Human Rights, Legitimacy, Political Judgement

Abstract

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams's prima vista enigmatic assertion that '[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions'. Though Williams's approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other 'political' and 'minimalist' understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams's way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative. Keywords Bernard Williams • Human rights • European Convention of Human Rights • Legitimacy • Political realism • Political judgement In his essay 'Human Rights and Relativism', Bernard Williams declares that 'Whether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions' (Williams 2005, p. 72). At first blush, this remark appears enigmatic and infuriating. Why cannot we distinguish between the philosophical merit of considering x a violation of a person's human rights and the political * Edward Hall