114 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 33: 113 that maximum gains ar e made by minimizing goals. 3 It also trades rightsinflation for rights-ambition, channeling the attention of advocates towards the severest cases of material deprivation and treating these as violations by states towards their own citizens or even to those outside their territorial reach. With the minimum core concept as its guide, economic and social rights are supposed to enter the hard work of hard law. Yet rights-ambition is a difficult st ance, and even minimalist ambitions can be misplaced. Critics of the concept have suggested that paring down such rights to an essential core threatens the broader goal s of economic and social rights, or pretends a determ inacy that does not exist. 4 A long-standing criticism faults the mini mum core for directing ou r attention only to the performance of developing states, 5 leaving the legal di scourse of economic and social rights beyond the reach of th ose facing material deprivation in the middle or high income countries. A more recent criticism points to the concept’s tendency to rank different claimants of rights, while ignoring the more salient assessment of rights vers us macroeconomic growth or defense policies.6 Even the primary conceptual questi ons remain unanswered. Is the minimum core in Mali the same as the minimum core in Canada? 7 If country3. This is a slight variation on the perspectiv e of Michael Ignatieff, who defines m inimalism as an outlook capable of accommodating the fact that “people from different cultures may continue to disagree about what is good, but nevertheless agree about what is insufferably, unarguably wrong.” Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Ideology , in HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICS AND IDOLATRY 53, 56 (Amy Gutmann ed., 2001). Ignatieff suggests that this entails targeting “unm erited suffering and gross physical cruelty,” from which he excludes econom ic and social rights depriva tions altogether. Michael Ignatieff, Dignity and Aging , in HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICS AND IDOLATRY, supra, at 101, 173; cf. Joshua Cohen, Minimalism about Human Rights: The Most We Can Hope For? , 12 J. POL. PHIL. 190, 192 (2004) (distinguishing what he term s “justificatory minimalism” from “substantive m inimalism,” and canvassing the possibilities of a m inimalism that encompasses economic and social rights). The position of minimalism maintained in relation to arguments about a minimum core does not necessarily signal an acceptance of pluralism. See infra Parts II-III. 4. E.g., Brigit Toebes, The Right to Health, in ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: A TEXTBOOK 169, 176 (Asbjørn Eide, Catarina Krause & A llen Rosas eds., 2d ed. 2001) [hereinafter ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS] (“States could be encourag ed to put the elem ents not contained by the core into an ‘indefinite.’”). 5. MATTHEW CRAVEN, THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: A PERSPECTIVE ON ITS DEVELOPMENT 143-44, 152 (1995) [hereinafter CRAVEN, THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT]. But cf., U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm. on Econ., Soc. & Cultural Rights, Substantive Issues Arising in the Implem entation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Poverty and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ¶ 18, U.N. Doc. No. E/C.12/2001/ 10 (May 10, 2001) [hereinafter Statement: Poverty and the Covenant] (“[B]ecause poverty is a global phenomenon, core obligations have great relevance to some individuals and communities living in the richest States.”). 6. Karin Lehmann, In Defense of the C onstitutional Court: Litigating Economic and Social Rights and the Myth of the Minimum Core, 22 AM. U. INT’L L. REV. 163 (2006). 7. Compare Asbjørn Eide, Economic, Social and Cultural R ights as Human Rights , in ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS, supra note 4, at 27 (suggesting that “[t]he imm ediate obligations of states under Article 2 imply that countries with more resources have a higher level of core content or immediate duties than th ose with more limited resources”), and Craig Scott & Philip Alston, Adjudicating Constitutional Priorities in a Transnationa l Context: A Comment on Soobramoney’s Legacy and Grootboom’s Promise, 16 S. AFR. J. ON HUM. RTS. 206, 250 (2000) (“There is thus a distinction between relative (state-specific) core minimums and absolute core minimums. For instance, Canada’s core minimum will go con siderably beyond the absolute core minimum while Mali’s m ay go no further than this absolute core.”), with Fons Coomans, In Search of the Core Content of the Right to Education, in EXPLORING THE CORE CONTENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS: SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES 159, 167 (Danie Brand & Sage Rus sell eds., 2002) [hereinafter EXPLORING THE CORE CONTENT] (“A country-dependent core w ould undermine the concept of the