Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION: THE PROLIFERATION OF HEALTH RIGHTS
The proliferation of human rights raises both philosophical and practical questions. Philosophically, when and under what limits is it appropriate to consider a normative proposition a human right? Practically, what formulation of human rights will guide individuals in a position to bring about change to mobilize resources in ways that will achieve the goals defined by the human right? Those working in the field of human rights tend to favor expanding the normative content of human rights to cover as much as possible to ensure human dignity.1 A preliminary question is, therefore, whether more is better when it comes to enumerating human rights.
The push for the proliferation of human rights has had its detractors, going back at least to the nineteenth century, when Jeremy Bentham famously denounced "natural and imprescriptible rights" contained in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as "rhetorical nonsense-nonsense upon stilts."2 As if that was not enough, Bentham also referred to the formulation of these rights as "mischievous nonsense," "dangerous nonsense," "miserable nonsense," "rueful nonsense," and even referred to the use of "terrorist language" in the Declaration.3 A more recent commentator denounced today's so-called "human rights inflation": "[W]e have a surplus of human rights-and they're all claimed to be equally important and indivisible. Human rights are going nowhere. They've lost their value."4 Political scientist Francis Fukuyama similarly expressed his frustration with the proliferation of rights:
Over the past generation, the rights industry has grown faster than an Internet IPO in the late 1990s. In addition to animal, women's and children's rights, there are gay rights, the rights of the disabled and handicapped, indigenous people's rights, the right to life, the right to die, the rights of the accused, victims' rights, as well as the famous right to periodic vacations . . . . Given this monumental confusion, why do we not . . . abandon talk of rights altogether?5
This Article explores the alleged proliferation of human rights through the example of the expansion of the right to health. It begins with a clarification of the current generally-recognized normative content of the right to health, and continues with a discussion of the new rights that have been proposed either as...