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Being Social
Being Social
The Philosophy of Social Human Rights
Edited by
KIMBERLEY BROWNLEE,
DAVID JENKINS,
AND
ADAM NEAL
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal
1. Interlocking Rights, Layered Protections: Varieties of
Justifications for Social Rights 18
Henry Shue
2. A Human Right to Relationships? 31
Stephanie Collins
3. A Right to Opportunities for Meaningful Relationships 52
Alexandra Couto
4. The Right to Participate in the Life of the Society 71
Kimberley Brownlee
5. What Becomes of the Right to Marry? Disestablishment and
the Value of Marriage 92
Jenny Brown
6. Do Older People Have a Right to Be Loved? 110
S. Matthew Liao
7. Social Rights at Work 127
Jesse Tomalty
8. Fair Equality of Opportunity, Social Relationships, and Epistemic
Advantage 144
Chiara Cordelli
9. Communication and Rights 171
Rowan Cruft
10. The (Social) Right to the City 188
David Jenkins
11. Rights to Belong and Rights to be Left Alone? Claims to Caring
Relationships and their Limits 211
Elizabeth Brake
vi 
12. The Role of Solitude in the Politics of Sociability 234

Anca Gheaus
13. Normative Disorientation and a Limitation of Human Rights 252
Simon James Hope
14. Four Types of Anti-Loneliness Policies 274
Bouke de Vries
Epilogue: Achieving Adequate Social Access 287
James Nickel and Kimberley Brownlee
Index 303
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our sincere thanks to the UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council for a two-year grant, which enabled us to build an international network
of human rights theorists to explore the neglected domain of social rights.
Members of this network contributed to a conference and a research retreat on
Social Human Rights held at the University of Warwick in 2019 and to this
collection of essays. For her invaluable assistance in administering the AHRC
project, we thank Clare Simpson.
We are equally grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research
Project grant (2017–2021) which funded the positions of two of the editors, and
provided a year of research leave for the third, thereby enabling us to pursue this
project. We also wish to thank the University of Warwick Philosophy Department
administrators who, alongside Clare Simpson, ensured the smooth running of our
project activities: Emily Hargreaves, Victoria Cox, and Sarah Taylor. We also
thank our project advisors: David Archard, Elizabeth Brake, Matthew Clayton,
Philip Cook, Anca Gheaus, Christoph Hoerl, Andrew Mason, James Nickel, Felix
Pinkert, and Pamela Qualter.
We are grateful to various learned societies and academic bodies that contrib-
uted to funding the Social Rights conference and retreat including the Society for
Applied Philosophy, the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society, the Analysis
Trust, the Warwick Public Engagement Fund, and the Warwick Institute for
Advanced Studies. We are also grateful to the scholars, policymakers, and rights
advocates who shared their expertise at the retreat including Baroness Ruth Lister,
Pamela Qualter, Charles Walton, Bethan Jinkinson, Clare Wightman, Mel Smith,
Andrew Neilson, Sharifah Sekalala, Andrew Williams, James Harrison, and
Elizabeth Barry. We also thank Elizabeth Ashford, Clare Chambers, and Felix
Pinkert for their contributions.
We are very grateful to two anonymous readers who provided invaluable
feedback on the chapters in this volume. We thank Kartik Upadhyaya, Simon
Gansinger, and Kelsey Vicars for their research assistance. We also thank Kelsey
for compiling the index and assisting with proofreading the final manuscript. We
thank Peter Momtchiloff, Emma Varley, and the team at Oxford University Press
for their support and editorial work. Finally, we thank all of the contributors to
this volume for taking up the challenge to reflect on the nature and value of social
human rights.
Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, Adam Neal
April 2022
List of Contributors
Elizabeth Brake is a Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. She is the author of

Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012),
co-editor of Philosophical Foundations of Children’s and Family Law (Oxford University
Press, 2018), and editor of After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships (Oxford
University Press, 2016). She is currently writing on the topic of wrongs and harms
distinctive to intimate relationships.
Jenny Brown completed her PhD in Political Theory at University College London. She
also holds an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and a BA in
Politics and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the
parameters of a just regime of legally established marriage.
Kimberley Brownlee holds a Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political and Social
Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her current work focuses on social rights,
loneliness, belonging, and freedom of association. She is the author of Being Sure of Each
Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford University Press, 2020) and
Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press,
2012), and co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Wiley, 2016)
and Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her

current research focuses on social ontology. Her books include The Core of Care Ethics
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for
Individuals (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Chiara Cordelli is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton
University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR Political Theory Prize, and the
co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Alexandra Couto is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. She holds an MPhil
and DPhil in political theory from the University of Oxford. She previously taught at the
University of Warwick and held research positions at the University of Vienna and
University of Oslo. Her recent research has focused on the ethics of forgiveness, luck
egalitarianism, and issues relating to innocently benefitting from injustices.
Rowan Cruft is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His research focuses
on the nature and justification of rights and duties, and their role in shaping a democratic
public sphere. He is the author of Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual (Oxford
University Press, 2019), co-editor of Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford
University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Crime Punishment, and Responsibility: The
Jurisprudence of Antony Duff (Oxford University Press, 2011).
   ix
Bouke de Vries is a Research Fellow at the University of Zurich working on issues of

loneliness and sociability, among other topics. His research is supported by an Ambizione
grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Previously, he was a research fellow at
Umea University where his research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research
Council.
Anca Gheaus is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the Central
European University in Vienna. Most of her work concerns justice, especially justice in
childrearing and gender justice. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the
Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2019) and is writing a monograph on
child-centred childrearing.
Simon James Hope is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Stirling.
His current work focuses on two areas: the importance of Kant’s distinction between
perfect/imperfect duties; and ways in which the history of colonization impacts
upon what it could mean to do political philosophy. The latter interest arises from his
participation in the UK/Ghana/Nigeria Domesticating Global Justice network, and his
engagement with Māori political argument in the country of his birth, Aotearoa, New
Zealand.
David Jenkins is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Otago, Aotearoa, New
Zealand. Between 2017 and 2020, he was a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Researcher at the
University of Warwick, and before that the Krzysztof Michalski Junior Visiting Fellow at
the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He has published work on uncondi-
tional basic income, the politics of the public space in India, homelessness, James Baldwin
and recognition, homelessness, structural injustice, and work.
S. Matthew Liao is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Arthur Zitrin Professor of
Bioethics at New York University. He is the author of The Right to be Loved (Oxford
University Press, 2015), editor of The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University
Press, 2020) and of Moral Brains (Oxford University Press, 2016), and co-editor of
Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015), and of
Current Controversies in Bioethics (Routledge 2016).
Adam Neal is a Leverhulme Trust-funded doctoral student in Philosophy at the University
of Warwick. His research concerns the social and interpersonal implications of poverty and
the ethical implications arising from the harms of loneliness and social isolation. He has co-
authored forthcoming work on different conceptions of a neighbour.
James Nickel is Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at the University of Miami. His
areas of work include human rights law and theory, political philosophy, philosophy of law,
and constitutional law. Nickel is the author of Making Sense of Human Rights (Blackwell
1987, heavily revised 2nd ed. 2006) and of more than 70 articles in philosophy and law
journals including the Columbia Law Review, Ethics, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, and Yale Journal of International Law.
Henry Shue is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, University
of Oxford. His books include Basic Rights (Princeton University Press, [1980] 2020),
Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford University Press, 2014), Fighting
x   
Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War (Oxford University Press, 2016), and The
Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right
Now (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Jesse Tomalty is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Her research focuses on normative and conceptual questions about global justice and
human rights. She has published articles on a range of themes including socio-economic
human rights, duties to assist the global poor, the nature of human rights, and the ethics of
immigration. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of
Human Rights.
Introduction
Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal
Certain rights are essential to a minimally decent human life because, when these
rights go unmet, human life becomes unbearable. This pioneering collection of
original essays explores the social dimensions of that minimum. The essays
investigate the nature and force of our interests in decent human contact,
acknowledgement, social inclusion, connection, relationship, intimacy, and
shared ways of living as well as our competing interests in solitude and associative
freedom. The category of human rights which encompasses these various inter-
personal and social interests is called social rights. The essays subject both
enumerated social human rights and proposed social human rights to philosoph-
ical scrutiny and probe the conceptual, normative, and practical implications of
taking social human rights seriously.
The human rights that protect our interests in shelter, food, health, education,
culture, and community have long been seen as the poor cousins or even false
relations of the human rights that protect our interests in physical safety, due
process, political participation, and freedom of movement, speech, and belief.
Indeed, even though many of our socio-economic rights are enumerated in key
international agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and
the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR),
some thinkers maintain that these rights are of a different ‘logical category’ from
the paradigms of civil and political rights, and the attempt to incorporate socio-
economic interests within the respectable concept of human rights has left it
muddied, obscured, and debilitated (Cranston 1967). Some thinkers hold that
access to education, food, health services, work, and culture is best thought of as a
desirable goal, or a liberal aspiration, rather than as things to which we can have
human rights (Williams 2005: 64; Beetham 1995; Geuss 2001: 138ff). The reasons
given for questioning the credibility of such rights include that they are simply
unclaimable or, if claimable, are overly demanding (O’Neill 2005; Collins 2016;
Tomalty 2014); that they are about the wrong kinds of things because human
rights are meant to protect us from oppression and not to secure for us basic
material and social goods; and that even if socio-economic rights are about the
Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal, Introduction In: Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights.
Edited by: Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal, Oxford University Press. © Kimberley Brownlee,
David Jenkins, and Adam Neal 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871194.003.0001
2  
correct kinds of things, many of them secure far more than the brute moral
minimum that is the proper purview of human rights (Ignatieff 2001; Cohen 2004).
In 1977, Karel Vašák branded socio-economic rights as ‘second generation’
rights, a very stubborn and unfortunate mislabelling that both misrepresents their
long history—which includes their figuring in some versions of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man (Walton 2019)—and implies that they are
lexically inferior to so-called ‘first generation’ civil and political rights.¹ That
debatable ranking is reflected in the different levels of urgency expressed in the
two International Covenants. The ICCPR—the Covenant that enumerates civil
and political rights—commits state parties to a demanding standard, specifically
that they respect and ensure to all persons subject to their jurisdiction the rights
recognized in that Covenant; states commit to adopting the laws and other
measures necessary to give effect to civil and political rights (Articles 2.1 and 2.2).
By contrast, the ICESCR—the Covenant that enumerates economic, social, and
cultural rights—commits state parties to a modest, progressive-realization stand-
ard, specifically that they ‘take steps, individually and through international
assistance and co-operation . . . to the maximum of [their] available resources,
with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized
in the present Covenant’ (Article 2.1). Whereas the ICCPR insists on implemen-
tation here and now, the ICESCR expresses no such insistence.
Significant inroads have been made over the past 30 years to defend the
credentials of our economic-welfare or material rights (Nickel 2005; Pogge 2008;
Pogge et al. 2007; Sen 1987, 1992, 1999). Comparatively few human rights scholars
still question either the right to be free from poverty or the rights to education and
health (narrowly construed); and most human rights scholars and institutions
acknowledge the truth of Henry Shue’s powerful observation that all human rights
make both negative and positive demands of duty-bearers which can require
significant resources (2020: ch. 2). In other words, we cannot divide human rights
neatly into so-called liberty rights and welfare rights: all human rights have a
welfare element that requires positive action from duty-bearers. And, many so-
called welfare rights, such as education and health, are the foundations upon
which liberty is meaningfully exercised.
Shue’s seminal contributions to human rights debates have shown just how
vital specific rights such as subsistence and security are to the realization of less-
contested rights such as due process, political participation, and free thought
(Shue 2020). Without adequate nourishing food, potable water, physical security,
and decent shelter, we will struggle, if not fail, to exercise any rights requiring the
exercise of clear thought given the mental and physical deterioration and risk of
¹ The ‘generational’ typology of human rights was introduced by Karel Vašák in 1977 following a
statement by the then Director General of UNESCO, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, that it was necessary to
formulate the ‘third generation’ of human rights (i.e. rights of solidarity).
 3
early death that our deprived situation will produce. To put it bluntly, due process,
free speech, and political participation are of little use to us when we are on the
brink of starvation.² In view of the foundational role that rights to security and
subsistence play in realizing other rights, Shue describes these rights as basic rights.
The argumentative inroads that human rights theorists have made on behalf of
economic-welfare or material rights, whether or not theorists regard them as basic
in Shue’s sense, have not yet been systematically made on behalf of our social
human rights. This collection takes a first step towards remedying that neglect.
Shue, for his own part, had not explored prior to the publication of this collection
the vital role that our social connections play, particularly in childhood, in
securing our other human rights.³ In his chapter here (Chapter 1), Shue makes a
notable contribution to human rights debates by expanding his conception of
basic rights to include our interests in social inclusion. He utilizes Elizabeth
Ashford’s method of identifying a basic right, i.e. would a person forgo any
other right to secure the right in question (Ashford 2015),⁴ and he draws on
empirical literature to show that opportunities for social contact, inclusion, and
enculturation are vital for the development and maintenance of our cognitive
capacities. Indeed, without the development of such capacities in childhood, the
very concept of personhood is threatened. For this reason, Shue says that the right
to have adequate social opportunities during childhood is ‘more basic than basic’
(Chapter 1). He submits that any guardian acting on behalf of someone threatened
with the loss of such opportunities would surely sacrifice any number of civil and
political rights to avoid it. That said, development is not more important
than maintenance. Each is as fundamental an interest as there can be. Together,
² There are other rights which are important to the exercise of most rights but which Shue does not
classify as basic, including primary education. Without primary education, we are unlikely to develop
the skills which will enable us to ‘participate effectively in a free society’ (ICESCR, Article 13.1).
Indeed, without adequate education, we are unlikely even to know either what our rights are or how to
claim them.
³ In his seminal work, Basic Rights, Shue does observe that ‘The infant and the aged do not need to
be assaulted in order to be deprived of health, life, or the capacity to enjoy active rights. The classic
liberal’s main prescription for the good life—do not interfere with thy neighbor—is the only poison
they need. To be helpless they need only to be left alone’ (2020: 19). However, what he has in mind here
is the instrumental value of social connections to ensure children’s and older people’s access to security
and subsistence, not their needs for social connection in its own right independent of its instrumental
value. See S. Matthew Liao’s chapter in this collection for a discussion of the social needs of older
people.
⁴ Ashford writes that ‘The core threat that destitution poses to the enjoyment of other rights is
grounded in the severity of the threat to persons’ basic interests and most important ends posed by
inadequate subsistence. The severity of this threat has two central implications. First, inadequate
subsistence is unsustainable. Second, it is liable to be even worse than the option of forgoing any
other right. It follows that whenever forgoing another right is the only available opportunity for
obtaining adequate subsistence, the right-holder is liable to be driven to forgo that right, because
continuing inadequate subsistence is liable to be the most unsustainable option of all . . . [T]he threat to
persons’ basic interests and core ends posed by inadequate subsistence is so severe that it is liable to
outweigh even the harm posed by forgoing negative human rights.’ (2015: 526)
4  
our development and maintenance interests in social inclusion comprise a

