The Promise of Human Rights. Jamie Mayerfeld
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right only if its violation is morally wrong (and of course not every wrong act is correlated to a human right).
Some writers have disputed this picture.28 They say we should become used to the idea of human rights being in conflict, that the identification of a human right marks the beginning, not the end, of a moral discussion. We should (in this view) recognize the existence of plural and competing values and the moral quandaries in which they land us; human rights discourse should incorporate the truth of moral pluralism into its own terms. But this proposal represents too abrupt a departure from ordinary usage. It drains the concept of human rights of its moral force. Sooner or later we would have to coin a new term to do the work now done by “human rights,” and such linguistic reshuffling would be an unnecessary invitation to confusion and misunderstanding. The concept of human rights does not deny (or affirm) that values conflict. It merely says that some ways of treating human beings are morally unacceptable. Since that happens to be true, the existing usage is worth preserving.
Socioeconomic Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts several social and economic rights. They include economic subsistence (adequate provision of food, clothing, housing, and health care); security against destitution from old age, disease, disability, and unemployment; safe and dignified conditions of work (with the right to form trade unions as a necessary protection of this right); opportunities for rest and leisure; and education.
The existence of socioeconomic rights has been denied. The only true human rights, some claim, are civil and political. The skeptical position has been strongly rebutted in philosophical arguments made over the past forty years.29 Here I confine myself to some cursory remarks. Note that I am not interested in challenging economic libertarianism in general, but only the strong version of it that denies that there are any socioeconomic rights.
We should first notice the extreme nature of the skeptical position. It implies that no one’s human rights are violated if children are deprived of an education, or workers are subjected to unsafe working conditions, or trauma victims are denied emergency medical services, or orphans, the severely disabled, the unemployed, or the unemployable are left to starve.
Socioeconomic rights are grounded in the same values as civil-political rights. They are necessary to a minimally decent existence; some of them (such as food and basic health services) are necessary to any existence at all. Like protection from violent assault, they honor our fundamental interest in security. They are also necessary for autonomy: their deprivation confines one to a set of severely reduced, often grim opportunities, or no opportunities at all. To deny people these goods—to let them go hungry, or permit their deterioration from easily cured disease, or leave them unattended when no cure is available, or refuse them shelter, or subject them to slave-like work, or keep them illiterate—is to deny their basic dignity.
Skeptics posit fundamental differences between civil-political and socioeconomic rights. It is claimed, for example, that civil-political rights imply negative duties (duties not to inflict harm) whereas socioeconomic rights imply positive duties (duties to provide help); or that civil-political rights are less demanding than socioeconomic rights; or that unlike socioeconomic rights they can be universally fulfilled; or that they lend themselves more easily to legal enforcement; or that civil-political rights imply individual duties whereas socioeconomic rights imply collective ones; or that the duties implied by civil-political rights are clear and determinate while those implied by socioeconomic rights are vague and indeterminate. These differences, it is claimed, constitute the line between genuine and spurious human rights.
If the differences seem real at first glance, they fade on closer inspection. Begin with the alleged distinction between negative and positive rights. As several scholars have shown, all human rights imply a package of both negative and positive duties. The right not to be violently assaulted entails more than a moral obligation of fellow citizens and government agents not to commit assault. It requires positive measures by government to protect citizens from assault. When governments leave certain private groups free to terrorize a particular segment of the population, those governments are properly accused of violating human rights.30 An effective police force, functioning system of criminal and civil justice, and competent regulatory regime are measures necessitated by our rights to physical safety and security of property. And while the negative duty of governments not to harm the innocent and not to inflict excessive harm on the guilty is central to any human rights conception, this obligation is reinforced by an elaborate system of positive duties, including habeas corpus and the numerous undertakings that constitute the guarantee to a fair trial. Moreover, rights imply remedies. If there are no rights without a remedy, then civil-political rights no less than socioeconomic ones entail positive duties.31
Just as civil-political rights imply positive duties, so socioeconomic rights imply negative duties. One reason for emphasizing socioeconomic rights is precisely that they prohibit grievous inflictions of harm. Humans have long inflicted starvation through blockade, siege, and seizure. During the 1932–33 terror-famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, Soviet officials seized food from the homes of starving peasants. Three-quarters of a million people or more died in the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Nor should we forget that land seizures by white settlers caused vast numbers of American Indians to die from hunger; that Mao Zedong’s grain requisitions in the Great Leap Forward killed millions of Chinese; that crushing taxes and shredding of local safety nets by agents of the British Empire caused severe famines in colonial India; that as many as a half million children died from UN sanctions against Iraq between 1990 and 2003; or that food blockages to starving civilians are still used as a method of war in Africa.32 Evictions and housing demolitions cause widespread homelessness, often depriving those affected of access to employment and basic social services.33 Large numbers of people lose access to safe drinking water through government or private company diversion of traditional water sources or through the industrial pollution of the water supply.34
The deprivation of socioeconomic goods, in other words, often takes an active rather than a passive form. But, in addition, the very distinction between active and passive deprivation is systematically misperceived. In all societies, property, whether private or communal, is constituted by norms that are coercively enforced.35 The authorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union did not permit agricultural workers to dissolve collective farms into private plots, just as U.S. authorities today do not permit landless farmhands to establish their own plots on large commercial estates. What looks superficially like passive deprivation—people not owning or not being able to purchase or not being given particular resources—is in fact a case of active deprivation whereby human agents use force or the threat of force to enforce institutionalized rules determining who owns what. The wealthy landowner who evicts the starving poacher from his orchard, or the baker who hauls Jean Valjean to the police for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children, may not be perceived as engaging in an act of positive deprivation, but that is exactly what they do. Similarly for all those who assisted the export of grain from famine-stricken Ireland, India, Ukraine, and rural China while local people died from hunger. Institutions are human arrangements and therefore involve human agency and choice, however much we take them for granted. To prevent someone from taking something (or to force him to return what he has taken) is a form of action. If we think that individuals who lack some good should be prevented from taking it, we must make our case on grounds other than the distinction between active and passive behavior. (For example, we might argue on other grounds that the good is the rightful property of the current possessor. The appeal to private property as a reason for rejecting socioeconomic rights is discussed below.)
Other alleged differences between civil-political and socioeconomic rights fare no better. Consider the socioeconomic right to safe working conditions. This right is legally enforceable. It creates obligations for individual employers and managers (obligations that are often negative in character, for example, not to expose workers to dangerous chemicals or block safety exits). It is less costly to guarantee than several civil-political rights, such as the right to a fair trial. And it can be specified with some precision.
It has been claimed that physical scarcity makes it impossible for certain socioeconomic rights such as the right to food to be universally