Why we need needs-based approaches to human rights

WHY WE NEED NEEDS-BASED JUSTIFICATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS RITA FLOYD Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 256 pp., £16.99/$29.95 cloth. James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 360 pp., £17.99/$29.95 paper. Beth A. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 468 pp., £20.99/$29.99 paper. The topic of human rights is easily among the most popular research areas in political science and political theory. Despite the sheer volume of research produced on this issue, there still exists plenty of disagreement on what human rights are and on their foundations. Alone the ostensibly simple claim that we have human rights in virtue of being humans is complicated by the fact that people disagree on what it means to be human. For example, some hold that definitive of human beings is their capacity for acting morally (Hart 1984; Donnelly 2003: 14), for others it is their ability to socialise and cooperate with others (Freeden 1990; Doyal and Gough 1991), and one thinker even claims that it is human rights themselves that make humans human (Booth 2007). These disagreements, however, do not change the fact that human rights exist in practice. And it is for this reason that some scholars explicitly reject the idea that human rights have to be founded on intellectual consensus (Dembour 2010: 6) Yet other human rights scholars go further than this still, and reject the whole idea of grounding human rights in human nature, suggesting instead that ‘human rights are political values that liberal societies choose to adopt’ (Dembour 2010: 3). And yet a third group argues that we have human rights only Journal of International Political Theory, 7(1) 2011, 103–115 DOI: 10.3366/jipt.2011.0008 © Edinburgh University Press 2011 www.eupjournals.com/jipt 103 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd because we talk about them, that is to say, human rights are discursive constructs (Dembour 2010: 4). I want to argue in this review essay that a particular form of justification for human rights – what I, following David Miller (2007) call needs-based justifications – enable the grounding of human rights in something that is both objectively and universally valuable, and that can therefore serve as a potentially consensual basis for enforcing human rights. I make my case by examining three recent books on human rights by some of the foremost thinkers on this issue. Although none of the three explicitly draws on human needs, I argue that each of them would have benefited from recourse to needs-based justifications of human rights. To strengthen my case, I have deliberately chosen three very different approaches to the study of human rights, namely James Griffin’s personhood approach, Beth Simmons’ empirical approach and Charles Beitz’s practical approach.1 Each of these scholars comes to the subject of human rights with different intentions and needs. Much simplified, Griffin is interested in philosophically grounding human rights and in devising a definitive list of what should and should not be a human right. Simmons is interested in questions of compliance; specifically she examines the difference international human rights treaties make to the lives of people. While finally, Beitz is concerned with questions of intervention, and he seeks to ground human rights in how they are practiced in contemporary international relations. The argument is structured as follows. I begin by examining the personhood, the empirical, and the practical approaches in turn, ending each section by pointing to their respective shortcomings. I then introduce needs-based justifications of human rights and I go on to show how a needs-based justification remedies the shortcomings of each of the three approaches. My conclusion is that although human rights and human needs are distinct concepts, they are complimentary and human rights research as a whole would benefit from paying attention to human needs. Three Approaches to Human Rights The Personhood Approach Griffin holds that although human rights are now ubiquitous, there is still insufficient clarity regarding what they are. As a philosopher Griffin considers it his task, indeed his duty, to render the ‘indeterminate’ and nearly ‘criterionless’ concept of human rights determinate (1–19, 203, 210). His starting point is the natural law tradition. He believes that in spite of today’s manifestation of human rights in international law, ‘the idea is still that of a right we have simply in virtue of being human, with no further explanation of what ‘human’ means here’ (13). Griffin aims to render human rights determinate by fleshing out what it means to be human. To this end he develops what he calls the personhood approach 104 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights to human rights. This approach starts from the idea that ‘human life is different from that of other animals’ because humans alone are purposeful agents that choose, assess and act in a way ‘to make what we see as a good life for ourselves’ (32). Contra utilitarians he contends that human standing is valued by many much more than is happiness. Human rights are a testimony to this, as they are protections of our human standing (personhood) as purposeful and normative agents. Grounding human rights in personhood does not mean that anything that contributes to human flourishing or the good life is a human right, but merely that which is needed for human standing. Griffin identifies three high-level human rights, each of which contains within it a large and not fully developed list of lower level human rights. The three principal human rights are autonomy, liberty and minimum provision. ‘Autonomy is