Social Justice and Human Rights: a Conceptual Review

This article is an attempt to review the varied philosophical and ideational positions on two core tenets of social sciences - justice and rights. Social justice is a term which has origins in Greek thought and later utilitarianism and modernism. Another class of theorists have built on the elements of difference/diversity to conceptualise justice. Later theorists such as Rawls and Freire have brought in elements of criticality through difference and conscientisation principles in the gamut of discourse on social justice. Human rights, as a subset of social justice, is an amalgamated stance finding references in early Greek thought and modern thinkers. However the main focus on human rights has been in the contemporary times with thinkers such as Hart, Cranston, Feinberg, Pogge and Rorty as also non-western thinkers who have placed a premium on the concerns and interests of 'people in struggle and communities of resistance' at the centre stage. There are also antagonisms within an essentially chaste repertoire of rights highlighted through aspects of gendering, universalisms and essentialisms. The central concern of this article is to bring to a common platform some of the varied conceptual positions on justice as rights as the utopian visions of social science endeavours.