ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how one approach to public morality, the human rights approach, sheds light on some of our global duties regarding development. The chapter opens with a brief account of the Right to Development (1986) and shows why this right is problematic, both from the standpoint of development institutions and from the perspective of human rights theory as such. After discussing well-known problems associated with defining and ranking different categories of human rights, both in their moral (philosophical) and legal (institutional) senses, and in their ambivalent attachment to groups as well as individuals, the chapter concludes by showing how otherwise legal acts of water privatization and protection of drug licenses might run afoul of human rights to subsistence, health, and security whose protection is necessary for development.
