Reviewers of edited volumes (and their would-be publishers) often ask how well the chapters fit together. The assumption seems to be that the greater the cohesion, the greater the value or quality of the volume (or perhaps, the greater its marketability). Global Basic Rights, edited by Charles Beitz and Robert Goodin, disproves the value and quality arguments: It is a fine collection of essays that do not cohere particularly well but whose collection is nonetheless useful. The book, a Festschrift for Henry Shue, highlights the breadth and depth of his influence. Its eclecticism is thus an advantage, allowing readers to engage with Shue's ideas in unfamiliar contexts.

The editors frame the book mainly as a celebration of Shue's Basic Rights (1980, 1996 2d ed.), which has been tremendously important both for philosophers and for empirically-minded students of politics and international relations. His work on torture and on climate change also receives well-deserved attention here.

Turning to the essays, I am reminded that another reason reviewers emphasize coherence is that edited volumes are difficult to review: The less similar the chapters, the harder the review to write. I briefly discuss four themes running through the book and raise some questions in connection with them as a way of conveying the nature and scope of the essays—and of Shue's intellectual legacy.

A first theme concerns the role of rights in the international system. Christian Reus-Smit challenges the conventional wisdom that rights emerged on the global stage only after World War II. This view, he argues, misses and misrepresents the generative role of rights in constituting the states system. Seeing this reveals a paradox: Rights seem to generate and to constrain sovereign states. Andrew Hurrell asks whether the renewed significance of security, of balancing power, and of states' global economic role signals a turn from rights-based idealism to Westphalian realism. In his view, human rights condition states' sovereignty and help legitimize global governance, making a full return to Westphalia impossible.

Reus-Smit argues that rights require an institutional referent; since the sixteenth century, that referent has been the state (p. 45). That is persuasive but incomplete. Sometimes a state is the objective of rights politics: As Reus-Smit shows, rights-based movements destabilize empires and promote statehood. But he also recognizes that nation-state self-determination does not always facilitate rights (pp. 45–46). His account misses the face that sometimes the state is the target of rights politics. Internally, that is a story of liberalization and usually presumes self-determination; externally, though, it is a story about conditional sovereignty, as Hurrell recounts (pp. 66–69). Hence, Reus-Smit's paradox: two distinct but entangled processes—rights politics and demands for self-determination—interact to produce the global system. This complexity and its accompanying tensions require further investigation.

Conditionality might well limit sovereignty, but only in inverse proportion to power. David Luban and Jeremy Waldron's discussions of torture remind us (though not explicitly) that while some states' sovereignty might be conditional on their respect for rights, the sovereignty of others is not so conditioned. Richard Miller addresses such questions of power directly; Luban and Waldron, however, are concerned with torture and the right to security since 9/11.

Luban provides a powerful and eloquent refutation of the ubiquitous ticking bomb scenario, along with salutary cautions against basing ethics on exceptional cases and against “thinking the unthinkable.” After 9/11, the unthinkable was thought and acted upon—in more ways than one. Security mongers in the Bush administration stoked Americans' fears about terrorist attacks. Waldron worries that calling security a basic right might indirectly support their “9/11 argument” that rights must be traded for security—usually someone else's rights for our security (p. 223). Waldron acknowledges that the actual risk of terrorism for individuals is tiny, but, drawing on Joseph Raz, he endorses the idea of security as a public good, from which it is a short step to the “homeland security” ideal (pp. 214–15). This ideal, he warns, is a “voracious” one (p. 218), one he thinks the basic right of security might feed (p. 222).

I am not so sure. Shue's idea of standard threats, which Waldron neglects, works both to expand our understanding of what counts as a violation of a right and to establish limits for society's responsibility for protection. Shue advocates proportionality in such cases—something the security mongers have toiled against. The point is not to reject luggage screening but, rather, to emphasize that societies must approach defining and addressing threats in reasonable, deliberate ways. The idea of standard threats provides guidance for thinking about how demanding rights are in practice; it also insulates Shue from the 9/11 argument more effectively than Waldron realizes.