double-barrelled basic right.
The general theoretical neglect of social human rights to date is mirrored in
human rights practice. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the 2015 UN Sustainable
Development Goals do not include a goal specifically related to our interpersonal,
social interests, and none of the 17 Goals have targets explicitly related to social
interests, though various indicators of progress gesture toward social integration
and related values.⁵ Much attention is paid within the Goals to our basic material
interests, which attests to the growing awareness of the importance of these
interests, but also confirms that our social rights have been the poorest of the
poor cousins.
The relative neglect of social rights within the 2015 Sustainable Development
Goals is more surprising than the sidelining of these rights within the human
rights tradition that grew during the second half of the twentieth century. This is
because, over the past few decades, with social psychology and social neuroscience
taking the lead, we have become more aware of both the fundamental importance
of our social interests (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008; Williams 2009) and the extent
to which our social, political, and material interests are intertwined. A person with
insufficient material and temporal resources cannot be hospitable to others,
cannot be a hands-on caregiver, and cannot meet their own needs or their
dependants’ needs for social contact and community. This has ramifications not
only for their social interests, but also for their material and political interests: a
person who must dedicate most of their time to working and commuting, or who
lacks the money to join in social or political activities, will be marginalized within
their community and more vulnerable to compounding and corrosive forms of
disadvantage and injustice (Cordelli 2015; Jenkins 2020; Rose 2016: ch. 5; de-Shalit
and Wolff 2007). Lacking adequate material resources can also be a source of shame
for people, especially when this prevents them from clothing and presenting them-
selves in a way that is deemed to be socially acceptable by society. This kind of shame
can lead those who suffer from it to isolate themselves (Sen 2000; OPHI 2021;
Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness 2015), which further harms their social,
material, and political interests. As this indicates, social rights protect us not only
from ways that we can be harmed as social beings, but also from other forms of
disadvantage and harm.
Sociality and core social interests have received attention within related con-
ceptual frameworks such as the capability approach, advanced most famously by
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, which offers a less individualistic, but
nonetheless human-rights-friendly vehicle with which to defend core social inter-
ests, including our needs for shared ways of life and shared ethical outlooks,
⁵ The two goals that come closest to identifying social needs are ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’ and
‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’, but their targets do not highlight social needs.
 5
emphasizing as it does the vital importance of both individuals and groups having
meaningful freedoms and opportunities to realize core functionings, such as those
related to sociality.⁶ Nussbaum identifies ten central capabilities which all dem-
ocracies should support. Two of these capabilities are explicitly social; namely,
affiliation and emotions, and several others on her list are implicitly social,
including senses, imagination and thought; other species; play; and control over
one’s environment (Nussbaum 2011: 33–4). The affiliation capability focuses on
being able to live with and toward others, recognize and show concern for others,
engage in different forms of social interaction, and imagine another’s situation.
Protecting our capability for affiliation means enabling us to engage in various
forms of social interaction, a crucial part of being human. It also means protecting
institutions that constitute and nourish important forms of affiliation such as the
family (but not only the family) and protecting freedom of assembly and freedom
of speech (2011: 34). The emotions capability focuses on being able to have
attachments to people and things beyond ourselves, to love and be grateful to
those who love and care for us, to grieve when we are separated or when we lose
those we love. This capability also includes not having our emotional development
blighted by fear and anxiety. In general then, ‘[s]upporting this capability means
supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in [the]
development [of these emotions]’ (2011: 34).⁷
All that said, not all social human rights are equally marginalized within human
rights theory and practice. The standout exceptions are the rights that protect
marriage and family life, the rights that protect religious practice, and the rights
that protect freedom of association. These social rights enjoy a much firmer
theoretical and legal position than do other social rights. Their comparative
security is due in no small part to the fact they have been enumerated in
international agreements officially pertaining to civil and political rights such as
the ICCPR. Also, in the case of freedom of association, our protected interests
have traditionally been understood in political terms as preserving trade union
⁶ The capability approach is not a competitor to human rights norms. Amartya Sen states that: ‘The
two concepts—human rights and capabilities—go well with each other, so long as we do not try to
subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can
be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms
cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework.’ Sen, Amartya (2005: 151), ‘Human
Rights and Capabilities’ in Journal of Human Development, 6:2, July.
⁷ Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have highlighted additional functionings related to sociability
including: doing good for others, being able to follow the norms of etiquette, being able to care for
others as part of expressing our humanity, and being able to show gratitude (2007: 46–7). These ideas
seem to be implicit in Nussbaum’s list of capabilities, but Wolff and de-Shalit explicitly shift the focus
away from receiving resources and towards the value in being able to give. This can involve the
capability of giving to charity or of helping someone in need. It can also involve caring for others, an
important aspect of living a human life. This means being an active participant in a social community.
We are interdependent, social beings who depend on each other socially and for survival. Stemming
from this need to belong we must see and take an active part in this interdependence. Doing good for
others and caring for others then is important for our own wellbeing.
6  
rights,⁸ and also have been viewed largely through a negative-rights lens even
though they, like other rights, must make positive demands on duty-bearers to
ensure they are meaningfully respected, protected, and fulfilled. Freedom of
association protects our rights to associate with each other and to form voluntary
groups together, which serves our interpersonal needs. But, if viewed through a
purely negative-rights lens, this freedom does not actually give us a right to
associate: it merely gives us a right not to be prevented from associating with
others who wish to associate with us. It does nothing to protect an abandoned child
or an exiled person, or an immigrant with whom nobody wishes to associate, or an
older person whose mobility issues prevent him from attending his local social
club. The negative right against (state) interference also does not provide the legal,
political, and social infrastructure necessary, first, to ensure that third-parties
honour our rights to associate freely and, second, to give us meaningful ways to
routinely meet proto-associates so that we can form associations over time.
Additionally, a freedom-from-interference approach to associative rights ignores
the massive investment that parents and guardians must make during a person’s
childhood—willingly or not—in order for her to assert her freedom of association
later in life (Brownlee 2020: chs 5–6).
As the examples of family rights, religious practice, and freedom of association
show, it is conceptually incorrect and analytically unhelpful to bundle all social
human rights under the ‘socio-economic’ heading, especially since that heading is
weighed down by the sticky assumption that such rights do not merit the strongest
legal and political protection. In reality, many social rights seem to straddle, if not
dissolve, the civil-political/socio-economic divide, and also, as noted above, they
push against the contrast between so-called liberty rights and welfare rights
(Tasioulas 2007; Shue 2020: ch. 2 and 166–8; cf. O’Neill 2005). A more fruitful
theoretical approach, therefore, might eschew sharp conceptual, normative, and
practical divisions between different human rights in order to highlight those
rights and perspectives that have been neglected in human rights debates.
Of course, collapsing sharp conceptual and normative divisions will not solve
all theoretical problems, and may create some new ones. First, without some kind
of ranking of human-rights priorities, societies will struggle to determine, and will
disagree about, how to allocate their resources. A civil-political lexical ranking
could be replaced with a basic-rights lexical ranking as a guide to societies, but that
would still require some reasonably sharp conceptual and normative divisions.
Second, if our interpersonal and social needs are lumped into a general category
with other human rights, certain important features of our sociality might
be overlooked, including the fact that, by nature, social resources such as
face-to-face contact, physical touch, companionship, care, culture-making, and
⁸ See Scheinin, M. (1999), ‘Article 20’ in G. Alfreosson and A. Eide (eds), The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement (Martinus Nijhoff).
 7
community-building necessarily rest within us. Such resources are necessarily

