The Great Gap: Economic Rights in a Global Economy


Paul Brienza, York University

This paper makes the broad claim that ‘economic rights’ are insufficiently enforced within the context of international human rights law. Economic rights, exemplified globally through such documents as the Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural rights include access to education, health care, and an adequate standard of living. However, these rights are often given scant attention by politicians, NGO’s, and the media. The focus is generally placed on the political rights of freedom of expression, participation, and the right to life threatened by genocidal state actors. This study argues that this lacuna of attention is interwoven within the global context of both the international human rights regime and the logic of the global economy. I begin with an examination of classical political economy and its excision of the idea of ‘rights within an economy’ from the very project of modern economics. To some extent, this excision begins with Adam Smith and the notion of a spontaneous order that allows for the question of a self-conscious moral stance as an economic actor to be effectively bracketed. Actors are conceived as essentially amoral, through the pursuit of immediate self-interest, while teleologically contributing to a wider social and communal good. By arguing that economic actors contribute to a wider social good through their self-interest, economic rights are effectively excised from economic thought. Further, the development of utilitarianism, exemplified by Bentham’s felicity calculus, defers the question of economic rights by arguing that self-interest is algorithmically calculable as a wider social good. I then turn to an analysis of the application of this principle to the context of the global economy. Corporate and state actors, in order to justify a continued sidelining of the issue of economic rights, apply the same argument by claiming that economic growth, fostered by self-interest, ultimately makes these rights either irrelevant or counterproductive to the amelioration of economic lives. It is argued, in other words, that economic rights must be submitted to the larger goal of growth. This strategy results in a never-ending postponement and deferral of economic rights to a time not yet here. Rights will come, they argue, when wealth is widely dispersed. Ultimately, this submerges the call for the implementation and enforcement of these rights to the logic of capitalist formation and a never-ending process of primitive accumulation. Finally, I turn to an examination of what I call the expediency factor. This is a process whereby the economic logic of capitalism practically marginalizes any call for economic justice in favor of an amoral justification of efficiency. This allows for corporations and state actors to ignore economic rights and to bracket any moral question of a just economy.

This paper will be presented at the following session: