Human Rights By Griffin's Theory Of Personhood Theory

To a great extent, the theory of personhood rests on a breaking down and clarification of what it is to be an agent. Human rights, as understood by Griffin, are protections of our status as functional human agents, grounded in our interests in autonomy, liberty and the minimum material provision requisite to make the exercise of our agency real and possible. Griffin acknowledges that the human interests in autonomy and liberty are not the only important interests that exist, but it is the protection of these particular interests that generate a human right . In this sense, autonomy and liberty are the special, determinant grounding elements identified by Griffin as the interests required for normative agency.

Inbuilt in the nature of the personhood theory,

Both the pluralist account as well as the personhood account will yield highly indeterminate and, or, unreasonable norms without specification of the threshold as to when an interest or autonomy does generate a right upon others. Griffin introduces this threshold through the addition of the further ground of ‘practicalities’, that rights need enough content so to generate a socially manageable claim. A pluralist perspective introduces threshold criterion through understanding a right to be an imposition of duties upon others, in addition to evaluating the ‘impossibility’ and ‘burdensomeness’ of a the interest. Therefore, if we are assessing not when a right is generated, but rather what can serve as the grounding of human right we return to the question of why the interest of liberty and autonomy are any more pertinent to the human condition than any other