Human rights haven’t failed because they’re irrelevant. They’ve failed because they’re a hanging garden—detached from moral roots, stretched by competing claims, and hollowed out by politics. It’s time to reclaim the foundation.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, health and human rights was emerging. But the field carried intellectual divisions. On one side were the public health practitioners—many without legal training—who used the language of “rights” as a cry for decency. Rights, for them, became a sharper way of saying “ought” or “should”—signalling fairness and ethical urgency.
To the lawyers, this was infuriating. When they spoke of rights, they weren’t talking about moral gestures. They were talking about the law—about using legal instruments to empower action. What do treaties require of duty bearers? How do we hold them to account? General Comment 14 wasn’t a metaphor. It was a legal tool—an authoritative interpretation of the right to health under international law.
While the lawyers stayed with “human rights,” others drifted towards a more explicit discussion of equity, fairness, and (natural) justice. The split revealed a foundational problem. Human rights—the narrower legal and procedural endeavour—had become crucially detached from the ethical instincts that once animated the field.
The narrowing of human rights to law provided rigour, but lost moral reach. And as states learned to ignore legal obligations with impunity, what remained was often hollow. Public health had a moral language without teeth. Law had a legal language with contradictions and a weak ethical foundation.
Today, the international human rights framework is fraying—and in danger of complete collapse. It’s not a failure of aspiration. It’s a failure of structure.
We appeal to fairness, but we disagree on what fairness means. We invoke rights, but the legal instruments offer an incoherent and contradictory account of what grounds them. And when rights collide—speech versus protection, work versus life—we have no principled way to resolve the conflict.
Too often, the international human rights framework is treated as if it’s free-floating. The rights are asserted without grounding, and negotiated without foundation. We’ve built a symbolic garden of human dignity, but it hangs untethered—detached from root and soil.
What we need, I contend, is a moral structure beneath the legal scaffolding. Something that explains not just what rights exist, but why they matter—even when they’re inconvenient, unpopular, or costly.
A Different Kind of Foundation
The traditional approach to grounding human rights is to seek a foundation in reason, drawing on various traditions of moral philosophy. Yet each of these traditions—necessarily, though often implicitly—relies on a set of foundational assumptions that themselves demand justification. For example, John Rawls, working within the liberal contractarian tradition, assumes that morality can be derived from radical impartiality (the “veil of ignorance”). John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, as utilitarians, treat utility—happiness—as the basis of moral judgment. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian rooted in natural law, posits God not merely as a theological claim but as a rational necessity. Immanuel Kant, the deontologist and perhaps the most rigorously reason-driven of all, grounds morality in the capacity for rational self-governance—the idea that to be moral is to act only on principles one could will as universal law.
Unfortunately, reasoning our way to good behaviour does not seem to have worked.
An Axiomatic Approach
An alternative approach is to work backwards. Rather than deducing rights from reason, we ask: what must be true for rights to make sense at all?
Three axioms emerge:
Inherent Dignity
Every human being possesses inherent dignity. It’s not something to be earned, granted, or achieved—it’s a moral condition intrinsic to personhood. Dignity doesn’t fluctuate with ability, social contribution, or behaviour. It’s not comparative. It doesn’t admit degrees. It is equal and inviolable.
Individual Welfare
Dignity, while inviolable, is not self-executing. The social and legal order must promote the material, psychological, and social welfare of individuals—so they can live, develop, and participate meaningfully. Without these conditions, dignity is betrayed in practice, even if affirmed in theory.
Constraint on Expendability
No one is expendable. Lives cannot be sacrificed for the convenience or benefit of others—except under conditions of compelling and justified moral necessity, subject to strict and transparent constraint. Where institutions permit suffering for efficiency, or render individuals invisible in pursuit of “greater goods,” moral collapse has already occurred.
These aren’t ideals. They are constraints. They don’t define utopia. They define a moral floor beneath which no system can fall and still claim legitimacy.