self-legislation, deciding one’s own goals in life, choosing one’s own conception of a worthwhile life; liberty is being free to pursue that conception’ (243, emphases added); and minimum provision refers to life and certain supporting goods necessary for being both autonomous and free. Personhood alone, however, does not render human rights sufficiently determinate; human rights are determinate only when they take account of practicalities. Practicalities include availability of resources in a given society, developments of technology and science, and, in contrast to a number of other philosophers, also limitations posed by human nature. ‘Moral deliberation must take place largely on the common-sense level at which it occurs in ordinary life’ (75). Griffin maintains, for example, that there are clear limits to the extent to which humans would sacrifice themselves to save other people, or to which they would, and indeed should, sacrifice their own child in order to save other people’s children. In short, if human rights claims are to have any bearing in practice, they simply cannot be too demanding on individual persons. This is especially important given that Griffin holds that ‘A human right is a claim of all human agents against all other human agents’ (177). While Griffin’s idea of what it means to be human is internally consistent, his account of rights is not. For example, at one point Griffin laments that ‘too often the form of argument for a human right, or a right of any kind is to identify a value . . . and then conclude that there is a right that protects it. But that is a blatant non sequitur’ (225). The problem is that Griffin can be accused of the very same mistake. Thus he argues: ‘my account . . . grounds human rights . . . directly in a central range of substantive values, the values of personhood’ and ‘personhood [in turn] gives us a right to security of person’ (34, 37). With that, as Joseph Raz rightly observes, Griffin follows others in the natural law tradition, by failing ‘to show that value establishes rights’. His logic is the same as saying ‘if the love of my children is the most important thing to me then I have a right to it’ (Raz 2010: 325). The inability to ground rights is not the only shortcoming of Griffin’s approach; another is their relation to their actual practice. Griffin argues, for 105 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd instance, that there are two general ways for philosophers to supply an account of human rights. The first is top-down whereby ‘one starts with an overarching principle, or principles, or an authoritative decision procedure . . . from which human rights can be derived’ (29). The second is bottom-up, whereby ‘one starts with human rights as used in our actual social life by politicians, lawyers, social campaigners, as well as theorists of various sorts, and then sees what higher principles one must resort to in order to explain their moral weight’ (29). Griffin claims that his is a bottom-up approach, because ‘we need some understanding of what human rights are independent of the principle or principles from which they are said to be derivable, and their social use is the most likely source’ (29). Yet the only thing in Griffin’s approach that has some bearing on reality is the requirement of practicalities for human rights claims. Although this requirement does a useful job in limiting human rights, practicalities alone do not make for a bottom-up approach. The three principal human rights are superimposed by Griffin as being valuable; they bear no resemblance to how human rights are practiced, but rather are a collection of abstract principles whereby human rights are closely connected to a particular conception of the good life. (cf. Raz 2010: 324; Beitz 2009: 7 fn. 12, 59–68). In evidence of my claim that the personhood approach is removed from the practice of human rights, consider further here that under this approach human rights no longer apply to all human beings but rather to normative agents only. While this does not mean that nonagents are outside of morality (after all there are other moral concepts than rights alone, for example, justice, fairness and well-being), the suggested notion does directly contradict the practice of human rights. Thus, one of the key groups of non-agents indentified by Griffin are children, despite the fact that existing human rights treaties – the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Optional Protocol Relating to Children in Armed Conflict (OPCAC) – clearly specify children as rights bearers, plus there is compelling evidence that both treaties have had positive consequences for the lives of children (Simmons 2009: 307–48). The Empirical Approach Human rights treaties are Beth Simmons’ subject in Mobilizing for Human Rights. In contrast to, for example, realist International Relations theorists, who hold that ‘treaties have little purchase over government behaviour because they are not likely to be meaningfully enforced’, she argues that the real effect of treaties can only be known if we contemplate the domestic effects of international treaties (116). The assumptions of realists are questionable, at the least, simply because if there were no costs attached to treaties, why is it that states often take long periods of time before they ratify a particular treaty? Hence, Simmons poses the question: ‘Why do governments voluntarily 106 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights hand over the figurative “whips” . . . that then might be used by individuals, groups, courts, and peers to criticise their own politics and practices?’ (58). By way of an answer she proposes that with regards to treaty ratification the behaviour of governments falls into one of three categories: 1) sincere ratifiers, ‘those that value the content of the treaty and anticipate compliance’; 2) false negatives, ‘those that may be committed in principle but nonetheless fail to ratify’; 3) strategic ratifiers, those that ratify the treaty for reasons ulterior to their regard for the content of the treaty. Such alternative reasons could be peer pressure (strongest when other countries in the region have ratified the treaty), short-term benefits such as good press, and/or an improved image at home and abroad. In a further step she proposes that ratification is rationally expressive, meaning that it reflects a ‘government’s preferences and practices, subject to the potential net costs that ratification is expected to involve’ (64, emphasis added). The latter provides valuable insights into what types of government (democratic, autocratic, and so on) are most likely to behave in which of the three ways discussed above. In brief, she finds that although Western democracies are the natural allies of human rights and most likely to be sincere ratifiers, high legal integration costs (for example, those stemming from the nature of the legal system) can result in non-ratification (false negatives). Strategic ratification, in turn, is almost exclusively the behaviour of non-democracies, who are not as accountable to their people as democratic leaders. Whatever the reason for ratification, the important point is that ratification is not costless. Not only do treaties hold within them agenda-setting potential for executives, but also ‘[t]hey can become powerful instruments in the hands of rights claimants to hold governments to their promised behaviour’ (111). Simmons suggests two ways in which this can happen: 1) litigation in that individuals and groups can and increasingly do use courts and treaty commitments to hold government’s accountable; 2) mobilisation in which individuals and groups of people organise in support of the established rights (NGOs in particular are a good example). Mobilisation is easily the more interesting strategy because unlike litigation, whose success depends on the prior existence of structural means (such as the physical existence of courts), the success of mobilisation primarily depends on the probability of succeeding with a given demand in a given society. The latter has important consequences for the types of regime in which mobilisation is highest. Simmons demonstrates, for instance, that rights mobilisation is low in autocracies, because people tend to be afraid of the long term consequences. It is also low in stable democracies, as here human rights are mostly satisfied by existing legislation, and there is little of added value to be gained from mobilisation. Mobilisation is highest though in partially democratic transition countries. Here ‘individuals have both the motive and the means realistically to press their governments to take international human rights treaties seriously’ (153). 107 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd Simmons substantiates these findings through the use of comprehensive statistical analysis. She suggests that her finding – that all six major human rights treaties2 have empowered those in transition countries to turn their lives around for the better by holding their own governments accountable for their human rights record – brings with it the important policy advice that human rights treaties are a more powerful tool for improving lives than humanitarian intervention, economic sanctions and even untailored development programmes. Simmons’ policy advice is, however, unnecessarily weakened because it is not self-evident why human rights would unequivocally improve the world, let alone compare favourably with other ideals. To make this argument convincing I will suggest below Simmons would have had to show what well-being is and how human rights relate to well-being. The Practical Approach Charles Beitz’s starting point in the development of his practical approach to human rights is the idea that a theory of human rights must take account of human rights as an ‘emergent political practice’ (xii). He believes that we can get at the meaning of human rights only if we look at the function they fulfil in global political life. Beitz holds that the function of human rights can only be understood within the context of international society. Hence, Beitz adopts a position similar to that which International Relations English School theorists have been claiming for some time (see, for example, Donnelly 1998: 21; Dunne 2001: 76; Buzan 2004: 29; Hurrell 2007: 143). Beitz argues that human rights set limits to states’ sovereignty. ‘Human rights are requirements whose object is to protect urgent individual interests against certain predictable dangers (“standard threats”) to which they are vulnerable under typical circumstances of life in a modern world order composed of states’ (109). The maintenance of human rights is in the first instance the responsibility of states. If a government violates human rights by failing to uphold them, they become matters of international concern. Importantly, however, in Beitz’s functional model outside agents do not have conclusory reasons to act on human rights violations but merely pro tanto reasons, which means that outside agents do not have a categorical duty to act on human rights failures in other countries. Once he has worked out the function of human rights as well as the nature of the corresponding duty, Beitz moves on to the content of human rights. He argues that in order for something to count as a human right it must satisfy three conditions: 1) the interests it seeks to protect are ‘intersubjectively recognizable as important or urgent’; 2) ‘that it would be advantageous to protect the underlying interest by means of legal or policy instruments available to the state’ (139); and 3) it must be shown that the issue or area of state failure is a suitable object for international concern. 