Political Philosophy
Candidate number: 847044
Word count (excluding bibliography): 4913

2. (a) Could poverty be a violation of human rights?

Introduction
In this essay I argue that poverty could be, and sometimes is, a violation of human rights. But what counts as a ‘violation’?
After sorting out terminology (section 1), I distinguish three ways in which impoverishment could be a human rights violation (section 2). When an agent deliberately acts to impoverish someone, the resulting impoverishment, indisputably, is a violation of human rights. In contrast, when an agent merely omits to aid someone who is impoverished, it is deeply implausible that the impoverishment constitutes a violation of human rights. But there is a third, controversial class of cases, at the border of the acts/omissions distinction: where an agent, such as a state, negligently allows people to fall into or remain in poverty. Whether this counts as a violation of human rights is the principal subject of this essay, and requires for its resolution a discussion of the major philosophical conceptions of human rights.
I consider the ‘standard’ account (section 3) and the ‘pragmatic’ account (section 4) of human rights. The former interprets human rights as fundamental moral rights; the latter interprets human rights in light of the function of actual human rights practice. I argue that both fail as philosophical accounts of human rights, and thereby fail to justify the human right to freedom from poverty (henceforth ‘HRP’): the standard account is unacceptably partisan to one controversial moral theory; the pragmatic account fails to provide a genuinely normative justification. I suggest, however, that we can formulate a better account that incorporates the insights of both accounts, and that this can probably provide a solid foundation for HRP. I then defend HRP against the