Practical Philosophy Seminar: Jakob Elster

One of the many debates about the justification of human rights concerns the degree to which they are subject to feasibility constraints: Does the fact that a human right cannot be fulfilled for all human beings invalidate its status as a human right? If, for example, holidays with pay or the highest available standard of health cannot be provided to all human beings, can there be a human right to these goods, as international human right law claims there is? The paper will describe this debate and assess some of the main arguments made. Its main purpose is not to solve the feasibility question, but to map the debate and identify which questions need to be solved in order to make sense of the feasibility critique. A core claim the paper makes is that assessing the feasibility critique requires not only that we find the best understanding of the concept of feasibility, but also that we answer a number of "compositional" questions about the relationships between individual claim-rights and human rights.