The Promise of Human Rights. Jamie Mayerfeld
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rights are concerned with the interests of individual persons; they adopt the perspective of the individual. This does not imply atomistic individualism, since human rights also protect a wide range of social activity. But human rights value social groups because of their benefits to people, not the other way round. The starting point is the vulnerability of the individual; the main object, to protect individuals from various kinds of harm. These harms are often inflicted by groups, although one of the principal harms inflicted is to deprive individuals of the benefits and rewards of social life.
Belief in human rights does not imply a rejection of animal rights. Indeed, animals may have rights for some of the same reasons that humans have rights. Though I do not pursue the point here, a belief in human rights may lead to a deeper appreciation of animal rights, and even to the recognition of values beyond human and animal values.5 In any event, it is worth emphasizing that human rights claims do not exhaust the domain of morality, or even justice. A society that fully respects human rights could still be unjust in a number of ways.
Human rights, despite their superficial variety, possess an underlying rationale. There is a point to human rights. If we look, for example, at the Universal Declaration and the entitlements asserted over the course of its thirty articles, we can perceive some unifying themes and persistent concerns. The following is an attempt to render the basic values that underlie human rights. The precise wording is unimportant: other people may prefer different formulations that convey the same general idea.
On the account I present, human rights may be tied to the following four principles:
1. Persons have a fundamental interest in security. There are some fates that everyone has a reason to avoid. They include untimely death, severe injury, physical confinement, torture, terror, disease, chronic or severe pain, hunger, starvation, abandonment, forced isolation or separation, social humiliation, and lack of basic education and socialization. Everyone should be protected from these fates. Of the main principles that support the human rights idea, this is the least contested. Stuart Hampshire writes, “There is nothing mysterious or ‘subjective’ or culture-bound in the great evils of human experience, re-affirmed in every age and in every written history and in every tragedy and fiction: murder and the destruction of life, imprisonment, enslavement, starvation, poverty, physical pain and torture, homelessness, friendlessness. That these great evils are to be averted is the constant presupposition of moral arguments at all times and in all places.”6
2. Persons have a fundamental interest in autonomy. Everyone should be allowed to lead a life of one’s own choosing. Persons should be allowed to think their own thoughts, make their own plans, and choose their own company.7 The principle of autonomy recognizes that, once our most basic needs are guaranteed, individuals should be given considerable scope to define what is, for each, the most desirable life.8 In the world as a whole, belief in individual autonomy is somewhat less robust than belief in individual security. It encounters resistance from traditional societies (which believe individuals should adhere to prescribed roles), conservative religious groups (which seek the enforcement of scriptural rules limiting religious freedom, sexual freedom, and women’s freedom), and autocratic governments (which limit freedom of expression and association). When critics complain about the “Western” bias of human rights, they generally have in mind the importance attached to personal autonomy.
3. Persons are inviolable. Persons may not be treated as means only. They may not be used as a mere instrument for the pursuit of other goals, however worthy. That includes the goals of furthering other people’s security or autonomy. In an example well known to moral philosophers, a surgeon may not kill a healthy man to save the lives of five other people in need of the man’s transplanted organs. For the same reason, the police may not suspend due process and thereby condemn a certain number of innocent people to punishment, even if doing so will save a larger number of citizens from violent crime. Inviolability affirms our status as creatures whom it is morally forbidden to injure in certain egregious ways. Although philosophers debate how best to explain the principle of inviolability, it is politically indispensable for blocking the consequentialist rationales used by governments to justify all manner of cruelties.9
4. Persons deserve to be recognized and treated as equals. This principle goes beyond noting our equal inviolability and equal interest in security and autonomy. It upholds a claim to be accorded equal standing in the communities, especially the political communities, to which we belong. The principle excludes arbitrary or invidious discrimination, social caste systems, and stigmatization of entire groups. It bars the political subordination of one group of people to another. Equality is a recurrent principle of human rights charters and national constitutions. It is emphasized by the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is trumpeted in the classic human rights texts of John Lilburne, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. Practically speaking, it is a crucial condition for the respect of one’s other rights (though that may not be the only reason to uphold it).10
Security, autonomy, inviolability, and equality are the point of human rights. If we are asked, why human rights? these are the principles we can invoke. Their powerful appeal explains why the idea of human rights is so difficult to resist.
This may not be the most philosophically rigorous explanation of human rights. Yet it has important virtues. For a want of a better term, I shall call it a “public conception” of human rights.11 That is, it is an argument for human rights with which a great many people can agree, although their reasons for supporting it may vary.12 Do we want a deeper, philosophically more rigorous justification? There are a great many to choose from: Kantianism, consequentialism, contractualism, intuitionism, sentimentalism, conventionalism, constructivism, discourse ethics, Aristotelian perfectionism, natural law, and various religious traditions. Each has been identified as providing the strongest basis for human rights. All have inspired discussions that enrich our understanding and appreciation of the values underlying what I call the “public conception.” All the same, they tend to place heavy demands on our intellects—that is, they can be difficult to understand, and each is premised on the denial of at least some of the others. So focusing on these deeper justifications can bring uncertainty and dissension. It is worth recalling the existence of an “overlapping consensus”13 on a set of core principles that make sense of, help explain, and render coherent the human rights idea, even if the search for reasons behind the principles leaves us perplexed and divided.
Some people, struck by the clash of different people’s philosophical and religious worldviews, may say that collective human rights discourse should avoid talk of justification altogether. This goes too far in the opposite direction, and threatens to make belief in human rights seem accidental, arbitrary, contingent, and optional. Without a public justification, we cannot explain to one another the point of human rights, or have a shared basis for determining which items do and do not belong in a list of human rights, and our confidence that people really have human rights may begin to fade.
The fact is that we do care about people’s vulnerability to calamity, and people’s ability to make their own choices in life (not have others decide for them). We care that people be spared the most severe griefs, terrors, and humiliations. We care that their capacity to think, decide, and act not be forced down by the overriding preferences of others. For some of us, this is a moral starting point; for others, an inference from prior moral, religious, or philosophical premises. In either case, these are robust convictions, difficult to shake, which we have little reason to doubt, and which supply their own motivating power.
As befits a public conception of human rights, nothing about this story is original. The idea that security and autonomy are the two fundamental interests underpinning human rights has been invoked by many thinkers, though in different ways. Ronald Dworkin writes, “Government must treat those whom it governs with concern, that is, as human beings, who are capable of suffering and frustration, and with respect, that is, as human beings who are capable of forming and acting on intelligent conceptions of how their lives should be lived.”14 George Kateb echoes this idea, though he notes as a third feature of the human condition our capacity to treat others as equals: “Public