Redefining Human Rights

Campus Report ^ | May 4, 2009 | Bethany Stotts

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Redefining Human Rights

by: Bethany Stotts, May 04, 2009

When Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen released his book Development as Freedom in 1999, his argument that democratic freedoms had an economic component in the developing world was greeted with acclaim. Now a World Bank employee building upon Sen’s conception of positive and negative freedoms is arguing that the twin discourses of human rights and development need to reach an accord.

“In many instances when policy makers are producing policies in these countries, they pay only lip service to the role of economic freedom in their own development strategy,” said Jean-Pierre Chauffour, author of The Power of Freedom: Uniting Human Rights and Development, at the CATO Institute on April 23.

Chauffour argues that while many developing countries focus on “positive” human rights as embodied by social welfare programs such as housing, education, and health care, “negative” freedoms such as individual liberties and rule of law are a natural prerequisite to such programs.

“Negative rights ...are the freedom from” repression and execution, namely, “the freedom that emerged from the philosophers of the Enlightenment,” he argued. (Some authors and historians dispute this, notably M. Stanton Evans in The Theme is Freedom: The Religious Roots of American Liberty). In contrast, positive rights are “not freedom from but right to, which are claims and an entitlement of society: the right to education, the right to health, to housing, to appearance in public without shame.”

“And the point is that these negative and positive rights at some level are quite inconsistent,” he argued. Chauffour asserted that, since the social programs associated with positive are all dependent on a “common underlying factor” of “income” the resulting discussion revolves around to how generate money.....