Jesse Tomalty, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, will present a paper co-written with Kerry Woods. Who are the bearers of human rights? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: all humans. We can add to this the commonsensical thought that human rights are held only by humans. They are, after all, human rights. While seemingly intuitive, this idea of human rights as the rights of all and only humans has proven remarkably difficult to defend.

Within the philosophy of human rights, attempts to justify the scope of human rights as including only humans end up excluding many humans as bearers of human rights, notably infants and adults with severe cognitive impairments. By contrast, attempts to justify the scope of human rights as including all humans struggle to explain why they do not also extend to at least some non-human animals. 

We begin from the premise that the idea of human rights as the rights of all and only humans is worth preserving, and we develop a proposal for justifying this commitment. Our proposal turns on the distinction between status, interests, and obligations as grounds of rights. We argue that human rights are distinctive, even if they are partly grounded in a status shared with non-human animals. On our proposed account, the distinctiveness of human rights comes primarily from the distinctiveness of rights-grounding interests that are shared by all and only humans, regardless of individual differences. We then argue that the scope of human rights is further circumscribed by the distinctiveness of obligations owed to humans.      

This seminar is organised jointly by Human Rights Studies and the Department of Philosophy. Find out more about Jessy Tomalty here.