In debates about human rights, philosophers have tended to neglect social rights (i.e. the rights that protect our interpersonal, associative, and community-membership needs irrespective of our economic or political circumstances. Philosophers have focused instead on a familiar list of 'first generation' civil and political rights as well as a subset of the so-called 'second generation' socio-economic rights, namely the economic-welfare rights to shelter, basic subsistence, health and education.

This conference aims to bring together leading philosophers of human rights and rising stars to present frontier work on themes related to social rights, including the conceptual terrain, the place of social rights within the standard dichotomy between so-called 'liberty rights' and 'welfare rights', the defensibility of social rights as human rights, their relevance to distributive justice issues such as equality of opportunity, and their bearing on other branches of political philosophy such as democratic theory. The conference aims both to expand human rights theory and to set an agenda for further research.