Moral human rights, atypical humans, and the under-inclusiveness objection

Abstract

Moral human rights are often defined as rights that human beings are said to hold simply in virtue of their humanity. Philosophical defences of moral human rights frequently espouse the following two-tier justificatory strategy: first, they locate some morally relevant property (or set of properties) that is common to all human beings; second, they claim that this property is what justifies right-holding. If some property Q is thought to justify right-holding, it means that some human being A holds moral human rights in virtue of having Q. What should we do, however, if we come to the realisation that there is some other human being B that does not have Q? This is the so-called problem of marginal cases. Philosophical accounts that fail to justify universal right-holding can be objected to on the grounds of being under-inclusive. In the present paper, I defend what I deem to be the most sophisticated version of the under-inclusiveness objection, based on the notion of minimal inclusiveness requirement that any account must satisfy. I also attempt to show that any philosophical account that takes the concept of moral human rights as its starting point must make room for three additional conceptual claims: universal property, relevant property, and univalence. These three claims – together with the minimal inclusiveness requirement – serve as constraints on the scope and nature of justificatory arguments. Crucially, I claim that some prominent philosophical accounts fail to simultaneously satisfy all four requirements.