owned or possessed by the people and groups who offer them. In that respect,
social resources are distinct from—and potentially much more problematic
than—both material resources such as food, land, and water, which can be
unowned, and institutional resources such as laws and policies, which are
detached mechanisms that can protect us from oppression. Even so, many
human-rights-securing institutions which we do not typically think about in
interpersonal terms are in fact deeply social. Both a well-functioning police
force which helps to secure our rights to life and physical security, and a well-
functioning legal system of judges, juries, prosecutors, and defence lawyers which
helps to secure our rights to due process, justice, and remedy, are social forces:
they are collectives of people who—usually through face-to-face interactions—are
tasked with neutralizing tense situations, defending vulnerable people, and pro-
viding comfort, assurance, restoration, and vindication. To understand this better,
suppose that police interactions with the public were carried out predominantly
via robots or automated systems: no longer would police officers relate to other
persons on a human level, no longer would those parties realize the social value
that comes from a well-functioning police service helping people face-to-face. The
same is true of other spheres of justice that fall within the purview of human
rights. The point here is not to suggest that social rights is a capacious catch-all
concept, but rather to highlight the underappreciated and ineliminable social
aspects of enumerated civil and political rights. Sociability runs deep within all
human rights concepts since, at rock bottom, human rights recognize our com-
mon membership within a moral community.
Third, that said, a larger concern is whether human rights norms as such offer a
credible moral, political, and social mechanism to identify and protect our fun-
damental social interests. Familiar charges against human rights norms include
that they are ethnocentric, culturally imperialistic, excessively individualistic,
antagonistic, minimalistic, and unduly demanding of under-resourced societies
despite their claims to minimalism. By framing discussions of people’s social
needs and interests in the language of human rights, we may simply be repeating
past argumentative mistakes within a whole new set of debates. Is it possible, for
instance, that the ‘sociable’ person who is the intended subject of social human
rights is, yet again, a particular vision of the person presented in the guise of
universal personhood?
Concerning the demandingness and potential impracticability of human rights,
James Nickel argues that we should resort to human rights talk only when some
norm weaker than a right will be insufficiently effective. In addition, we should
attend to the feasibility of a declared human rights norm and, specifically, whether
the majority of countries today are capable of implementing that norm (2006:
ch. 5). In the Epilogue to this collection, Nickel explores the kinds of steps that
international human rights institutions might take to increase the feasibility of
8  
implementing social human rights norms. In Chapter 13, Simon Hope expresses
the worry that some of the interpersonal, associative, and communal dimensions
of human life cannot be adequately captured by individualism, and this is par-
ticularly problematic in post-colonial settings where individualism clashes with
more holistic local ethical outlooks which are built around shared forms of life,
including shared ways of thinking and acting. Hope’s chapter explores specifically
the rights of the Māori people in New Zealand/Aotearoa to use a specific form of
communication with people outside their community, namely, the right to com-
municate their ethical claims utilizing their own ethical language and concepts. He
is critical of the expectation that Māori people should use a human rights
framework to communicate their ethical claims. He argues that, to insist that
they use this framework, causes them to suffer from normative disorientation, to
which human rights claims are not the solution. Hope’s scepticism about human
rights talk—voiced in this volume and elsewhere (2016)—offers an important
counterpoint to the enthusiastic endorsements of human rights concepts found in
most of the other chapters. A question that remains, however, is what kind of
communicative rights of the Māori people are in play. Presumably, they are
solidarity rights (i.e. those collective rights or group rights, such as a group right
to self-determination, which are sometimes referred to as ‘third generation’
human rights), but ones which arguably must usher human rights language
from the room in order to be respected.
Several chapters in this collection enthusiastically defend specific social human
rights grounded in particular social interests. Some chapters focus on our social
interests within our intimate relationships. Some focus on our social interests at
work. Others focus on our social interests outside of our intimate relationships or
work-connections, including our interests as communicators, and our social
interests on the street amongst strangers. In a contrasting but ultimately comple-
mentary direction, other chapters focus on our interests in being sometimes left
alone unburdened by social demands as well as our interests in having periods of
solitude. These analyses, which pull in different directions and, in some cases,
identify social rights that are new to the human rights theoretical literature, form
one of the central contributions of this volume. Collectively, they subject a
plethora of (putative) social human rights to analytic scrutiny, thereby advancing
reflection on which rights, both familiar and foreign, are genuinely philosophically
respectable.
In more detail, Stephanie Collins (Chapter 2), Alexandra Couto (Chapter 3),
Kimberley Brownlee (Chapter 4), Jenny Brown (Chapter 5), and S. Matthew Liao
(Chapter 6) each explore our needs and rights within some of our most intimate
connections. Collins looks at a key tension in the ethics of sociability between
our positive social needs, specifically our need for intimacy, on the one hand,
and our need for associative control, on the other. She argues that, although
each person has no human right to intimacy as such, each has a right to
 9
intimacy-consideration, which gives others a duty to deliberate about her needs for
intimacy and her intimacy inclinations and to act accordingly. Collins also argues
that intimacy groups have group-rights to group-intimacy, and not just rights to
intimacy-consideration, which requires others to respect, protect, and promote their
group-intimacy (cf. Cruft 2015). In defending the idea of persons’ human right to
intimacy-consideration, Collins develops her view that, in light of certain problems
concerning the claimability, enforceability, and action-guidance of the right to
goods such as intimacy, we do not have human rights to specific socio-economic
goods but instead we have human rights to socio-economic-consideration, by which
she means that ‘. . . each human—in virtue of being human—bears claimable rights
(one right for each pairing of a socioeconomic good and an agent) that each agent
deliberates equitably about how to respect, protect and promote the socioeconomic
good and acts accordingly’ (Collins 2016: 704).
In Chapter 3, Couto considers two possible accounts of the fundamental inter-
ests and values that are protected by our core social human rights. She focuses on
the right against social deprivation, which Brownlee has defended in recent work
(2013, 2020), and identifies two possible interpretations of the content and
function of this right. Couto analyses whether the right against social deprivation
is best understood in terms of (1) the importance of protecting our opportunities
to cultivate meaningful relationships with family and friends or, alternatively, (2)
in terms of our interests in a basic kind of social contact—a social currency or
basic type of social nourishment—that could take the form of purely non-
associative decent interactions with fellow human beings. Couto highlights that
the interpretation we adopt has significant implications for the scope of the right
against social deprivation and for the policies required to respect, protect, and
fulfil it. She defends the interpretation which focuses on opportunities for mean-
ingful relationships, arguing that, although it’s the less minimal of the two
interpretations, it better captures the fundamental social interests that underpin
this core social human right.
Brownlee, for her part, elaborates on the importance of non-associative and
proto-associative social contact in Chapter 4. She begins by offering an account of
our social participation rights as a set of human rights that is broadly analogous to
our political participation rights. Our social participation rights include not only
familiar items such as our rights to marry and form a family, freedom of
association, freedom of religion, freedom of movement (to seek out, meet and
connect with other people), and rights to participate in the life of the society, but
also less familiar items such as our rights to interactional inclusion. She focuses
specifically on our interactional inclusion rights, i.e. our rights to have adequate
opportunities to meet and interact with non-associates and to benefit from the
modelling, exchanges of views, and affirmation of our general acceptance which
non-associative interaction provides. Brownlee’s chapter resembles Cruft’s chap-
ter (Chapter 9) and Jenkins’s chapter (Chapter 10) in that the rights in question
10  
are connected to a general atmosphere of inclusion with reference to, and

assessment of, a society’s cultural habits.
Brown’s chapter (Chapter 5) explores one of the most intimate relationships we
can have—marriage—a relationship that, as noted above, falls under one of the
few theoretically well-established and legally-secure social human rights. Of
course, the right to marry as it is enumerated in the UDHR, ICCPR, and
ICESCR was originally understood to pertain to heterosexual couples and,
hence, on that understanding, was arguably not a human right. More recently,
our understanding of the enumerated right has evolved to mean that men and
women and non-binary people have an equal right to marry, but need not marry
someone of a specific sex (UN Office of the Human Rights High Commissioner
2018). Brown focuses on recent cases that have been made for the disestablish-
ment of legal marriage on exactly these kinds of grounds that legal marriage—
even in societies that respect same-sex marriage—is exclusionary and perpetuates
inequalities in legal standing and protection (Brake 2012; Chambers 2017). Critics
of legal marriage highlight that those people who are permitted to marry enjoy a
bounty of rights and privileges which other pairs and groups are denied. It would
be ironic if the case for the disestablishment of marriage were unanswerable, given
that the right to marry is one of the few social rights to enjoy a firm legal footing
within international human rights institutions. But Brown does not think the case
for disestablishment is unanswerable. She maintains that if the call to disestablish
marriage is motivated by egalitarian concerns to better protect a universal right to
marry, then, in her view, retaining legal marriage serves that purpose equally well,
and indeed is necessary to ensure such equality.
In his book The Right to be Loved (2015), S. Matthew Liao considers another
domain of great intimacy—the relationships between children and their parents or
caregivers. Liao offers an account of human developmental needs in the language
of a child’s human right to be loved, which is arguably stronger, though less
foundational, than the basic right to developmental social inclusion, which Shue
defends in his chapter in this volume. In Liao’s view, our human right to be loved
during childhood is grounded in the fact that children have rights to the condi-
tions that are essential for a good life, and love is essential for a good life for a
child, both during childhood and for her future. In his contribution to this
collection (Chapter 6), Liao extends his empirically informed arguments for the
right to be loved to the case of older people, utilizing empirical data to demon-
strate how older people are at particular risk of harm when they lack love and
emotional support, and how necessary love is for their physical health and
cognitive function. Among other things, older people need regular, decent
human contact and emotional support to avoid some of the damaging effects of
social isolation to which they are particularly vulnerable, such as dementia.
Liao argues that this grounds a duty on behalf of us all to provide this support,
which cashes out in the form of assisting primary duty-bearers—whether
 11
professionals, friends or relatives—to carry out their support-providing duties