108 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights Especially when compared to Griffin’s tightly argued framework, Beitz’s proposal seems somewhat vague. Not only are we left without a list of concrete human rights, but also when he comes to define ‘urgent individual interests’ – a key element in his definition of human rights – he maintains that ‘an urgent interest is not necessarily an interest possessed by everyone or desired by everyone’ (110). Similarly he insists that human rights are a social phenomenon and that ‘it is not likely that the members of the discursive community that sustains the practice will be unanimous about its salient elements’ (106). He insists on these components because he wants to be able to theoretically capture the evolving and oftentimes contradictory practice of human rights. Above all else he does not want to superimpose an arbitrary normative standard that human rights should protect, nor is he interested in identifying a moral minimum that everyone can agree too. As Miller has argued such a practical approach to human rights is initially very appealing because ‘it tells us to put aside all the worries about the allegedly sectarian character of human rights. Since human rights can be shown to work, in the sense that they form the basis for an ever-growing international practice . . . why worry too much about their philosophical foundations?’ (Miller 2007: 69). The problem is, as Miller further argues, that this approach works only ‘if the practice really is in good order, in the sense of there being a widespread, unforced agreement to implement a set of human rights’ (2007: 170). This is not the case. Not only does the practice of human rights (often) differ from what international law prescribes, but also and as Simmons shows, international treaties are not unanimously endorsed and as such cannot authoritatively inform a theory of human rights that holds for everyone, everywhere and at all times. If, in turn, we were to take the practice itself as authoritative then we are potentially in even deeper trouble. And so, while Beitz’s pro tanto reasons clause might capture what goes on in practice, it effectively allows states to walk away from human rights obligations altogether. Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights and the Three Approaches In the following I will argue that these problems in Beitz’s approach could be solved by focusing on a needs-based justification for human rights. Interestingly, and although Beitz does not acknowledge it, his practical approach relies precisely on this universally applicable justification for human rights. That Beitz draws on needs-based justifications for human rights is evident from his discussion of three different cases: anti-poverty rights (rights to subsistence), political rights (the right to democracy), and human rights for women. Before I will discuss each of these three in turn, however, let me first discuss what I mean by needs-based justifications of human rights. 109 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd The use of human needs as the basis of rights originates from within development studies and development economics, where they serve as an important marker for poverty reduction and human development. Ever since the launch of Amartya Sen’s influential capability approach it is now generally accepted that poverty is a multidimensional concept that cannot be measured by income generation alone. Instead, poverty is the ‘deprivation of basic capabilities . . . reflected in premature mortality, significant undernourishment (especially in children), persistent morbidity, widespread illiteracy and other failures’ (Sen 1999: 20). In short, poverty is tantamount to human ill-being. Objective human well-being, in turn, is distinct from a person’s subjective level of ‘happiness’ or ‘life satisfaction’ as popularised by psychologists. In Sen’s terminology objective human well-being refers to a person’s freedom (capabilities) that leave them in a position to achieve ‘valuable beings and doings’ (functionings) (Alkire 2002: 2). Human needs theorists spell out the nature of these capabilities. Some needs theorists define human needs negatively as what is needed to avoid serious harm, while others define human needs positively and focus on what is needed for humans to flourish or achieve objective human well-being. Given that all human beings have the same capacity for being harmed or to flourish, needs are objectively valuable, yet the exact lists of human needs offered by human needs theorists differs slightely due to varying conceptions of harm and flourishing. As an example of how harm has been conceptualised by needs theorists consider Doyal and Gough’s approach, which argues that a person is harmed when their pursuit of goals that are deemed of value to them is inhibited, provided of course that those pursuits and goals do not harm anyone else (Doyal and Gough 1991: 50). For Miller, in turn, ‘a person is harmed when she is unable to live a minimally decent life in the society to which she belongs’ (Miller 2007: 181). Despite these differences needs refer almost always to basic needs only and certainly never to a person’s wants. The problem with human needs is that they are unable to produce duties in others, which is to say they are not easily motivated. To circumvent this problem many human needs theorists connect human needs to human rights (Gasper 2007: 51–2). The appeal of human needs is that they can simultaneously ground human rights in universally and objectively valuable facts while also setting limits to