Again, my aim in Part I of this book is to provide a basic understanding of the morality of human rights, in preparation for our exploration, in Part II, of certain aspects of the constitutional morality of the United States. Toward that end, a clarification of what Jürgen Habermas, in the passage just quoted, calls the “language” of human rights is in order. In this chapter, I explain what it means, in the context of the internationalization of human rights, to say that a right is a “human right,” and I then explain what sort of right a human right is: legal? moral? both?

WHEN WE READ ANY HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENT, be it international, regional, or national, we see that the substantive provisions of the instrument – as distinct from the procedural provisions, which concern such things as monitoring bodies and reporting requirements – state rules of conduct. More precisely, the substantive provisions state rules of conduct mainly for government, both rules that direct government not to do something to human beings and rules that direct government to do something for human beings. .