Abstract:

John Rawls, in The Law of Peoples, defines human rights by their role in setting the limits of tolerance of the behavior of peoples or countries. This paper criticizes Rawls' way of defining human rights. It allows that the role of setting the limits of tolerance may be served by the idea of large-scale violations of some particularly important subset of human rights. But the paper argues that this role is not definitional of what human rights are, and should not be used in deciding which norms are appropriately considered to be human rights.