130 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 33: 113 what Henry Shue has ter med “basic rights.”88 This focus on life and survival is able to transcend the prioritizatio n of civil and political rights over economic and social ri ghts by drawing attention to the moral equivalence of subsistence rights and security rights because of their mutual relation to survival. 89 Putting to one side the difficu lties in “equivalence” once the question of who the relevant duties holders are and what the correlative duties consist of, 90 the focus on life, survival, and basic needs has the additional advantage of pointing to the requirements for righ ts protections that are apparently self-evident, rather than requirin g a more contr oversial examination of what is needed for the satisfaction of more elaborate aims, and a “thicker” understand ing of the good life. 91 For proponents of this survivalbased view, the boundari es drawn around the minimum core are neater, and more cognizable, than those around the more ambitiou s formulations. Thus, a fixed set of entitlements may emerge, he lped by less open-ended criteria such as triage or urgency.92 Nonetheless, I ar gue that there are a number of objections to the economy of ambition behi nd the focus on “basic needs.” Most significant is the objection that the minimalist fo cus on survival and life misses the important connections between dignity and human flour ishing that are intrinsic to many interpretations of the right to li fe. These expansive interpretations, issued by both in ternational human rights tribunals and national courts, allow t he protection of life to serve as a vehicle for other norms.93 Advocates of a sur vival-based “basic needs” inquiry dismiss these more elevated conceptions of life as both too encompassing and too unlimited, likening them to “a free-f or-all provision, implicated by default in all human rights abuses that affect a pers on’s ‘dignity’ or ‘life pr ospects.’”94 Yet what these detractors miss is that the focus on bi ological survival can s et the interpretations of economic and social rights on the wrong ground. A focus on needs may disclose little ab out what (or “whose”) ba sic functioning deserves priority. We need additional principl es over simple survival, for example, those we would find when we as k whether the minimum core of the right to 88. SHUE, supra note 78, at 19 (“[R]ights are ba sic . . . if enjoyment of them is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights.”). 89. Id. at 25. (suggesting not only a moral equivalen ce, but perhaps the gr eater moral duty to prevent deprivations of the material essentials of survival, because of the utter helplessness that the latter can engender). 90. CECILE FABRE, SOCIAL RIGHTS UNDER THE CONSTITUTION: GOVERNMENT AND THE DECENT LIFE 53-54 (2000) (suggesting that Shue’s argument sacrifices important features of rights). 91. E.g., BILCHITZ, supra note 9, at 179-80 (favoring a surv ival-based definition to the minimum core as fitting more adequately with a thin theory of the good applicable to a diverse range of individuals). For the source of the th in theory of the good, and its restri ction to the bare essentials, see RAWLS, supra note 74, at 348. 92. BILCHITZ, supra note 9, at 187 (arguing that the interest in survival is the most urgent, due to its prior importance to other values). 93. Craig Scott, The Interdependence and Permeability of Human Rights No rms: Towards a Partial Fusion of the International Covenants on Human Rights , 27 O SGOODE HALL L.J. 769, 771 (1989) (articulating this im portant relation as one of “perm eability,” which refers to “the openness of a treaty dealing with one category of human rights to ha ving its norms used as ve hicles for the d irect or indirect protection of norms of another treaty dealing with a different category of human rights”). 94. Melish, supra note 14, at 326 (decrying e xpansive formulations of life as representing a “potentially illimitable scope, capable of subsuming into their protective embrace virtually all nationally and internationally recognized human rights”).