In Human Rights Without Foundations, Joseph Raz challenges the traditional philosophical attempt to ground human rights in a single universal moral foundation such as human nature, dignity, or rational agency. Instead of searching for an abstract moral basis for human rights, Raz argues that we should understand them by examining how they function within international political practice.
Raz criticizes what he calls the “traditional doctrine” of human rights, which tries to derive rights directly from fundamental human characteristics. Philosophers such as Alan Gewirth and James Griffin attempt to justify human rights by linking them to essential features of human life like agency or personhood. Raz argues that these approaches fail because they misunderstand the relationship between values and rights and cannot adequately explain why particular rights should count as human rights rather than simply moral goods or political goals.
Instead, Raz proposes a political conception of human rights. According to this view, human rights are best understood as rights whose violation can justify international action against a state, even though states normally enjoy sovereignty over their internal affairs. In other words, human rights are those rights that limit state sovereignty and provide moral grounds for outside intervention in international relations.
Raz further argues that human rights do not need to be universal or foundational in the traditional philosophical sense. Rather, they emerge through a layered process involving individual interests, the duties of governments to protect those interests, and the international community’s authority to respond when states fail to do so.
Ultimately, Raz concludes that human rights are not timeless moral truths grounded in a single principle. Instead, they are norms shaped by the evolving structure of international political and legal institutions.
In Human Rights Without Foundations, Joseph Raz ultimately argues that human rights cannot be grounded in a single universal moral foundation like human nature, dignity, or rationality. Instead, traditional theories fail because they blur the line between what is valuable and what creates enforceable rights, and they cannot explain why only certain rights count as human rights. Raz replaces this with a political conception, where human rights are defined by their role in limiting state sovereignty and justifying international action.
Taken together, his main points show that human rights are: