What comes first,democracy or human rights?

Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.     

Why Work Harder? Equality, Social Duty and the Market

The paper responds to Cohen's critical claim that for agents who sincerely accept Rawls's difference principle it is not consistent to seek material incentives towards productivity. The central argument of the paper is that productive agents in a market economy would not be as productive without material incentives unless held to be under a (controversial) duty to increase productivity. This duty is distinct from merely having a duty to contribute up to a reasonable minimum, and then equalise material benefits. The controversial duty is not derivable from the difference principle itself, nor from the background motivations for it. Therefore, if Cohen's critique is internal to Rawlsian distributive justice, it is based on a controversial version of that view of distributive justice when applied to a market system. It is the reach, and not the core insight of Cohen's critique that is attacked here. If in any way sound, that insight does not un-controversially apply to all material incentive-seeking in a market economy.