual, which is then appealed to by his model of human rights.
I’m especially curious about how would go about adjudicating between a collective right (accessed through the individual’s desire to be in that group and have those rights) and an individual right if they were to conflict. I find it especially relevant when considering the erosion of cultural practices. What if an individual really needs access to a market to sell her wares/practices, but the mechanism that brings her increased economic resources also destroys local traditions? (roads, machinery, social values from the global North, etc.) As was mentioned by Sen, it can occur that in the name of increasing one right, another is restricted. Beitz seems to slip away by claiming to be agnostic about whether these should be included in a basket of human rights, but what do you guys think?
Hey Cesco, thanks for bringing up this category of rights, I definitely think it's vey very important. I think that there really is no way of assessing if collective interests should be protected by human rights on a full scale level, because this question is so dependent on the specific culture we are dealing with. I think it's a positive step just to have this open as a question in the way Beitz proposes, "the two-level model is framed so as to allow the question whether international doctrine should include rights aimed at protecting these interest to be treated as a normative question within the practice." (113) This seems to me a lot like the approach that Sen might take to this question; leaving it up to the internal deliberation of each culture what traditions they want to keep or otherwise abandon.
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