Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy: 40th Anniversary Edition, Paperback

An expanded and updated edition of a classic work on human rights and global justice

Since its original publication, Basic Rights has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. Henry Shue asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? Shue argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter by the author examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights.

Henry Shue is professor emeritus of politics and international relations at Merton College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War and Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection.