The value of distributive equality—any ceiling on the wealth gap between rich and poor—is as absent from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as it is from the legal regimes and social movements that take it as their polestar. As Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently acknowledged in a pioneering attempt to consider the topic, “At present, there is no explicitly stated right to equality, as such, under international human rights law.”
True, the founding document of human rights announced status equality: according to its first article, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It may be true that, in a world devastated by the evils of racism and genocide, the assertion of bare status equality was itself a revolutionary act. Yet this same status equality implies nothing more. All rights are costly, especially economic and social rights, and if implemented have redistributive effects; however, not as part of an ambitious attempt to create a ceiling on inequality, but instead as part of a noteworthy but more modest effort to build a floor of protection against indigence. One could imagine one man owning everything—an absolute overlord—and he would not violate the current scheme of human rights, so long as everyone had their basic rights fulfilled. Even perfectly realized human rights are compatible with radical inequality.
Human rights in the age of national welfare
The assertion of human rights in the 1940s began as one version of the update to the entitlements of citizenship on whose desirability and necessity almost everyone agreed after depression and war. Franklin Roosevelt issued his famous call for a “second bill of rights” that included socioeconomic protections in his State of the Union address the year before his death. But in promising “freedom from want” and envisioning it “everywhere in the world,” Roosevelt in fact understated the actually egalitarian aspirations that every version of welfarism proclaimed. These went far beyond a low bar against indigence so as to guarantee a more equal society than before (or since). His highest promise, in his speech, was not a floor of protection for the masses but the end of “special privilege for the few”—a ceiling on inequality.
