21 - Moral progress and human rights

Summary

This chapter makes the case that the concept of human rights on which the modern international human rights enterprise is grounded is morally progressive. I first clarify the idea of moral progress. Next, I focus on what I take to be some of the most important improvements in thinking about justice and explain how they are connected to one another. Then, I show that the modern conception of human rights encompasses all of these improvements.

My account of moral-conceptual progress will be neutral on the crucial question of causal relations between changes in normative ideas and interests or other so-called “material” factors. What I will say is compatible with both the view that the moral-conceptual changes I describe played a major causal role in progressive institutional change (such as the abolition of slavery) and with the view that they were largely post-hoc responses to institutional change caused by realignments of interests, as well as with a range of more nuanced alternative views that allow complex reciprocal causality between normative beliefs and interests. It will also be compatible with a sensible rejection of the facile distinction between normative beliefs and interests on the basis of which the question of causality is usually framed.