Sobre el estatuto de los derechos sociales: una relectura en clave normativa

In recent years social rights have made their way back to the forefront of the debate in legal philosophy as a vantage point from which to investigate how effective and sustainable they are, especially in the face of the abiding economic and financial crisis of 2008. The discussion has thus returned to the notion of social rights as “special” rights, revealing themselves to stand in conflict with the other fundamental rights, such as the basic freedoms, in that social rights are understood as moral rights entailing a duty of public bodies to deliver a corresponding service. In this article I argue, by contrast, that social rights are endowed with a normative force, in that their function and structure are not “reducible”: With other rights they share a foundation consisting in their merging the principles of freedom, equality, and dignity. In this sense, we not only have to move beyond the distinction between unconditional rights to freedom and conditional social rights, but we ought to also recognize that the latter are now powerfully emerging as an essential tool with which to tackle the alarming scenario of growing economic social inequalities and the increasing rate of poverty.