Human Rights and Status Functions,before and after the Enlightenment

Abstract

This article discusses John Searle’s status function account of human rights and Åsa Burman’s “A Critique of the Status Function Account of Human Rights.” While recognizing the validity of part of the critique, based on the distinction between types and tokens, the author argues that, nonetheless, one is not compelled to accept Burman’s conclusion, that “one must give up the status function account of human rights to explain how a human right (as a kind) can exist without collective recognition” (472). Specifically, the author accepts Burman’s critique of Searle’s attempt to preserve the intuition that human rights have existed without collective recognition, but concludes offering three ways to understand human rights even in the absence of collective recognition, all of which preserve the status function account.