33. Liberty Rights and the Limits of Liberal Democracy 34. Human Rights Without the Human Good A Reply to Jiwei Ci推荐.pdf

33 Liberty Rights and the Limits of Liberal Democracy Jiwei Ci Liberty rights are first among human rights, both in order of invention and in importance usually ascribed. They begin life (or their first life) as liberal rights, rights enjoyed by members of liberal societies, and come to be treated as human rights through extension to the international arena. Thus liberty rights have a dou- ble identity and are doubly ambitious: as liberal rights, they create, legitimate, and intensify the desire characteristic of members of liberal societies for nothing less than some form of self-determination; as human rights, they generalize what origi- nally was a culturally particular desire into a universal human aspiration worthy of the strongest protection. As a committed and precisely for this reason uneasy believer in liberty rights or, more precisely, in many of the things liberty rights are supposed to make possible, I want to see how well liberty rights live up to these two ambitions and what lessons we can draw if they fall short. By considering liberty rights in their double identity, I hope especially to arrive at a critical appraisal of liberty rights as human rights that would be difficult to reach by attending to liberty rights as human rights alone. I. Liberty Rights as Human Rights It seems appropriate to start from what strikes me as a deep contradiction in the con- cept of human rights, especially liberty rights as a subset of human rights. The con- tradiction lies between the universalism and supposed minimalism of human rights, on the one hand, and the fact that human rights—again I have in mind liberty rights in particular—are not necessary conditio