the concept. Thus something qualifies as a human right only if it can be shown that having that right fulfils human needs (Miller 2007: 179). Conceived in this way then human rights protect right-holders from being harmed. Let me now turn to Beitz’s three hard cases of human rights and how they implicitly rely on human needs. According to Beitz poverty qualifies for the status of human right because: a) ‘the interests protected by the rights are among the most uncontroversially urgent of all human interests and the least open to variation by culture’, and b) poor societies fail to provide their people with adequate subsistence (163). From here he goes on to show at some length that 110 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights the reasons outside agents (rich countries) hold to alleviate poverty in poor countries depend on the relationships (current or historical) that exist between countries. Reasons for action include beneficence, the avoidance of harm, and compensations for historical behaviour. From this Beitz concludes that ‘there are anti-poverty rights even if there is no single distinctive reason or category of reasons for action that explains why eligible agents should contribute to the relief of severe poverty wherever it occurs’ (173). It is noteworthy, however, that Beitz does not allow for pro tanto reasons to outweigh the need for action, which is to say, while there may be no single reason why agents should act, the need for action is bound up with the universal recognition of subsistence as an urgent value in need of protection. In Beitz’s own words: ‘any value counted as a human right should be such that a government’s failure to respect it could give rise to reasons for external agents to act in its defense’ (127). In short, what matters for action is not, in the first instance, the reasons any one state might hold, but recognition of the importance of the need for subsistence. Moving on to political rights, Beitz discusses here whether there should be a right to democracy as has been suggested by international law. He explains that although human well-being in stable democracies is highest due to unrivalled levels of physical and material security, the guarantee of personal autonomy and political equality, and also the recognition of individual preferences, empirical evidence suggests that the same is not necessarily true for transition democracies, many of which are only formally democratic. If then democratisation is forced on countries as a matter of human rights this may not have the desired positive outcomes. In the place of a right to democracy he proposes that there should be a right to self-determination. The latter is not to be confused with self-rule; instead it refers to a society where, following Joshua Cohen, three conditions are being met: ‘political decisions result from and are accountable to a process in which everyone’s interests are represented, there are rights of dissent for all, and public officials explain their decisions in terms of a widely held conception of the common good’ (181). According to Beitz, in such a regime, the shortfall from not having democratic governance would be minimal. ‘Such a society acknowledges its people’s fundamental interests in personal and material security and provides access to adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, and education for all’, while a common-good conception of justice renders political inequality insignificant (183). In other words, much of the requirement for self-determination is its capacity to satisfy basic human needs. Finally, Beitz discusses the issue of whether there should be special human rights for women. He argues that because women are subject to certain genderspecific threats they are entitled to certain special human rights concerning primarily reproduction. On closer inspection, however, it emerges that these special rights are rather more ordinary as all they do is protect women’s physical security, material security and autonomy. ‘The importance of these interests seems to be perfectly general. We see this by considering that their importance 111 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd would be conceded in any culture if the beneficiaries of the protections were men’ (191). In short, quite unlike his categorisation of urgent human interest suggests, human interests are in fact universally valuable. They concern the basic human needs of physical health, material security and autonomy of all people everywhere. My suggestion that Beitz’s defence of these three rights implicitly relies upon needs-based justifications of human rights is not, however, intended to undermine or diminish Beitz’s practical approach; all I mean to say is that his important approach would be strengthened if he made this connection more explicit. Thus, if we allow for a formulation of Beitz’s approach where his vague concept of ‘urgent individual interests’ is replaced with basic human needs we can specify more easily than Beitz, just when a state’s failure to provide for basic human needs becomes a matter for international action. And, while we can accept that states may well have pro tanto reasons that would prevent them from acting on human rights violations, needs-based justifications for human rights trump these reasons, necessitating outside agents to alleviate human rights violations abroad. The bottom line is that even proponents of practical approaches to human rights cannot simply be content with offering an analytical theory of how human rights work. Not only is the practice of human rights too fragmented for such a theory to be feasible, but also, if human rights are to function as a compelling moral force against state-based violence, we need to aim for convergence on universally