(see also Liao 2006).
Liao’s analysis could be extended further since similar arguments can be made
on behalf of people who are severely physically or cognitively impaired, as they
also face acute risks of harm in the absence of love, emotional support, and close,
caring attention. Indeed, this kind of argument might be made on behalf of every
human being—be they broadly able-bodied and self-reliant or not—since we are
all vulnerable to the physical and mental health risks that dog poor social
connections and insufficient opportunities for supportive interaction.
Two chapters in this collection—by Jesse Tomalty (Chapter 7) and Chiara
Cordelli (Chapter 8)—focus on social human rights and interests within the
contexts of employment and work. Work-environments are highly significant to
the study of social human rights for many reasons, one of which being just how
much time we typically spend at work. The US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy,
has observed that ‘on average, we spend more waking hours with our co-workers
than we do with our families’. But, work-environments are also troubling sites in
which we attempt to meet basic social needs given the poverty of connections they
often supply. As Murthy asks: do our co-workers ‘know what we really care about?
Do they understand our values? Do they share in our triumphs and pains?’
(Murthy 2017).⁹
In her chapter, Tomalty argues that working conditions can only be considered
just in the context of human rights when they do not undermine people’s
fulfilment of their other human rights, including their social human rights.
Those social rights include having adequate access to social resources such as
social abilities, opportunities to form and foster social connections, and the
protection of existing connections (Brownlee 2020, ch. 3). The second and third
types of social resources—social opportunities and existing social connections—
are particularly affected by persons’ working conditions. Tomalty highlights a
range of social-rights implications that follow from a proper understanding of
what ‘just and favourable’ working conditions entail. For instance, changing
people’s work patterns, which undermines their ability to form or maintain decent
relationships outside of working hours, should be seen as breaching those persons’
human rights. Likewise, working conditions that require persons to work in
isolation, or without opportunities to speak to customers or co-workers, and
which thereby undermine their efforts to form even paltry social connections at
work, are also at odds with persons’ social human rights. The same is true of
remuneration that is inadequate to satisfy persons’ social interests in conjunction
⁹ Murthy continues: ‘Our understanding of biology, psychology, and the workplace calls for
companies to make fostering social connections a strategic priority. A more connected workforce is
more likely to enjoy greater fulfillment, productivity, and engagement while being more protected
against illness, disability, and burnout.’
12  
with their material interests. More generally, working conditions that are hostile
and that deprive people of respect threaten their access to key social resources—
including the preservation of their social abilities—and, hence, are at odds with
their social rights.
Cordelli’s chapter explores the unfair employment benefits which people can
enjoy when they either personally know their prospective employer or are mem-
bers of the same social network. Social relationships and networks give prospect-
ive employers greater knowledge of an applicant. Additionally, their relationship
or social network provides a source of trust, which the employer can rely on,
especially if she needs to decide about applicants quickly. Equally, social networks
can be either circles of power or circles of disadvantage depending on who a
person is, since persons tend to form networks with people who are similarly
placed to them. Cordelli argues that social relationships affect economic oppor-
tunities by developing a set of relational goods and epistemic goods, which
provide employers with reasons for hiring people with whom they share a social
relationship. She argues that fair equality of opportunity should include fair
epistemic opportunity for fairly distributed epistemic goods, and the best way to
realize fair epistemic opportunity within the labour market is to cancel the effects
of relational epistemic goods by imposing a norm of anonymity on hiring
practices. If we put these ideas in the language of human rights, Cordelli’s
argument highlights specific implications of the human right to work, which in
its enumerated form (ICESCR Article 7) includes not only the right of everyone to
the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work, but also equal oppor-
tunity for promotion subject to no considerations other than seniority and
competence. Cordelli’s analysis implies that, for these elements of the right to be
meaningfully honoured, employers and states must recognize the impact that
inequality in access to epistemic goods has on persons’ chances to secure and
retain work on just and favourable terms.
Social rights also pertain to concerns other than meeting our needs for mean-
ingful relationships, friendship, and intimacy with family, friends, and co-workers
where possible. Specifically, social rights can concern the ways in which we relate
to each other more broadly, for example, through general practices of communi-
cation, or through the variety of ethical concepts we use to make claims on each
other. Rowan Cruft (Chapter 9) looks at the morality of communication and
argues that we hold rights both to communicate to others and to receive commu-
nication. He argues that we all have a general interest in living in open societies
that are peopled by educated, well-informed individuals, who are capable of
expressing themselves, and who are connected with one another via the nexus
of communication. This interest is weighty enough to ground a right with
corresponding communicative duties which entail that right-holders can claim
apologies or compensation if those communicative duties go unfulfilled.
For instance, we have a duty to approach each potential contributor in an open
 13
and receptive spirit: if a person is ostracized or otherwise excluded from

communication practices without justification, then their rights to communicate
and receive communication are undermined.
In Chapter 10, David Jenkins argues for a broad social right that pertains to
shelter, habitability, and social acceptance, namely, a social human right to the
city. More and more people are coming to live in or work in urban settings—and
arguably all of us should live in the relative density of urban settings in order to
reduce our collective impact on the more-than-human world—which raises
specific social rights issues concerning how to live peaceably in conditions of
often pronounced density, diversity, and detachment. Jenkins outlines the poten-
tial claimants of a right to the city, i.e. the users of the city, the producers of the
city, and the people who need the city. He then argues that focusing on the social
dimensions of urban life can help to clarify the tensions between these different
claimants and also to highlight appropriate directions for future urban planning
(Jenkins 2020). Jenkins focuses in particular on (1) preserving streets as sites for
social encounters, (2) facilitating mobility and maintaining centrality as ways of
helping people to sustain social relations across large metropolitan spaces, and (3)
ensuring that housing stability is sufficient to support sociable neighbourhoods.
All of these are ways in which cities can be developed to accord with specifically
social rights.
All of the chapters just summarized emphasize the important role that our
positive social interests in love, intimacy, emotional support, social contact, and
social acceptance play in helping us to avoid significant harms and injustices,
including the bundle of harms that is social isolation or social deprivation, social
anxiety, depression, and loneliness. However, these accounts must confront coun-
tervailing arguments in support of competing interests and rights, including
competing social interests and rights. In their respective chapters, Elizabeth
Brake (Chapter 11) and Anca Gheaus (Chapter 12) highlight some of the costs
of prioritizing positive social interests, including the gendered distribution of
social-duty-bearing and the implicit disregard of our interests in solitude and in
being sometimes left alone, free from social burdens.
In Chapter 11, Brake highlights specific concerns that we should have when we
assign the state the power to protect and fulfil our positive social rights. She argues
that when the state provides institutional support for caring relationships, there is
a risk that women’s interests will be harmed. First, state institutions that provide
people with access to decent social contact and caring relationships might exacer-
bate existing unfair distributions of social burdens, particularly upon women and
upon other less socially-powerful people, because these people already perform
the lion’s share of both paid and unpaid social care work. Second, the gendered
distribution of caring and emotional work comes with added threats since women
face particular threats in the context of care work including heightened risk of
sexual harassment. By disregarding these realities, states might compromise these
14  
persons’ abilities to access the goods of caring relationships themselves. Brake

outlines ways in which the state can fulfil its duties to attend to our social needs
without exacerbating gender injustices or other injustices, including doing more to
foster interaction for the relationship-disabled, and providing more protection for
women and other minority groups against harassment and mistreatment.
In light of the difficulties and general costs of combating social isolation and
loneliness through reactive state intervention, Anca Gheaus (Chapter 12) explores
another, more proactive way to tackle the problems of weak connection, isolation
and loneliness. She argues that learning to enjoy solitude is, counterintuitively, a
key skill in forming nourishing relationships: if we want to be with others, and
especially if we want to maintain good relationships rather than find ourselves
stuck in harmful ones, we need to learn how to be with ourselves. Gheaus draws
on empirical research to argue that enjoying solitude reduces loneliness and social
anxiety, and the most efficient way for people to enjoy solitude as adults is for
them to have caregivers to whom they could securely attach during their child-
hood: in short, ensuring that children have appropriate caregivers is an important
policy aim for combatting loneliness. In other work (2018), Gheaus highlights the
importance of ensuring that children are not subject to monopolies of care.
Diversifying children’s caregivers so as to include both non-parental one-on-one
care and institutional care serves both children’s interests as vulnerable parties and
women’s interests, which is relevant to the worries raised by Brake about the
gendered distribution of care work. Women’s own interests in solitude and in
being sometimes left free from duty are less likely to be compromised when
children are securely attached to an appropriately diverse—including a gender-
diverse—set of caregivers.
Supporting and protecting our developmental interests in social abilities by
providing us with a diverse set of attentive caregivers is one key way in which the
state can honour our social interests and rights. But, it is certainly not the only
way. Bouke de Vries (Chapter 14) explores a range of ways in which states could
strive as a matter of duty to protect us from isolation, chronic loneliness, and other
assaults on our social interests. He identifies specific policies which help persons to
develop better relationships with others, promote social interactions with non-
humans such as pets and robots, change persons’ perceptions of whether their
social network is deficient and, thereby, allay the disutility produced by the
mismatch between their desired and realized social networks. de Vries argues
that states should choose policies that are most likely to prevent and minimize
loneliness, with the proviso that states should ensure that each citizen has
adequate access to human social interaction, and that they should try to preserve
citizens’ current relationships.
In the Epilogue to this collection, James Nickel and Kimberley Brownlee
consider additional ways that states might support social interests and inter-
national human rights institutions might combat assaults on social human rights,
 15
notably through the appointment of a Special Rapporteur, the commission of a

General Comment on social human rights, and the instruction to states that they
attend to impacts on social rights in the design of new legislation. Nickel and
Brownlee also reflect on ways in which civil society, business, families, and people
themselves can take meaningful steps to ensure that all persons enjoy adequate
social access.
Human rights have become the most prominent conceptual and normative
framework through which we determine in law, politics, and morality what we
fundamentally need as human beings and what we owe and are owed in virtue of
being human. To be an effective force for good, human rights concepts must
represent us accurately in all our complexity including, crucially, our complex
sociality. The contributors to this volume demonstrate powerfully the importance
of taking social human rights seriously despite that complexity, and of grappling
with the thorny conceptual, ethical, and practical issues that social rights present.
The overall ambition of this collection is to initiate a broad conversation that will
put debates about social human rights on an equal footing with other human
rights. Going forward, that conversation must reckon with the fact that our social
interests interweave with our civil, political, and economic interests in ways that
defy easy classification and give the lie to the idea that human rights instruments
could stand firm in support of civil and political rights while disregarding social
rights. The conversation must also include a fine-grained analysis of the various
spheres within which our social natures develop—our homes, faiths, schools,
neighbourhoods, jobs, unions, political parties, public spaces, online spaces, and
nations—and the conditions that must obtain for those spheres to honour our
diverse yet fundamental interests in decent social contact, recognition, inclusion,
connection, intimacy, shared ways of living, interactional control, solitude, and
associative freedom. This collection writes the first, crucial lines of the next
chapter in the debate about human rights—the debate about human sociality
and our fundamental need to belong.
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of Human Rights at 70: 30 Articles on 30 Articles – Article 16: Right to Marry and to
Found a Family’: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?
NewsID=23927&LangID=E.
Vašák, K. (1977), ‘A 30-Year Struggle: The Sustained Efforts to Give Force of Law to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, The UNESCO Courier, November 1977,
29–32.
Walton, C. (2019), ‘Why the Neglect? Social Rights and French Revolutionary
Historiography’, French History 33/4: 503–19.
Williams, B. (2005), In the Beginning was the Deed (Princeton University Press).
Williams, K. (2009), ‘Ostracism: Effects of Being Excluded and Ignored’, in
M. P. Zanna (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 41: 275–314.
1
Interlocking Rights, Layered Protections
Varieties of Justifications for Social Rights
Henry Shue
1.1 Introduction: Varieties of Justifications
Kimberley Brownlee has correctly observed that in my previous work I have

