Debates about human rights neglect social rights. By ‘social rights’, I do not mean economic rights, such as basic subsistence, health, and education, which have received considerable attention. By ‘social rights’, I mean the rights that protect our fundamental interpersonal, associative, and community-membership needs irrespective of our economic circumstances. The project aims to remedy the neglect of these social needs by exploring 1) the theoretical and practical credentials of social human rights, and 2) the ethics and politics of sociability in acknowledging such rights. The project aims to show that we have more reason to attend to each other’s interpersonal needs than liberal thinking tends to recognise.

Within the category of social human rights, there is one particularly fundamental, but neglected right, which I call the human right against social deprivation. By ‘social deprivation’, I refer not to poverty, but to a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Social deprivation is a common experience in arenas of institutional segregation such as long-term medical quarantine and solitary confinement. It is also a common experience for people whose principal forms of social interaction are degrading or cruel. The human right against social deprivation can be fleshed out as a civil-political right and a socio-economic right. It faces such objections as redundancy, burdensomeness, unclaimability, infeasibility, and intolerability, which the project aims to answer.

Coercive social deprivation is the most extreme variant of a more general, pervasive phenomenon of social isolation that includes people, many of whom are elderly or disabled, who are chronically, acutely lonely and unable to remedy their situation. Such severe unwanted loneliness is a topical concern in the UK and elsewhere given aging populations and the individualistic bent of Western culture and policymaking that threatens social support structures.