This book explains the development of human rights as a process of moral improvement in ground level moral and legal practices. This leads to a consideration of the process by which moral and legal practices are improved. The book focuses on moral improvement and then shows how to apply the model of moral improvement to improvements in the law. The book reconstructs moral improvement as a process of making exceptions to status quo moral practices. It introduces a meta-level consequentialist (though not utilitarian) principle, the main principle, as a sufficient condition for an improvement in ... More

This book explains the development of human rights as a process of moral improvement in ground level moral and legal practices. This leads to a consideration of the process by which moral and legal practices are improved. The book focuses on moral improvement and then shows how to apply the model of moral improvement to improvements in the law. The book reconstructs moral improvement as a process of making exceptions to status quo moral practices. It introduces a meta-level consequentialist (though not utilitarian) principle, the main principle, as a sufficient condition for an improvement in a ground-level moral practice. Because the main principle is a meta-level explanatory principle, not itself a part of any ground-level moral practices, it is an indirect consequentialist principle. The rough idea of the main principle is that it endorses a change to the status quo ground-level moral practices as a moral improvement, if, when evaluated both as a substantive practice and a practice of implementation, the change would make the overall system of social practices one that does a better job of equitably promoting life prospects (a probabilistic measure of well-being) than the status quo practices and better than any of the other relevant alternatives to the status quo. The main principle is not utilitarian, because it is sensitive to the distribution of life prospects (well-being). The book uses the main principle to explain why all societies everywhere can improve their ground-level moral and legal practices by guaranteeing the following package of fourteen robust, inalienable, human rights: (1) a right to physical security; (2) a right to physical subsistence; (3) children’s rights to what is necessary for normal physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development; (4) a right to an education, including a moral education; (5) a right to freedom of the press; (6) a right to freedom of thought and expression; (7) a right to freedom of association; (8) liberty rights to a sphere of personal autonomy free from legal paternalism; (9) political rights; (10) economic rights; (11) negative opportunity rights; (12) positive opportunity rights; (13) rights to social insurance; (14) privacy rights. The book explains how the main principle avoids the standard counterexamples thought to be decisive against consequentialist accounts. It compares its account with many of the most influential nonconsequentialist accounts of morality and justice in the philosophical literature.