ignored what she calls social rights, but also that reasoning similar to some of
mine in favour of what I call subsistence rights can equally well be invoked in
support of her right against social deprivation. She also correctly points out that
my conception of basic rights, one of which is the right to subsistence, maintains
that there are some rights, the basic ones, that must be protected if any other
rights, including the other basic ones, are to be adequately protected (Brownlee
2013, 2020, ch. 2). On my account, full security for basic rights is, in effect, all or
nothing (Shue 2020: 34 and 191, n. 23).¹
Here I want to explore a few converging but separable linkage arguments, some
presented as interpretations of or variations on arguments in Basic Rights (2020),
with a view towards establishing which, if any, are good arguments for a right like
Brownlee’s right against social deprivation. David Luban (1999) and Elizabeth
Ashford (2015), in different decades and for different purposes, have constructed
important and powerful arguments that go well beyond Basic Rights while draw-
ing on it to some extent—in Ashford’s case, I think, giving it considerably more
credit than it deserves, because the argument she formulates is primarily her own
contribution. Exegetical debates about what is and is not already in Basic Rights
would, however, be of no interest here and are of only limited interest even to me.
So, I proceed without any more attention to whether the arguments discussed are
what Basic Rights did, could, or should have said than is necessary for clarity about
social rights, which are our present focus. Let us simply understand the various
types of argument now made available by various authors, and their differences
from each other, and ask whether they support any social rights.
¹ Thus, I rely on a species of what James W. Nickel (2021) has helpfully called ‘linkage arguments’.
Henry Shue, Interlocking Rights, Layered Protections: Varieties of Justifications for Social Rights In: Being Social:
The Philosophy of Social Human Rights. Edited by: Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal,
Oxford University Press. © Henry Shue 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871194.003.0002
 ,   19
1.2 Standard Threats
Here is one general route by which to approach the question of which human
rights there are. Humans in fact have vital interests. It is perfectly reasonable to ask
further ‘vital for what kind of life?’. Here I am perfectly content to accept
Brownlee’s assumption, drawn largely from James Nickel, that the vital interests
are ‘those conditions that are necessary for the realisation of a minimally decent
human life’ (Brownlee 2013: 200; Nickel 2007, 2005).² The one point that it is
crucial to emphasize is that, given a particular conceptual understanding of a
minimally decent human life, it is a largely empirical question which conditions
are necessary in order to develop and to sustain such a life, or at least a decent
prospect of it, at a particular point in history. This is one general reason that
arguments about human rights cannot be purely conceptual and must instead, like
the current project to which this chapter contributes, be interdisciplinary (Shue
2020: 32–3 and 209, n. 22).³
Humans have vital interests, but there are serious threats to these interests. The
role of human rights is to protect some vital interests against some of these threats.
Rights are protections for fundamental interests against major threats. Rights are a
social compact in which the strong shield the weak, the able protect the vulnerable,
realizing that fates may reverse. Rights as I defend them work against atomistic
individualism and enhance solidaristic individualism.
Two complications soon emerge. First, society needs to be alert to change, both
changing forms of threat and changing forms of possible protection against new
or old threats. Even if vital human interests themselves are largely unchanging,
changes like new technologies and new social institutions can modify either what
needs protection or what can be protected (Shue 2020: ch. 8).⁴ These are further
specific reasons that arguments about which rights there are must include empir-
ical information and cannot be purely conceptual. Rights are too enmeshed in
history to leave exclusively to philosophers and theorists.
Second, society can provide protection only against some threats. It would be
almost infinitely expensive, and perhaps impossible, to try to protect all of every-
one’s vital interests against all threats; and it would be excessively burdensome, if
not oppressive—much of everyone’s life could be consumed by efforts to try to see
to it that everyone else’s vital interests were protected at all times.⁵ Acknowledging
a right to exercise or enjoy some interest securely grants that interest very high
priority; any notion of assigning very high priority to unlimited numbers of
² My variant is: ‘a decent chance at a reasonably healthy and active life of more or less normal length,
barring tragic interventions’ (2020: 23).
³ For more on the methodological issue, see Shue (2014).
⁴ This chapter is not in the 1st and 2nd editions of Basic Rights. ⁵ Compare Luban (1999: 19).
20  
interests would drain ‘high priority’ of any meaning. So, society must not multiply
rights beyond necessity or beyond the capacity of individuals to bear the duties
inherent in the institutions protecting the rights.
Since society needs to be selective about the threats against which it grants the
strong protection of a right, we need to focus on what are, roughly speaking,
the primary threats. Much of the debate about rights can be organized around the
question: specifically which threats shall we try to protect each other against? In
Basic Rights I tried to begin to structure the answer with the notion of ‘standard
threats’: ‘common, or ordinary, and serious but remediable threats . . . . The social
guarantees that are part of any typical right need not provide impregnable
protection against every imaginable threat, but they must provide effective
defenses against predictable remediable threats’ (Shue 2020: 32–3). A number of
theorists, including Luban and Ashford, have clarified, extended, and enriched the
concept of standard threats in ways that I will discuss presently.⁶ The trick, of
course, is establishing specifically which threats are the appropriate targets of
rights—which should be judged to be the standard ones.
If Brownlee has a candidate for consideration to be a standard threat, it is social
deprivation: ‘a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent or
supportive human contact including interpersonal interaction, associative inclu-
sion, and interdependent care’ (2013: 199). And one illustrative list of specific
forms of the threat that she provides is: ‘it is endured in arenas of institutional
segregation, for example, by prisoners held in long-term solitary confinement and
patients held in long-term quarantine. It is also endured by persons who suffer less
organized forms of persistent, unwanted isolation. And, it is endured by persons
who do have social contact but whose principal forms of social contact are
persistently hostile, degrading, or cruel’ (Brownlee 2013: 200).
The vital interests that are threatened are: ‘the development and the mainten-
ance of the cognitive, physical, emotional, linguistic, and social abilities that both
partly constitute a minimally decent human life and make many other human
rights and domains of value meaningfully available’ (Brownlee 2013: 200). This is
a rich and complex account of the vital interests, with separable parts that need to
be appreciated analytically. In particular, two different distinctions provide struc-
ture: the interest in the development of socially grounded abilities and the interest
in the maintenance of socially grounded abilities; and the constituent value of
these abilities in a minimally decent human life and the instrumental value of
these abilities in enabling other rights and values. Consider the latter distinction.
⁶ Charles R. Beitz (2009: 109) has developed the concept of standard threats in important ways at the
international level: ‘human rights are requirements whose object is to protect urgent individual
interests against certain predictable dangers (‘standard threats’) to which they are vulnerable under
typical circumstances of life in a modern world order composed of states’. Other helpful discussions are
in Beitz and Goodin (2009: 1–24, at 10), and Wolff (2015: 491–501, at 495–6).
 ,   21
The cognitive, physical, emotional, linguistic, and social abilities that can only
arise through social contact are indeed constituent parts of a minimally decent
human life. A life without socially grounded emotional or linguistic abilities, for
instance, is a blighted life, a life far less good and less distinctively human for lack
of them. These abilities, which can only be developed through social contact, are
constituent goods in a decent life. They are indeed vital interests and therefore
worthy of protection as rights.⁷ As Brownlee puts it in a follow-up article, ‘to be
human is to have non-contingent, basic needs for the care and company of other
members of our own species . . .’ (Brownlee 2016: 27–8).
It is extremely important, I think, that abilities developed only through oppor-
tunities for social contact are also instrumentally valuable in enabling the exercise,
or enjoyment, of other rights. In Brownlee’s words, ‘many other rights and goods
are meaningfully available only when our fundamental social rights are protected,
including many civil and political rights, subsistence rights, education rights,
health care rights, and, in extreme cases, all rights requiring the maintenance of
clear thought’ (Brownlee 2016: 37). They are instrumentally valuable to the
enjoyment of virtually all other rights because minimal skill in performing
cognitive and social tasks, for example, is necessary to adequate functioning as a
human being and therefore necessary to understanding and making use of any
right. This instrumental value grounds linkage arguments for them of the kind
I presented in Basic Rights for liberty, security, and subsistence.
Virtually every major theorist who thinks there are any rights at all—certainly
including Thomas Hobbes—considers physical security to be a fundamental right.
Brownlee (2013: 201–2) quotes part of my original argument for subsistence
rights, which compares the results of a lack of subsistence (like food, clothing,
and shelter⁸) to a lack of physical safety: ‘any form of malnutrition, or fever due to
exposure, that causes severe and irreversible brain damage, for example, can
effectively prevent the exercise of any right requiring clear thought and may,
like brain injuries caused by assault, profoundly disturb personality. And, obvi-
ously, any fatal deficiencies end all possibility of the enjoyment of rights as firmly
as an arbitrary execution’ (Shue 2020: 24–5). She then accurately continues,
⁷ A deep appreciation of the intrinsic value of even brief social contact is eloquently displayed in the
working principle of the intensive care nursery of the Benioff Children’s Hospital, ‘every baby dies in
someone’s arms’, as recounted in a heart-breaking chapter in Zaki (2019: 94–118, at 105). When the
staff decides to withdraw life-support from a baby in a hopeless case, and the baby’s own family are not
present, a member of staff takes the baby into her arms and holds it for as long as it lives. The
psychological costs for staff of this self-imposed practice are high, needless to say.
⁸ Subsistence, or ‘minimal economic security’, is defined as ‘unpolluted air, unpolluted water,
adequate food, adequate clothing, adequate shelter, and minimal preventive public health care’ (Shue
2020: 23). Some level of education almost certainly ought also to have been included in my account,
although education might alternatively be considered a social right in Brownlee’s sense. For thoughtful
exploration of the implications of a basic right to subsistence for the agency of the right-holders
themselves, see Mancilla (2016).
22  
writing first about the development of these abilities and then about their
maintenance (the other analytic distinction that she invokes):
. . . he says nothing about the fact that cognitive deficiencies caused by social
deprivation during critical stages of childhood development, such as a failure to
acquire language or to learn to control bodily function, effectively prevent the
exercise of rights requiring clear thought. He also says little about the fact that the
deficiencies often caused by social deprivation under the extreme conditions of
long-term physical isolation or solitary confinement, such as depression, des-
pondency, hallucination, self-mutilation, psychosis, or suicidal ideation and
behaviour, can equally effectively prevent the exercise of rights requiring clear
thought, social ability, and personal control; and that extreme deficiencies can
result in early death. (Brownlee 2013: 202)
Brownlee’s implication is exactly right. An appropriate analogy can be drawn

between the results not only of physical attack and subsistence deprivation but
also of both of those taken together and social deprivation. In all three cases
fundamental human functions and their physical and social bases can be thwarted,
undermined, or damaged to an extent that prevents the enjoyment of a minimally
decent human life. I suggest that this means that no one can fully enjoy any
right—any right at all—unless they enjoy rights to physical security, subsistence,
and opportunities for social contact, making each of these the content of a basic
right. Deprivation of any one of them has a crippling effect. The detailed explan-
ations of why in each case need not be fully parallel for the basic analogy to hold,
so we may continue to focus attention here on social deprivation. Security
deprivation, subsistence deprivation, and social deprivation are all standard
threats.
Someone who was genetically human and somehow managed to survive phys-
ically in the absence of all human social contact and opportunity for enculturation
would fail, for lack of any opportunity, to learn to feel appropriately human
emotions and develop normal human reactions as well as failing to develop
human language and other defining human characteristics, more or less like the
purported feral children sometimes rumoured to have been discovered being
reared by a wolf or other animal (whatever the literal truth of such stories).
Documented less extreme cases, such as neglected children reared in orphanages
(or indeed in family homes) while shown sub-minimal warmth, attention, and
care have been found to suffer less extreme but still horrific and warping social
deformities.⁹ What are frequently considered to be central rights like, say, freedom
⁹ See Chapter 6 (by S. Matthew Liao) in this volume.