Axioms to Rights and Duties
From these axioms, rights and duties follow:
- From dignity comes the right to recognition, and the duty to respect others as full moral equals.
- From welfare comes the right to the conditions for flourishing, and a duty to assist when the need is real and the cost is bearable.
- From non-expendability comes the right not to be sacrificed, and a duty of restraint—to avoid complicity in systems that treat people as disposable.
These are not grounded in legal agreement. They are grounded in the foundational, moral necessity.
Once one begins to play with this axiomatic approach, what fast becomes clear is that the state, as a moral agent, has been miscast in international law. The state is not a de facto rights-holder, nor is it a source for the rights of others. The state is a duty bearer—nothing more.
The state exists to protect dignity, promote welfare, and prevent expendability. When it fails to do this—systematically, persistently—its legitimacy erodes. Its existence is not self-justifying; i.e., the purpose fo the state is not to perpetuate its own existence. Its existence is contingent.
This flows from the axioms, and reframes the conversation: human beings do not have moral standing because the state recognises them. The state has standing only to the extent that it honours the people within its reach. This is not anti-state. But it is deeply sceptical of the idea that the state’s authority is morally primary. It isn’t. People are.
When Systems Fail
The axiomatic approach is pluralistic, but it is not permissive. Some systems are structurally incompatible with these axioms. For example, autocracies treat rights as contingent on loyalty or usefulness. Dissent is punished not because it is wrong, but because it defies power. Theocracies, in contrast, base human worth on belief and compliance to doctine. The person becomes secondary to divine law—as interpreted, of course, by the state. In both autocratic and theocratic systems, rights are conditional. Recognition is revocable. Worth is earned.
The axioms say otherwise. Dignity is inherent. Welfare is required. No one may be discarded.
It would be wrong to claim that the axioms are an expression of “Western values.” The expression of these kinds of ideas can be found across tradition in Asia, Africa, and the pre-colonial America. They are put forth as minimum moral thresholds. The test isn’t, thus, one of cultural conformity to some putative “Western” ideal. The test is whether the system respects the moral worth of the people within it.
Against Relativism. And Democracy.
Some people will simply not agree with the axioms. They will argue that certain groups—racial, ethnic, religious—are less than, sub-human. That outsiders are un-deserving. That dissenters are worthless. Life is to be instrumentalised for some other end.
Relativism, when pushed far enough, accommodates this. It permits anything, so long as it is “culturally accepted.”
The axioms say: no. Some practices are beyond justification.
Nor do the axioms necessarily support democracy. Majority rule is not a moral guarantee. A vote to discard a minority is still a failure. Democratic decisions must be constrained by moral principles.
Power alone is not a justification, whether the source of that power is autocratic, theocratic, or democratic. Justification is determined by what power does. Too often, might is blight.
Holding the Line
The axioms emerged from a simple realisation. Many communities, political parties, and even nations now openly argue that the value of other people’s lives lies only in how useful they are to the ambitions of those with power. The human rights framework is under siege—not just from external enemies, but from those who claim to defend it. You can see this everyday in the statements and actions of leaders (and wanna-be leaders) around the world. Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central, South and East Asia, Oceania and the Americas—everywhere leaders seek to treat some group as “other”. “Those people”—outsiders, the un-deserving—are no longer means to allowed to be the means to their own ends, they are the means to ours.
States invoke rights while violating them. Institutions look stable but are morally hollow.
The axioms of dignity, welfare, and non-expendability do not resolve every conflict. But they clarify the ground. They give us a framework to test law, policy, ideology—and to know when a system has failed, even if it looks orderly.
You can read the full account, with examples and theoretical detail, in the preprint on SocArXiv:
But the core is simple:
People matter. Their lives must be livable. And they cannot be discarded.
I am shocked these ideas are up for debate.
This blog was first published on 24 May 2025 and further edited on 7 June 2025