recognisable goods in need of protection. I have argued so far that needs-based justifications of human rights refine the practical approach suggested by Charles Beitz. I will continue with suggesting that such justifications also go some way towards remedying some of the shortcomings of Griffin’s and Simmons’ theses as well. One of the shortcomings of Griffin’s thesis is that he fails to adequately ground his list of human rights as ‘claims rights’, which is the form of right chosen by him. A needs-based justification for human rights would have allowed him to ground human rights effectively. Unlike values needs are generally accepted as legitimate objects for claims rights, although this is not to suggest that everyone agrees that human needs are determinable. The fact though that Griffin does not do this is especially noteworthy given that he too appears to see value in needs-based justifications. Thus at one point in the book he argues that it is possible to regard the personhood approach as ‘a kind of need account: what is needed to function as a normative agent’ (90). What is more, a list of needs of functionings of normative agents, together with a list specifying the needs of children and how these are being met outside of a rights framework, would have rendered Griffin’s approach considerably less ‘top-down’ and more ‘bottom-up’, and in the process made it more convincing. Moving on to Simmons’ thesis, I would like to suggest that recourse to needsbased justifications of human rights would have further strengthened Simmons’ 112 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Needs-Based Justifications of Human Rights findings, and there are also reasons to believe that Simmons herself would endorse these approaches. Starting with the second point, it must first of all be noted that Simmons’ interest in international treaties ultimately springs from a concern with human well-being. Her rationale for conducting her elaborate empirical study is nothing less than a desire to disclose ‘How and why the turn toward the international legalization of human rights has taken place, and what this means for crucial aspects of the human condition’ (3). The second thing to note is that Simmons is not only very able in quantitative research methods, but also that she is quite obviously convinced by their explanatory power. While we already know that human needs are about human well-being, I have not yet mentioned that many needs theorists rely on statistical data to examine the extent of needs satisfaction across societies (see, for example, Doyal and Gough 1991; Gough 2000: 1–65; Comim et al. 2008). The fact that needs-based justifications of human rights both employ a research method after Simmons’ own heart, whilst also being concerned with well-being, leaves me to conclude that out of the many philosophical justifications available, she might be most inclined to endorse this one. While this is of course purely speculative, it is also true that human needs approaches to well-being would have strengthened Simmons’ case beyond where it presently stands. In effect she aims to show that wellbeing is improved by international human rights treaties, and yet, because she does not conceptualise well-being she fails to measure the exact extent of this improvement. Reference to the satisfaction of human needs would have allowed her to do just that, thus rendering her policy advice even more acute. Conclusion My suggestion that needs-based justifications of human rights speak to the three theses discussed here is important, I contend, beyond the arguments proposed by Griffin, Simmons and Beitz because it suggests that human rights and human needs are best thought of as complimentary concepts. Thus, unless theories of human needs are complimented by human rights they cannot (easily) be realised, because unlike ‘rights’, ‘needs’ do not produce duties. Without the capacity to produce obligations in others, the quest for needs fulfilment by needs theorists is likely to remain fruitless, which is why many needs theorists have reverted to linking human needs to the concept of human rights. The big weakness of human rights, in turn, is with their justification. Unless human rights are grounded in something that is both universal and objectively valuable, they are not easily translated from theory into practice. For example, in the absence of sound foundations it is not clear what should be done if human rights clash. This is where human needs come in. Not only do they specify what is needed for humans everywhere to achieve objective human well-being, but also they limit the sometimes limitless concept of human rights in useful ways 113 Downloaded from ipt.sagepub.com at University of Birmingham on March 27, 2015 Rita Floyd because something qualifies as a right only if it can be shown to satisfy a human need. To conclude, neither one of the two concepts is in any sense ‘better’ than the other, instead they are better off together. Human needs give foundation to human rights, while so grounded human rights oblige states and/or individuals to act on human needs. This finding combined with the fact that human needs speak to all three books reviewed here suggests that attention to human needs is a step in the right direction for human rights research more generally. Acknowledgments The author is grateful to Jonathan Floyd for repeatedly discussing the arguments presented in this review essay. The author would further like to thank Stuart Croft for reading an earlier version of this piece. All faults remain the author’s. Notes 1 2 While both Griffin and Beitz use these labels, the label for Simmons’ approach is my own. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC). 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