Basic human needs, human rights, and human development

Basic human needs, human rights, and human development provide three perspectives from which to examine human well-being. Societies come into being where people wish to govern their lives within an agreed upon system of cooperation, and cooperation within a society requires that its citizens be able to participate autonomously. After explaining how economic and social distribution according to desert is arbitrarily partial and counterproductive to social cooperation, I argue that need should serve as the basis for distributive justice.; A conception of needs stems from an analysis of the nature of deprivations, and a conception of rights from an assessment of what can be done about those deprivations. I draw from the contractarian and discourse theoretical free-agreement models of human rights, but argue that a thorough explanation of how human rights are morally justified requires an account of basic human needs and autonomy.; After explaining how the common characterizations of civil and political rights as "negative rights" and economic and social rights as "positive rights" are misleading, I argue that protecting the latter does not actually present more significant difficulties than protecting the former once we rethink how the responsibility to fulfill all human rights is distributed. If duties are predicated solely on the vulnerability of one party to another, then general positive duties and special positive duties become theoretically indistinguishable from a moral standpoint, and many obligations considered to be matters of charity become matters of justice. This idea is expressed by cosmopolitanism, which offers the potential for resolving questions of which parties corresponding duties fall upon by making the current scheme of global cooperation more explicit and structured.; Development is a process aimed at the actual enjoyment of human rights that people have, and the enjoyment of these rights is both the primary end and the principal means of development. Insofar as human rights and development are interdependent and we live in an interconnected world in which duties to meet people's basic needs should be extended beyond state borders, it is useful to synthesize the two concepts into a collective right to development.