The grammar of rights and the grammar of needs

Abstract

The paper is structured into four parts. Firstly I discuss the connection between the concept of injustice and the idea of human or individual rights. The claim is quite trivial: the language of rights has been and is still used as a strategy to demand correctives against injustice. Since this strategy has negative effects, of which concrete examples are given, I suggest a different grammar be adopted, the grammar of needs, which is what societies adopt in their justificatory discourses anyway. This leads into a consideration of how social criticism could start precisely from such discourses and why, under specific circumstances, the grammar of needs could represent a better strategy for this criticism than the language of rights does.