 ,   23
of religion, speech, and association, cannot possibly be fully exercised, adequately

enjoyed, or even appreciated by such under-developed individuals.
1.3 Interlocking Rights
As Brownlee indicates, the hurdle for qualifying to be a basic right in my sense is

set so high that a number of critics, including sympathetic ones, deny that any
right whatsoever qualifies. Here is the original account: ‘basic rights, then, are
everyone’s minimum reasonable demands upon the rest of humanity. They are the
rational basis for justified demands the denial of which no self-respecting person
can reasonably accept. Why should anything be so important? The reason is that
rights are basic in the sense used here only if enjoyment of them is essential to the
enjoyment of all other rights. This is what is distinctive about a basic right. When a
right is genuinely basic, any attempt to enjoy any other right by sacrificing the
basic right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the ground from beneath
itself ’ (Shue 2020: 19).
How can the enjoyment of one right be essential to the enjoyment of all other
rights? In the present case of social contact, a range of distinctively human abilities
are strictly necessary for the exercise and enjoyment of any and every right, and
opportunities for meaningful social contact are strictly necessary for the develop-
ment of these abilities. So, it is undeniable that to have had opportunities for these
kinds of meaningful social contacts, the extent and character of which would
obviously need to be spelled out and de-limited on the basis of the empirical
literature, is strictly necessary for the exercise and enjoyment of all rights. To have
had these social contacts is a vital interest, and this vital interest is as appropriate a
subject for protection as a basic right as one can imagine. We have, then, a strong
argument for providing the protection of a basic right to the vital interest in the
development of the relevant ‘cognitive, physical, emotional, linguistic, and social
abilities’.
It is instructive to compare the explanation of why the right to subsistence is a
basic right developed in compelling form by Ashford (2015). The protection of
subsistence as a basic right is necessary to the protection of all other rights if the
deprivation of subsistence that was not protected as a right would be so unsus-
tainable that any person deprived of subsistence would abandon any other
supposed right to any other interest if sacrificing the other putative right would
secure this especially important unprotected interest in subsistence instead.
Consequently, none of those other interests is securely protected because the
person with the crucial unprotected interest in subsistence is in no position to
insist that those other interests be guaranteed, as one is able to do in the case of a
genuine right, and, on the contrary, the person has no alternative but involuntarily
to exchange one of the other interests for the sake of securing the crucial
24  
unprotected interest in subsistence. Why would anyone sacrifice any other interest
for the sake of securing subsistence?
This is fundamentally because a person cannot survive more than a few days
without water or food (and in many circumstances, clothing and shelter).
Deprivations of subsistence for more than a very brief time cause irreparable
harm, if not death. Suppose that no right to subsistence has been acknowledged.
People have, by contrast, been assured that they have many splendid rights like the
right to the integrity of their own bodies, the right to public education, the right to
citizenship, the right to privacy, and the right to free speech, but they do not have a
right to subsistence. Consider a person who in fact cannot obtain food and water
for herself and her family. She might then engage in dangerous kinds of prosti-
tution in exchange for enough income to buy food and water. If the person is a
child, she might accept long hours of poorly paid and unhealthy labour for the
needed income. If the person is a chronically unemployed farmer in a stagnating
undeveloped country, she might pursue the option of migrating illegally to a
country in which she has no citizenship rights as a way of gaining subsistence.
Their respective putative rights to integrity of person, public education, and
citizenship are in reality not protected as rights because they can be involuntarily
lost in exchange for subsistence.
Someone might respond that these persons do enjoy these other rights and are
actually making use of their rights by voluntarily trading those rights for some-
thing else. The woman exercises her right to the integrity of her body by volun-
tarily waiving that right in exchange for subsistence, and the child exercises her
right to a free public education by voluntarily waiving that right in exchange for
subsistence. But this is doubly nonsensical, as Ashford sees (2015: 524–5). First,
one is not making use of, exercising, or enjoying a right by surrendering it. This is
not what making use of a right means. To make use of a right to A is to be
protected in the enjoyment of A, not to have to abandon A and put it out of reach.
Second, these are in any case not voluntary exchanges—they are involuntary
exchanges (Ashford 2015: 524–5). The structure of the situation facing each of
these persons allows only one endurable way out. The choices in these situations
are involuntary because they are made in the absence of any viable alternative. The
farmer migrates involuntarily because remaining in her own country is not a
feasible option. The child chooses child labour because she cannot live without
subsistence. There is no such thing as ‘living without subsistence’—this combin-
ation of words is just noise.
These situations reflect the fact that deprivation of subsistence is unsustainable
for more than a few days. When that is the option if nothing changes, one must
choose some other option. If the only other option available is child labour,
dangerous prostitution, or illegal migration, one is forced to choose this other
option. This is not the voluntary waiving of the exercise of a genuine right. This is
the involuntary loss of an interest that might have been protected as a right but
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was only at best fraudulently labelled a right while protection was not provided.
It was not protected as a right because subsistence was not protected as a right.
Where subsistence is not protected as a right, people will involuntarily choose, if
they can, to sacrifice other interests that ought to be protected as rights, in order to
secure subsistence because they cannot forgo subsistence and live. Nothing else
can be protected as a right unless subsistence is protected as a right. This is my
understanding of the heart of Ashford’s powerful argument.
Ashford’s argument does not exactly fit the right to the social contacts needed
to develop the capabilities of an adequately functioning person, including ‘cogni-
tive, physical, emotional, linguistic, and social abilities’. This is for an important
and interesting reason: the right to opportunities for social contact is, in a sense,
more basic than ‘basic’. Ashford maintains that the need for subsistence is so
urgent and essential that a person might reasonably, if involuntarily, sacrifice any
other interest when she expected this sacrifice to be necessary and effective in
securing subsistence, making a secure right to subsistence necessary for an
effective right to anything else. But a person who had not enjoyed the ‘minimally
adequate opportunities for decent or supportive human contact including inter-
personal interaction, associative inclusion, and interdependent care’ could not
even have developed a mature personality capable of making reasonable judge-
ments about which interests she has, which interests are more important than
other interests, and which interests cannot be sacrificed.¹⁰ Ashford’s argument
relies on what a reasonable agent would choose, but an individual deprived of the
social contacts essential to human development would not even have become a
reasonable agent capable of informed choice.
At best one can ask only whether a trustee responsible for the well-being of a
not yet fully developed personality could choose for that person to lack develop-
mentally essential social contacts, and the answer would obviously be: no. Nothing
else could possibly be so valuable to that person as to be worth exchanging the
person’s social development for it. So, enjoyment of the right to social contact ‘is
essential to the enjoyment of all other rights’, and ‘any attempt to enjoy any other
right by sacrificing . . . [this] right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the
ground from beneath itself ’ (Shue 2020: 19). Thus, the right to social contact
perfectly fits the definition of a basic right.
1.4 Layered Protections
Ashford’s argument shows why the effective protection of any basic right depends
on the effective protection of every basic right. David Luban had earlier enriched
¹⁰ See Chapter 12 (by Anca Gheaus) and Chapter 3 (by Alexandra Couto) in this volume for
discussions of related issues.
26  
our understanding of the meaning of effective protection. Luban suggests that the
Warren Court—the US Supreme Court with Earl Warren as Chief Justice
(1953–1969)—developed a deeper understanding of ‘what rights are, based on
an analysis of how they must be secured’ (1999: 9). Luban is writing about legal
rights, but I think his fundamental distinctions and arguments are equally applic-
able to moral rights. He observes that ‘the Warren Court approached the concept
of a right by rethinking the nature of a remedy . . . . Our rights are those back-
ground expectations we can count on, and thus, they must be not merely protected
but secured’ (1999: 11). In order for rights to be secure, remedies for violations
must be, in Luban’s terms, activist, not reactive. Reactive remedies are ex post—
‘they are imposed after the wrongdoing they remedy’—and direct—‘they are
imposed directly against the wrongdoer’ (1999: 11). Activist remedies are either
ex ante, indirect (not imposed on the wrongdoer), or both (1999: 13).
An ex ante remedy is, for example, the requirement of a Miranda warning,
which informs a suspect of her entitlement to have a lawyer present before
answering police questions (Luban 1999: 12), in order to protect arrested suspects
from abusive questioning. Miranda requires police to warn suspects of their rights
prior to questioning in order to prevent abusive questioning from occurring (by
having the suspect’s lawyer present to object to improper questions and advise
against answering them). The Mapp exclusionary rule (1999: 12), which sup-
presses evidence illegally obtained by the police from use in any subsequent trial, is
not ex ante because the evidence has already been illegally obtained before it can
be suppressed. But it is indirect, because it neither punishes the police nor requires
compensation from them for the illegal search, but simply changes the police’s
incentives for engaging in illegal searches by making such searches legally point-
less. In both cases, if the remedy functions according to design, the suspect’s
primary rights are secured against violation: the suspect is neither abused during
questioning nor convicted at trial on the basis of illegally obtained evidence.
Such activist remedies are vastly superior to remedies that allow violation to
occur and then follow it by punishment of, or compensation from, the violator.
Activist remedies are ‘forward-looking’ (Luban 1999: 16), and well-designed ones
treat the disease, not the symptoms. ‘The Warren Court insisted that . . . primary
constitutional rights must often be hedged with derivative, prophylactic rights
designed to forestall infringements before they happen’ (1999: 17), as the right to a
Miranda warning can forestall abusive questioning and the right to the Mapp
exclusion of evidence can forestall illegal searches.
Then, having introduced the concept of a standard threat from Basic Rights,
Luban provides the following overview:
We have a right to activist protection only against standard threats, because the
world produces too many non-standard threats to protect against them all. To
anticipate and guard against all these would require an omnipresent, omnipotent,
 ,   27
omni-intrusive, and very expensive government that abandoned all its activities
except one: anticipating improbable rights-threatening scenarios that must be
warded off. It makes more sense, I think, to leave the unusual rights violations to
a purely reactive remedy system. Only the standard threats need to be guarded
against in advance. Thus, both activist and reactive rights protections have a
proper place in a system of rights . . . . The activist strategy insists that
each primary constitutional right implicitly includes a protective belt, or buffer
zone . . . of derivative rights to have standard threats to the primary right
curtailed. (Luban 1999: 19)
These other rights will themselves be protected but not fully secure, but this is the
most that can reasonably be required of society.
I have noted that Brownlee distinguishes ‘the interest in the development of
socially grounded abilities’ from ‘the interest in the maintenance of socially
grounded abilities’, although she couples them together as the content of a single
fundamental right (Brownlee 2020: chs 1–2). One might be tempted to think that
if this distinction were pressed, a divergence in the relative importance of these
two interests might open up. For instance, one might think that, on the one hand,
protection of opportunities for social contact of kinds that permit the develop-
ment of these abilities are indeed vital, since the acquisition of socially grounded
abilities is necessary to functioning as a human, but that, on the other hand,
protection of opportunities for social contact of kinds that permit the mainten-
ance of these abilities is less vital, since fully functioning humans may be able to
take care of themselves in general and, in particular, make their own socially
sustaining contacts.
This, however, rests on a confusion. Development cannot be more important
than maintenance. What is essential to human life is actively to have the social
abilities. In order to have them, one must develop them. But in order to have them,
one equally must maintain them once they are developed. It is certainly true that
well-functioning adults are better able to take care of themselves than, for
instance, utterly vulnerable children, so the average adult may need fewer—or at
least, different—protections than the average child. This, however, shows mainly
that protections must be tailored to vulnerabilities. Neglected old people have
different deficiencies from neglected young people, and someone whose partner
has died faces different challenges from someone who has been sentenced to
solitary confinement. Each of these situations, however, contains its own standard
threats, and Luban’s general point that effective protection requires hedging basic
rights ‘with derivative, prophylactic rights designed to forestall infringements
before they happen’ (1999: 17) applies to them all.
What would those threats to the maintenance of social abilities be? This is a
predominantly empirical question, not to be adequately answered from a philo-
sopher’s armchair. But, for instance, solitary confinement and the isolation of
28  
older people who live alone, who lack internet skills, and who lack the mobility to
initiate social contacts on their own seem obvious examples of such threats. What
are the best shields against these threats is similarly an empirical matter, although
at least a few points are quite clear, such as that solitary confinement should either
never be imposed or, if imposed in some genuinely rare and extreme cases, be
carefully monitored and strongly qualified; and that social services like appropri-
ate and accessible transportation and/or visitation should be available to everyone
who would otherwise be involuntarily isolated.¹¹
Because of the importance of what can be lost—the vital interests that will be
threatened—if social contact deteriorates, situations like choices whether to
impose solitary confinement and whether to provide the means of social contact
to immobile and isolated older people clearly call for what Luban labels activist,
not reactive, attitudes and provisions to secure these interests against harm.
Threats like the imposition of solitary confinement by the state are certainly
‘common, or ordinary, and serious but remediable’, that is, they are paradigm
standard threats. All of this seems to fit fully into the analytic model that identifies
vital interests, then identifies standard threats to those interests, and finally would
then specify which duties would need to be fulfilled in order to secure those
interests against those threats. Once the duties were tentatively specified, the duty-
bearers need to be specified next, although this relationship is dialectical: who the
duty-bearers would need to be is relevant to whether acknowledging a particular
duty is finally reasonable.
1.5 Conclusions
I have formulated Brownlee’s social rights as rights to something rather than a