The demanding character of rights, and related debates about “positive” and “negative” duties, is a third theme of the volume. Elizabeth Ashford, by stressing the substantive interdependence of rights, powerfully challenges Onora O'Neill's claims that negative liberty rights are “perfect” while positive welfare rights are “imperfect” and incoherent. (The editors helpfully outline this debate; see pp. 10–14.) Judith Lichtenberg, in an attempt to put “another nail in the coffin of the distinction between negative and positive duties” (p. 88), finds significant flaws in Thomas Pogge's famous effort to portray duties to the global poor as negative duties. The duties are so demanding that they erase the distinction's appeal (p. 84), and they also suffer serious problems concerning the appropriate baseline for comparison (pp. 85–88).

It is hard to nail the coffin shut, however, when someone inside is kicking at the lid. Thomas Pogge's chapter reformulates his negative duty claim once again: There is “a general duty, insofar as we reasonably can, to avoid making uncompensated contributions to the deprivation of others and also to avoid receiving uncompensated benefits from such deprivation” (p. 129). Whether this will persuade Lichtenberg is doubtful; much more persuasive is Pogge's incisive analytic critique of basic rights as rights necessary for the enjoyment other rights. He shows decisively that “basicness” is problematic as formulated and requires serious reconsideration.

Neta Crawford and Miller respond to worries about demandingness in different, and intriguing, ways. Crawford focuses on moral motivations, arguing that individual and institutional moral capacities must be considered and cultivated together. Her claim that the individual dispositions and knowledge that support moral action must be developed through carefully designed institutions is compelling, though, unfortunately, her suggestions for institutional design toward this end remain embryonic.

Miller's concern with demandingness is rather different; he finds it unlikely that there is some as-yet undiscovered and unmet general duty that will rescue the poor. He appeals instead to duties grounded in concrete empirical relationships of power manifest in trade, conditionality, and imperial domination. These relationships give rise to duties not to exploit or manipulate others (p. 156). Whether Miller has found Ithaca I do not know; in Ulyssean fashion he covers a lot of territory, and at times seems tempted by the Siren song of general duties himself—as when describing duties of beneficence to states outside the “web of exploitation” (p. 177). Still, his attention to actual relationships of power offers welcome respite for those seeking shelter from the abstraction of these debates.

A final theme concerns the search for answers to another complex problem: climate change. Shue's pioneering work in this area always eschewed rights arguments, relying instead on claims about justice and fairness. Simon Caney, Beitz, and Goodin lament this decision. The editors worry that environmental rights often end up being too minimal and hope that Shue's emphasis on compromised agency might yield a solution (p. 21). Caney argues that climate change threatens important established rights, including rights to life, health, and subsistence. He proposes a modified version of Shue's proposal for assigning duties connected to these rights, allocating primary responsibility based on contribution to climate change and residual responsibility according to ability to pay.

It is unclear what work rights do in these analyses. In Basic Rights, Shue tried to persuade the rich to care about the poverty of distant strangers. He did so by invoking a right to subsistence, asserting that the empirical problem of poverty must also be seen as a moral problem, even by those not directly affected by it. The rights claim elevated the issue's moral standing, shifting the debate to duties and responsibilities for addressing it.

The moral and practical urgency of climate change are already clear enough; the problem is to devise a fair and effective scheme for addressing it. As the editors recognize, Shue's seminal contribution here was to emphasize the role of mediating institutions in allocating collective responsibilities (p. 22). It is not clear how invoking rights simplifies or even clarifies this problem: For Caney and for the editors, rights (re)define the harm done by climate change, but they do not figure into the proposed solutions.

Much more deserves to be said about these thoughtful essays. I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss them and, thus, in a small way to participate in honoring the work of Henry Shue.