24Rights and Security for Human Rights ScepticsVictor Tadros*It may seem that the central question to ask when considering the human right to security is: Is there a human right to security, and if so what is its source and content? This question, though, is unhelpfully unspecific for two reasons. First, until the object of security is clarified, the scope of the question is unclear. The main focus of the right to security has been on security from serious criminal offending. But we ought also to be interested in security from state wrongdoing and security from natural disasters. Hence, in a discussion of the right to security, we could include food security, water security, security from disease, security of accommodation, and so on. Secondly, and more importantly, what the question asks depends on our concep- tion of human rights. Many think that human rights are rights that we have in virtue of our status as human. Some think that human rights are distinctive in being rights held against states. Some think that human rights are distinctive in that international interference with sovereign states is permitted to enforce only these rights. Theories of human rights differ about which of these features are essential features of human rights. For reasons outlined later, I think that there is no good way of adjudicating these disputes, and that even if there was there would be no point in doing so. We should abandon the philosophy of human rights. For this reason, I will not aim to answer the question with which I began. Nevertheless, making progress on the ethical questions that some of the discussion of the human right to security has been concerned with is important. I aim to make modest progress with these questions by distinguishing between different kinds of rights. That will help to structure our thinking about the relationship between rights and duties with respect to security at national and international levels. As Liora Lazarus notes, the right to security has been understood as both a nega- tive and a positive right.1 On this understanding it grounds both negative duties not to harm or affect others in various ways and positive duties to protect others from being harmed or affected. I think that the right to security is better understood solely as a positive rightthe correlate of the right is a set of positive duties of pro- tection. Understood as a negative right, the right to security is simply an umbrella term for a range of more specific rights, such as the right not to be killed or the right * I am grateful to participants at a workshop on human rights at Worcester College, Oxford, and especially to Ccile Fabre and Massimo Renzo. 1 See Liora Lazarus, The Right to Security, this volume, ch. 23.Victor Tadros 443to bodily integrity. Even understood as a positive right, the right to security is prob- lematically umbrella-like given the range of threats that people may face. But at least in evaluating the right to security as a positive right we focus on a distinctive moral question: to what extent are there positive duties of protection against threats, and how are they related to duties and permissions on states and on the international community? Debate about the right to security can usefully be structured by answering these four broad questions:(1) Are there any enforceable positive duties to protect others?(2) To what extent do these duties fall on states?(3) Under what circumstances and in what way should the right to security be enshrined in a states constitution?(4) In what circumstances is the international community permitted or required to interfere with sovereign states to enforce duties of security, or to provide security directly?Obviously, I will not make much progress in answering these questions, but I hope at least to illuminate the questions by identifying some difficult issues that need address- ing if they are to be answered.I. The Philosophy of Human Rights: Forget it!There has recently been extensive philosophical discussion about the nature of human rights. I think that philosophers should not continue this debatethey lack the tools to make progress with it, and the debate is in itself unimportant. The language of human rights has great currency in international politics and law, and for that reason it should not be abandoned by activists, politicians, and lawyers: in politics and law precision is less important than results. Abandoning the language of human rights would probably set back the ability of activists to prevent injustice, pro- tect others from harm, and so on. Retaining a poor discourse is a small price to pay in the face of these ambitions. There is little point, though, in philosophical reflection on political and legal discourses to work out what conception of human rights fits the practice best. Here are two reasons why.A. Which discourse? Who cares?First, the question what is a human right? has a non-stip