right against deprivation. I believe, as I argued in Chapter 2 of Basic Rights, that
every right requires the performance of multiple duties, some of which are quite
‘negative’ and some of which are quite ‘positive’. One duty correlative to every
right is the duty not to deprive people of whatever the right is to, and this is a
universal duty. But right-based duties extend well beyond the purely negative duty
not to deprive. I do not believe that ‘right against social deprivation’ captures the
importance of these other duties that are not purely negative. In particular, the
other duties include a duty to protect, and, as Luban argues, often this duty
requires strong pre-emptive action to try to secure the content of the right so
that people are less likely to be deprived of it even by those who try to violate the
duty not to deprive.
¹¹ See Chapter 14 (by Bouke de Vries) in this volume for discussion of various ways that society can
seek to shield people from social threats including loneliness.
 ,   29
This positive turn focuses attention on what this social right is a right to. I have
described it in vague phrases that need to be replaced with more crisp terminology
based in detailed empirical analysis. Two distinguishable goods are at stake,
namely, the good of developing social abilities through social contact and the
good of maintaining those social abilities through social contact. Both, however,
are vital interests that deserve the protection of being the content of rights, and
each is as fundamental an interest as there can be. In effect, they are interests in
becoming and remaining human. Strong protection for these complementary
interests is essential to the protection of all other distinctively human rights,
making this double-barrelled right a basic right.
Bibliography
Ashford, E. (2015), ‘A Moral Inconsistency Argument for a Basic Human Right to
Subsistence’, in C. Rowan, S. M. Liao, and M. Renzo (eds), Philosophical
Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press), 515–34.
Beitz, C. R. (2009), The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford University Press).
Beitz, C. R., and R. E. Goodin (2009), ‘Introduction: Basic Rights and Beyond’, in
C. R. Beitz and R. E. Goodin (eds), Global Basic Rights (Oxford University Press),
1–24.
Brownlee, K. (2013), ‘A Human Right against Social Deprivation’, Philosophical
Quarterly, 63/251: 199–222.
Brownlee, K. (2016), ‘The Lonely Heart Breaks: On the Right to Be a Social
Contributor’, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume
XC: 27–48.
Brownlee, K. (2020), Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms
(Oxford University Press).
Luban, D. (1999), ‘The Warren Court and the Concept of a Right’, Harvard Civil
Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 34: 7–37.
Mancilla, A. (2016), The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty
(Rowman & Littlefield International).
Nickel, J. W. (2005), ‘Poverty and Human Rights’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 55:
385–402.
Nickel, J. W. (2007), Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Blackwell).
Nickel, J. W. (2022), ‘Linkage Arguments for and Against Rights’, Oxford Journal of
Legal Studies, 42: 27–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqab020
Shue, H. (1993), ‘Implied Protections and Protections Presupposed—Or, Not Every
Right That Looks New Is New’, in R. A. Licht (ed.), Old Rights and New
(Washington: AEI Press/University Press of America), 164–79.
Shue, H. (2014), ‘Making Exceptions’, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection
(Oxford University Press), 244–62.
30  
Shue, H. (2020), Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, 40th
Anniversary Edition (Princeton).
Wolff, J. (2015), ‘The Content of the Human Right to Health’, in C. Rowan, S. M. Liao,
and M. Renzo (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University
Press), 491–501.
Zaki, J. (2019), The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
(Robinson/Little, Brown).
2
A Human Right to Relationships?
Stephanie Collins
2.1 Introduction
Is there a human right to close personal relationships? This would be a right to

the existence of people who value the right-bearer for the right-bearer’s own sake,
whose wellbeing is invested in the right-bearer’s wellbeing, who are inclined to be
partial to the right-bearer over others, who help the right-bearer build a coherent
life narrative, and who more generally provide the right-bearer with familiarity,
understanding, closeness, love, care, and concern. Call such people ‘intimates’,
and the interests these people particularly fulfil ‘intimacy interests’ (or just
‘intimacy’).¹
The prima facie argument is easy: as Section 2.2 explains, intimacy is an
important, universal, and fundamental human interest. However, Section 2.3
outlines problems for the distribution, demandingness, and motivation of the
correlative duties. These problems imply that it’s false that every human is owed
intimacy from some specifiable agent. Instead, I argue, each human has a right—
which entails duties for all moral agents—to intimacy consideration: a right that
each agent gives careful consideration to the sources and boundaries of that
agent’s intimacy inclinations. Unfortunately, the correlative duties do not always
produce intimacy.
Fortunately, there is more to be said. Drawing on debates about so-called ‘third
generation’ or ‘cultural’ human rights, Section 2.4 argues that intimacy is akin to
what Jeremy Waldron (1987) called ‘communal goods’ and Denise Réaume (1988)
called ‘participatory goods’: these are goods essentially held by a group of co-
intimates. The group-level good has value that’s distinct from, and additional to,
the sum of the value of each member’s interest in the group-level good. The group
has a right that others respect, protect, and promote the group’s intimacy. The
correlative duties do not face the problems of distribution, demandingness, and
motivation that plague the individually-held right to intimacy. Additionally, the
high value that accrues at the group level implies that the group-held right to
intimacy is more demanding than the individually-held right to intimacy
¹ Intimacy can arise between people regardless of their biological, sexual, or domestic relationships.
I use the term ‘intimates’ to be neutral on these relationship-types.
Stephanie Collins, A Human Right to Relationships? In: Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights.
Edited by: Kimberley Brownlee, David Jenkins, and Adam Neal, Oxford University Press. © Stephanie Collins 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871194.003.0003
32  
consideration. For these reasons, I propose we think of intimacy-related human

rights primarily as group-held rights.
2.2 The Prima Facie Argument
I’ll assume there is a human right to some good if and only if each human is
enforceably owed that good from some agent(s), where the agent(s) wrongs the
human if the human lacks the good. Being ‘enforceably’ owed means the right-bearer
(or their representative) is permitted to impose proportionate costs on the duty-
bearer to extract the good and is entitled to demand compensation or redress if the
good is not given. The agent(s) enforceably owes that good to that human simply in
virtue of the human’s being a human, meaning the agent(s) owes that good to that
human independently of specific institutional arrangements.² This conception has
the benefit that human rights exist across various social-political arrangements.
Furthermore, I assume an interest theory of rights: rights protect (or demand
respect or promotion of) the interests or benefits of the right-bearer, rather than
the will or choices of the right-bearer.³ Interest theory boosts the prospects for the
human right to intimacy: the groups that (I’ll argue) bear the human right to
intimacy are not always organized groups, capable of making choices or having a
will—so they cannot always be rights-bearers under the ‘will’ theory. That said, I’ll
assume humans’ interest in intimacy is an interest in the opportunity for intimacy,
which humans may not choose to take up. So choices play a role in the account.
To see intimacy’s distinctiveness, consider four ‘levels’ of social interests. First,
some people have no social contact, for example if they are in solitary confinement
or medical quarantine. These people have unfulfilled contact interests. Second, some
people have human contact but their ‘principal forms of social contact are persist-
ently hostile, degrading, or cruel’ (Brownlee 2013: 200). These people are denied the
fulfilment of their associative interests. Third, some people have human contact that
is non-threatening, decent, and supportive—but lack involvement in civic, commu-
nal, political, or collegial relations. Such people are missing out on the fulfilment of
their community interests. Fourth are those who lack the fulfilment of intimacy
interests: they might have non-threatening, decent, and supportive human contact,
including civic, communal, political, or collegial relations—but they lack opportun-
ities for intimacy, as characterized in the Introduction.
This typology matters, because arguments cannot always be transferred
between different types of social interests. For example, Brownlee (2013, 2020)
² Roughly, this is a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘practice-independent’ conception, rather than a ‘political’ or

