Human Rights and Social Provision

Human rights are typically presented in terms of entitlements, correlative duties, claims, "trumps," and remedies. 1 These framings, which draw principally on law and philosophy, emphasize legal and political processes centered on adversarial claims. This essay, by contrast, seeks to highlight a more functional, sociological, or political perspective that understands human rights in terms of systems of social allocation and provision. Rather than focus on citizens and states linked by relationships of entitlement and claims, I stress the obligations of states to assure that citizens are provided with the goods, services, opportunities, and protections needed to enjoy their rights. After laying out a few simplifying assumptions, Part One outlines some of the basic elements of a social provision approach. Part Two then compares this approach to the " violations approach," which has received considerable attention over the past decade, and offers two illustrative applications.