Conceptualizing Politics

survival against man-made threats.
12
 This is a meta-right rather than a right among 
others because it makes all other rights possible in both senses: it aims at keeping – 
a not-so-obvious precondition – the future bearers of rights physically alive, and it 
constitutes the founding act of respect for human dignity, in the absence of which 
all particular rights would not make morally sense. This right, born out of a new 
threat, should not simply be declared as a human right, but constitutionalized as a 
fundamental one, in a procedure that cannot be analysed here. It would thus give 
more strength to legislation and jurisdiction on climate change.
This last proposal should be seen as an attempt to give human rights a more 
basic and sturdier foundation as a meta-right rather than as an expansion of the 
already long list. Inflationary expansion can depreciate the existing rights, as infla-
tion does with the existing currency. Not all legitimate or sensible aspirations or 
‘moral rights’ fulfil the requirements for becoming rights. For moral aspirations or 
obligations to become rights, it takes social or political conflict, with actors willing 
and capable of engaging in it with a political rather than moral logic. The flood, in 
the last decades, of human rights argued for in philosophical debates rather than 
born as an object of political and cultural struggles involving their potential bearers 
and creating a tissue of solidarity between them, is a step away from politics into a 
region of uncertain solidity.
Notes
 1  Only in this specific meaning can autonomy be associated with negative liberty. In a 
more common version autonomy is tied to self-realisation, hence to positive liberty.

---

Liberty, equality and rights  173
 2  On another, social-psychological key, a fundamental contribution to the theory of the 
Self was given by George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), in the framework of the so-called 
Chicago School.
  3  What these otherwise mysterious numbers mean in quotations from Aristotle is explained 
at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekker_numbering.
  4  Deepening the full philosophical range of these questions should start at Rawls’s concept 
of ‘primary goods’, cf. Rawls 1999, §11.
  5  In this sense, the article by Bernard Williams, The Idea of Equality (1962) remains seminal.
  6  For evidence, put ‘international inequality’ in a search engine and visit the websites of the 
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, among others.
  7  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) regarded equality as a lie concocted under the influ-
ence of Christianity by inferior people, who organise themselves in herds in order 
to overpower those who are naturally superior to them. Elite theories in political 
science (Vilfredo Pareto 1848–1923, Gaetano Mosca 1885–1941, Roberto Michels  
1876–1936 and Joseph Schumpeter 1883–1950) have little or nothing in common with 
this attitude.
  8  For example, in countries where most universities are funded by the state, the seemingly 
egalitarian free tuition favours students from affluent families, who could easily come up 
for it, while making all tax payers, even the less well-off, pay for the education of both 
well-situated and low-income students.
 9  This is the core view Benjamin Constant advanced in his famous speech (1819) De la 
liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes/The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with 
That of the Moderns.
 10  The pre-history of this document goes back to the Magna Carta of 1215 and the English 
Bill of Rights of 1689.
 11  Whether or not related to the issue of group rights, the so-called political correctness – 
particularly as developed in some American universities – appears to be a distortion or 
even a caricature of human rights protection.
 12  See Cerutti 2015, in which the constitutional questions mentioned below are also dis-
cussed. It is clear that humankind, the community of present and future human beings 
characterised by being threatened by lethal challenges as seen in Chapter 7, has nothing 
to do with the notion of a particular, self-confining group, whose rights I have denied 
above.