‘practice-dependent’ conception. But as Liao (2012) points out, that distinction can obscure more than
it illuminates, and I take it that core aspects of the naturalistic conception (such as the idea of
‘enforcement’) matter because of political practice—so I resist the labels.
³ On this distinction, see Kramer, Simmonds, and Steiner (2000).
     ? 33
argues for a human right to decent contact and the conditions necessary to satisfy
associative interests, by drawing on empirical research into the harms of severe
social isolation, such as is suffered in solitary confinement, quarantine, and
extended illness. Such evidence doesn’t speak to the intrinsic value of intimacy.
Similarly, since the 1980s there has been lively debate regarding human rights
to community interests—particularly culture, language, and national self-
determination. However, community interests do not face the problems that
Section 2.3 will raise for intimacy, so arguments about community interests
cannot be neatly transferred to intimacy. Also, community groups are large,
intergenerational, and retain their identity across membership changes, while
intimacy groups are small, do not outlive their members, and do not retain their
identity across membership changes. This makes intimacy substantially different
from other social interests, requiring different arguments for its value.
To further see the distinctiveness of intimacy, consider that intimates target us
as a non-fungible being. To have intimacy is to be seen in one’s particularity. As
Harry Frankfurt put it, the ‘focus of love’ is ‘the specific particularity that makes
[the] beloved nameable—something that is more mysterious than describability,
and that is in any case manifestly impossible to define’ (1998: 170). Through
intimacy relations, we console, comfort, advise, and bear witness to one another’s
particular lives. This contrasts with the more homogenized, impersonal, and
fungible relations we have with our community members, let alone associates or
transient contacts.
How, then, might we argue for intimacy-related human rights? I’ll assume an
interest is a human right only if it is sufficiently morally important, universal
across humans, and of fundamental value.⁴ The prima facie argument is that
intimacy has these features.
To demonstrate intimacy’s moral importance, we might turn to the distinctive
moral reasons it gives us—as discussed in the literature on whether we are
permitted (or required) to be partial to our intimates. Lawrence Blum elaborates:
. . . we feel that particular relationships are not simply generators of agent-neutral

good, but are rather expressive of a good which is internal to those special
relationships; and that the moral dimension of those relationships, as generators
of reasons for action, is bound up with this particularity, at least the particularity
of that type of relationship. (1986: 354)
Likewise, Samuel Scheffler argues that parties to some intimate relationships have
good reason to non-instrumentally value the relationship—and, when these
reasons exist, the intimates have reason to favour one another over non-intimates
⁴ Similar assumptions are made by, e.g., Brownlee (2013, 2020) and Liao (2015: ch. 3).
34  
(2001: ch. 6, esp. 103–4; 2010: 140–5). If the moral reasons intimacy gives us are
weighty enough to outweigh impartial moral considerations, then intimacy must
be morally important.
Others embed intimacy’s moral value within a broader moral theory. For
example, David Velleman embeds it within a Kantian theory, arguing that intim-
acy allows us to glimpse the intrinsic value of our intimates. Of course, non-
intimates have intrinsic value too—but without intimacy, our perception of that
value is stymied (Velleman 1999). Thus, on Velleman’s view, intimacy has per-
ceptual value. Perceiving others’ intrinsic value is surely of high moral importance.
Coming from Aristotelianism, Martha Nussbaum embeds intimacy within her
account of basic human capabilities: for Nussbaum, one of the core human
capabilities that should be supported by all democracies is the capability for
emotions, which includes ‘[b]eing able to have attachments to things and people
outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence;
in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger’
(2011: 33–4).
Intimacy’s moral importance also appears throughout the history of philoso-
phy. Two of the ten books in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to
friendship, which is touted as ‘most necessary for our life. For no one would
choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods.’ (Nicomachean
Ethics, 1155a5–6) Friendship is extolled by Western thinkers as diverse as Adam
Smith (Den Uyl and Griswold 1996), John Locke (Yeo 2009), and Spinoza (Lucash
2012). Confucius hints at the value of partiality amongst friends, writing that
‘[i]t is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them’.
In friendships, we find the Confucian values of xin (fidelity or faithfulness),
le (joy), and rendao (benevolence) (Yuanguo 2007). Kwame Anthony Appiah
(1998) and Thaddeus Metz (2012) have each argued that partiality—that is,
favouring of oneself and intimates—is central to traditional sub-Saharan African
thought. Across time, theories, and traditions, then, intimacy has been viewed as
morally important.
Is intimacy of universal importance? Yes. As infants and children, we crave
intimacy with guardians. Parents, too, crave intimacy with their children—for
good evolutionary reason (Sober and Wilson 1999: ch. 10; Cacioppo and Patrick
2008: ch. 4). If children lack intimacy, they struggle to form valuable relationships
later in life, lack self-esteem, and suffer from various physical and psychological
disorders (Liao 2015: ch. 4). This suggests all human children have an interest
in intimacy.⁵ Adults, too, have a universal interest in intimacy. In evolutionary
⁵ Liao therefore argues that children have a human right to be loved. But he suggests adults may not,
because ‘part of the point’ of adult friendships and romance is ‘that one obtains these goods by one’s
own autonomous efforts.’ (2015: 99–100) Yet this doesn’t speak against adults’ human right to an
opportunity for love, where the value of the opportunity resides partly in the autonomy exercised when
it’s taken up. See Liao’s chapter in this volume for his defence of older adults’ right to be loved.
Another random document with
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Sally had told him this morning not to call them together—to just go
and do it. But they would have been out in the corridors, waiting. He
would have had to brush by them. One touch—one contact of flesh
to flesh, and one of them might have tried to prove the mortality he
found in Sean Brendan.
"I want you in your homes. I want your doors shut. I want the corridor
compartments closed tight." He looked at them, and in spite of the
death he saw rising among them like a tide, he could not let it go at
that. "I want you to do that," he said in a softer voice than any of
them had ever heard from him. "Please."
It was the hint of weakness they needed. He knew that when he
gave it to them.
"Sean!" Sally cried.
And the auditorium reverberated to the formless roar that drowned
her voice with its cough. They came toward him with their hands
high, baying, and Sally clapped her hands to her ears.
Brendan stood, wiped his hand over his eyes, turned, and jumped.
He was across the stage in two springs, his toenails gashing the
floor, and he spun Sally around with a hand that held its iron clutch
on her arm. He swept a row of seats into the feet of the closest ones,
and pushed Sally through the side door to the main corridor. He
snatched up the welding gun he had left there, and slashed across
door and frame with it, but they were barely started in their run
toward his office before he heard the hasty weld snap open and the
corridor boom with the sound of the rebounding door. Claws clicked
and scratched on the floor behind him, and bodies thudded from the
far wall, flung by momentum and the weight of the pack behind them.
There would be trampled corpses in the auditorium, he knew, in the
path between the door and the mob's main body.
Sally tugged at the locked door to the next section of corridor.
Brendan turned and played the welder's flame in the distorted faces
nearest him. Sally got the door open, and he threw her beyond it.
They forced it shut again behind them, and this time his weld was
more careful but that was broken, too, before they were through the
next compartment, and now there would be people in the parallel
corridors, racing to cut them off—racing, and howling. The animals
outside must be hearing it ... must be wondering....
He turned the two of them into a side corridor, and did not stop to
use the welder. The mob might bypass an open door ... and they
would need to be able to get to their homes....
They were running along the dome's inside curve, now, in a section
where the dome should have been braced—it hadn't been done—
and he cursed Falconer for a spiteful ass while their feet scattered
the slimy puddles and they tripped over the concrete forms that had
been thrown down carelessly.
"All right," Brendan growled to himself and to Falconer, "all right,
you'll think about that when the time comes."
They reached the corridor section that fronted on his office, and
there were teeth and claws to meet them. Brendan hewed through
the knot of people, and now it was too late to worry whether he killed
them or not. Sally was running blood down her shoulder and back,
and his own cheek had been ripped back by a throat-slash that
missed. He swallowed gulps of his own blood, and spat it out as he
worked toward his door, and with murder and mutilation he cleared
the way for himself and the mother of his boy, until he had her safe
inside, and the edge of the door sealed all around. Then he could
stop, and see the terrible wound in Sally's side, and realize the
bones of his leg were dripping and jagged as they thrust out through
the flesh.
"Didn't I tell you?" he reproached her as he went to his knees beside
her where she lay on the floor. "I told you to go straight here, instead
of to the auditorium." He pressed his hands to her side, and sobbed
at the thick well of her blood over his gnarled fingers with the tufts of
sopping fur caught in their claws. "Damn you for loving me!"
She twitched her lips in a rueful smile, and shook her head slightly.
"Go let Donel out," she whispered.
They were hammering on the office door. And there were cutting
torches available, just as much as welders. He turned and made his
way to the control cubicle, half-dragging himself. He pulled the lever
that would open the gates, once the gate motors were started, and,
pulling aside the panels on cabinets that should have had nothing to
do with it, he went through the complicated series of switchings that
diverted power from the dome pile into those motors.
The plain's mud had piled against the base of the gate, and the
hinges were old. The motors strained to push it aside, and the dome
thrummed with their effort. The lighting coils dimmed, and outside his
office door, Brendan could hear a great sigh. He pulled the listening
earphones to his skull, and heard the children shout. Then he smiled
with his ruined mouth, and pulled himself back into his office, to the
outside viewscreen, and turned it on. He got Sally and propped her
up. "Look," he mumbled. "Look at our son."
There was blurred combat on the plain, and death on that morning,
and no pity for the animals. He watched, and it was quicker than he
could ever have imagined.
"Which one is Donel?" Sally whispered.
"I don't know," he said. "Not since the children almost killed me when
they were four; you should have heard Donel shouting when he tore
my respirator away by accident—he was playing with me, Sally—and
saw me flop like a fish for air I could breathe, and saw my blood
when another one touched my throat. I got away from them that
time, but I never dared go back in after they searched out the
camera lenses and smashed them. They knew, then—they knew we
were in here, and they knew we didn't belong on their world."
And Falconer's kind would have gassed them, or simply re-mixed
their air ... they would have, after a while, no matter what.... I know
how many times I almost did....
There was a new sound echoing through the dome. "Now they don't
need us to let them out, anymore." There was a quick, sharp, deep
hammering from outside—mechanical, purposeful, tireless. "That ...
that may be Donel now."
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Being Social The Philosophy of Social Human Rights Kimberley Brownlee Editor Full Chapter

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Being Social: The Philosophy of Social

Human Rights Kimberley Brownlee

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

12. The Role of Solitude in the Politics of Sociability 234

Elizabeth Brake is a Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. She is the author of

Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her

Bouke de Vries is a Research Fellow at the University of Zurich working on issues of

our development and maintenance interests in social inclusion comprise a

community-building necessarily rest within us. Such resources are necessarily

are connected to a general atmosphere of inclusion with reference to, and

professionals, friends or relatives—to carry out their support-providing duties

and receptive spirit: if a person is ostracized or otherwise excluded from

persons’ abilities to access the goods of caring relationships themselves. Brake

notably through the appointment of a Special Rapporteur, the commission of a

Brownlee, K. (2013), ‘A Human Right against Social Deprivation’, The Philosophical

1.1 Introduction: Varieties of Justiﬁcations

Kimberley Brownlee has correctly observed that in my previous work I have

 ,   19

1.2 Standard Threats

 ,   21

Brownlee’s implication is exactly right. An appropriate analogy can be drawn

⁹ See Chapter 6 (by S. Matthew Liao) in this volume.

 ,   23

of religion, speech, and association, cannot possibly be fully exercised, adequately

1.3 Interlocking Rights

As Brownlee indicates, the hurdle for qualifying to be a basic right in my sense is

 ,   25

1.4 Layered Protections

 ,   27

I have formulated Brownlee’s social rights as rights to something rather than a

 ,   29

Is there a human right to close personal relationships? This would be a right to

consideration. For these reasons, I propose we think of intimacy-related human

2.2 The Prima Facie Argument

² Roughly, this is a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘practice-independent’ conception, rather than a ‘political’ or

     ? 33

. . . we feel that particular relationships are not simply generators of agent-neutral

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