Human Rights and Republicanism

Republican political theory, with its commitment to a political and personal conception of freedom in terms of the absence of domination, has the potential to revitalize how we think about human rights. From a republican perspective, the aims of the politics of human rights are—in negative terms—to end exploitation, vulnerability, and precarity and—in positive terms—to establish a society of equals in a free political culture. It is suggested here that republican rights should serve as egalitarian levers. This chapter aims to explicate such a republican approach to human rights by outlining a unifying principle for what rights people have, what it is to have rights, or what a human right is, and offering an account of what the point of human rights is. These three aspects of a republican approach to human rights underline the need to attend to the extension of human rights (what rights there are (in the world)), the concept (what we mean by a human right or how we use it), and the rationale for thinking in these terms at all (what the point of human rights is or what kind of work we want human rights to do). An analysis of this kind is inescapably normative.