ABSTRACT
The Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent charters and legal elaborations embrace a range of rights relating to life itself, health and health care, protection from exploitation and slavery, and other rights that may be broadly construed as promoting well-being and the good life. Anybody who is committed in whatever way to the promotion and protection of human rights must welcome these developments. I have in Vulnerability and Human Rights (Turner 2006 ) argued that, because human beings are vulnerable, they require various legal and political institutions to protect themselves against the vagaries and perturbations of mere existence. Human rights provide us with some modicum of security against “bare life” (Agamben 1998 ). The implications of this argument are many and complex. Although the enjoyment of the rights that support life, health, and reproduction are basic to human rights as such, it is clearly diffi cult to deliver and enforce these rights. It is widely recognized that, without the support of nation-states, very few human rights could become effective. Furthermore, the institutions necessary for our survival are themselves precarious and often inadequate and ineffi cient. There is as a result a complex set of relationships among our vulnerability, institution-building, and state power. Current thinking about human rights in relation to the actual support of human life is weak in two fundamental respects. First, human rights declarations notoriously lack any parallel systematic development of the notion of human duties. In jurisprudential parlance, there is a lack of “correlativity.” What are the specifi c duties that might correspond to a right to adequate health care? The absence of a discourse of human duties is partly connected to the fact that human rights are typically invoked in extremis when a population is faced with famine, degradation, civil disturbance, or extinction, namely when a population has become a community of victims. In such circumstances, it is bizarre and possibly immoral to start talking about duty. Nevertheless, human rights are typically invoked for individuals or communities who are incapable of undertaking any duties, because their entitlements are to some extent claims of last resort. Stateless people who may be exposed to genocide are people whose right to have a right has been called into question, and hence it is equally diffi cult, indeed morally objectionable, to raise the issue of correlativity in such cases.
