fulfilled, some argue, then calling them universal human rights cheapens the meaning of the term. This argument may be criticized on both empirical and conceptual grounds. The view that the world cannot produce enough food for its inhabitants finds little acceptance among contemporary experts. Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen has convincingly argued that world hunger does not result from a global shortfall in food production but rather from the inability of vulnerable populations, under existing institutions, to command access to sufficient food.36 How to distribute the blame between domestic and global institutions is a matter of continuing dispute; plausibly, both levels of institutional failure are intertwined.37
But let us accept that, for whatever combination of institutional and natural causes, it would be difficult to quickly supply all the world’s inhabitants with sufficient food. To say that this disproves a universal human right to food rests on a conceptual confusion. The need for food makes access to food a morally urgent matter and establishes it as a universal human right. That right generates various duties on the part of individuals and institutions to help ensure that everyone has enough food. The human right to food is cashed out in terms of those duties. That does not mean, however, that if someone lacks sufficient food you and I are necessarily guilty of having violated that person’s right to food, for you and I may have done everything that could reasonably be expected of us to guarantee that person sufficient food. As Henry Shue writes, human rights call for “some reasonable level of guarantee.”38 We recognize this well enough in the case of civil-political rights. The right not to be enslaved is enshrined in international law and in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even so, there are several million slaves in the world, and several thousand in the United States. Even if every government did all that could be reasonably expected of it to end slavery, its complete elimination would be unlikely. These facts do not negate the right not to be enslaved. The right not to be enslaved gives institutions and individuals a package of negative and positive duties whose underlying rationale is the prevention of slavery. The equivalent is true of the right to food. Some of these duties are more absolute than others: the duty not to practice slavery or deprive someone of food is more absolute than the duty to prevent slavery or prevent hunger (though, as explained above, we tend to draw the line between inflicting and not preventing hunger in a confused manner). The crucial point is that an individual or institution may fully respect the human right not to be enslaved and the human right to food even if slavery and hunger are not fully eliminated.
It may be objected at this point that socioeconomic rights are excessively vague. We may have a clearer image of what is meant by the duty to prevent slavery, say, than the duty to prevent hunger. There is some merit to this challenge, because the duties implied by many welfare rights are still being worked out: the jurisprudence on socioeconomic rights is younger than that on, say, the right to a fair trial. We should not exaggerate the contrast, however. No human rights are perfectly transparent, which is why their meaning is continually reexamined in court decisions and why those decisions are themselves subjected to critical scrutiny. Some civil-political rights are famously vague: for example, the right to liberty, to equal protection of the laws, to the presumption of innocence, and to be spared cruel and unusual punishment. The task of specifying these rights—that is, clarifying the content of their correlative duties—is an immense labor both intellectual and political, and one that is never at an end. Considerable progress has been made in specifying the duties implied by socioeconomic rights, thanks to the rulings of national courts; treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter; the general comments and concluding observations of the International Committee for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and Amnesty International; and international law commissions and conferences.39 But there is no doubt that far more progress is needed, especially in clarifying those correlative duties that are transnational in scope.40
Socioeconomic rights place restrictions on the right to private property. They authorize taxes for education and basic welfare, and limit the conditions employers may impose on workers. Opposition to socioeconomic rights has therefore come from those who believe in what I shall call a maximal right to private property—one that excludes taxation for most (or all) functions other than the military, courts, and police and forbids most forms of regulation. Some even claim this as a human right.
As a general proposition, the claim that we have a maximal right to private property is not credible. It implies that Jean Valjean should let his sister’s children starve rather than steal a loaf of bread. With regard to the present discussion, it implies that the tax policies of almost all existing governments—certainly those of all economically advanced countries—are violations of human rights. But the idea that taxes levied for education or food stamps or Medicare (or, for that matter, roads or medical research or the arts) constitute human rights violations is difficult to take seriously. Democratically authorized, nonarbitrary taxes do not jeopardize people’s safety or deny them the chance to live autonomously. Deprivation of food, shelter, education, and basic health care, on the other hand, does have these effects. To deny the latter rights in the name of a maximal right to private property is a grotesque disordering of priorities.
For these reasons, the claim that our human rights include a maximal right to private property is difficult to maintain. The following difficulties may also be noted.
1. The claim of a maximal right to private property is not self-evident, but must be plausibly derived from human values and interests. Recall that the historically most influential defense of private property emphasized the universal benefits it provides. According to John Locke, private appropriation is permitted only if “enough and as good” is left for others, a condition satisfied in commercial society, Locke thought, because the resulting gains in productivity operate to the benefit of everyone, particularly the worst-off. Thus Locke claimed that the rural poor derive more benefit from ten fertile acres in commercial England than one hundred fertile acres in precommercial America. Even then, the property owner must acknowledge the right of the starving man to the “surplusage of his goods, so that it cannot justly be denied him, when his pressing wants call for it,” for “charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.”41 Locke makes the legitimacy of private property depend on its ability to guarantee universal subsistence; if modifications of that right are necessary to better guarantee universal subsistence, those modifications are morally required.
2. It is not plausible to defend a maximal right to private property in the name of self-ownership, because moderate taxation is compatible with autonomy and because our pre-tax holdings do not flow from our choices alone. As Kateb writes, it seems “impossible to conceive of us as having nerve endings in every dollar of our estate. A person’s holdings and level of income are so bound up with the changeable and culturally contingent rules and arrangements of the system of property, with the channels and opportunities for activity created by state action or permission, that it should be strange to look on all one’s dollars as exactly and entirely one’s own.”42
3. No one came by his or her present possessions through a pure sequence of free market transactions. Preceding centuries of conquest, plunder, slavery, and government intervention shape current holdings. Until we enact a massive redistribution of goods to rectify past involuntary transfers, it is doubtful to suppose on libertarian grounds that your pre-tax holdings are more genuinely yours than your post-tax holdings.
4. Wealth creation is a social process. I did not create my own clothes, food, shelter, office space, computer, Internet service, car, train service, or medical care. My money has value only because of the labor of vast numbers of people, past and present (much of that labor performed under exploitive conditions). This undermines the claim that I am entitled to maximum control of my current holdings.43
It may be claimed that recognition of socioeconomic rights undermines individual self-reliance. It transfers the responsibility of guaranteeing subsistence from the individual to society, thereby weakening the sources of personal effort and initiative. This argument moves too swiftly. To assert a right to subsistence is not to exempt the ablebodied from the necessity of working for such subsistence. As Stuart White notes, the right to subsistence must