Global Changemakers

There is something very appealing in the idea that every person anywhere in the world, irrespective of citizenship, residence, race, class, caste or community, has some basic rights which others should respect. The big moral appeal of human rights has been used for a variety of purposes, from resisting torture, arbitrary incarceratinn and racial discrimination to demanding an end to hunger and starvation, and to medical neglect across the globe. At the same time, the basic idea of human rights, which people are supposed to have simply because they are human, is seen by many critics as entirely without any kind of a reasoned foundation. The questions that are recurrently asked are: do these rights exists. ? Where do they come from. ?

It is not disputed that the invoking of human rights can be very attractive as a general belief and it may even be politically effective as rhetoric. Sceptism and anxiety relate to what is thought to be the ‘softness’ or the ‘mushiness’ of the conceptual grounding of human rights. Many philosophers and legal theorists see the rhetoric of human rights as just loose talk-well-meaning and perhaps even laudable loose talk- which cannot, it is presumed, have much intellectual strenght.

The sharp contrast between the widespread use of the idea of human rights and the intellectual scepticism about its conceptual soundness is not new. The American Declaration of Independance took it to be ‘self-evident’ that everyone had ‘certain inalienable rights’, and thirteen years later, in 1789, the French declaration of ‘the rights of man’ asserted that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’. But it didnot take Jeremy Bentham long, in his Anarchical Fallacies written during 1791-2 and aimed against the French ‘rights of man’, to propose the total dismissal of all such claims. Bentham insisted that ‘natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and impriscriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, by which, I take it.

The dichotomy remains very much alive today, and despite persistent use of the Idea of human rights in the affairs of the world, there are many who see the idea as no more than ‘bawling upon paper’. The dismissal of human rights is often comprehensive and aimed against any belief that people can have simply by virtue of their humanity, rather than those they have contingently on specific qualifications such as citizenship, related to provisons in actual legislation or in the accepted ‘common laws’.

Human rights activhsts are often quite impatient with this intellectual scepticism, perhaps because many of those who invoke human rights are concerned with changing the world rather than interpreting it. It is not hard to understand the reluctance of the activist to spend much time in trying to provide conceptual justifications to convince sceptical theorists, given the obvious urgency to respond to terrible deprivations around the world. This proactive stance has had its rewards, since it has allowed the immediate use of the generally appealling idea of human rights to confront intense oppression or great misery, without having to wait for the theoritical air to clear. Nevertheless, conceptual doubts about the idea of human rights must be addressed and its intellectual basis clarified, if it is to command reasoned and sustained loyalty.

WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. ?

It is important to consider seriously the questioning of the nature and basis of human rights and to respond to the long and well established tradition of precipitately dismissing these claims. Bentham’s diagnosis that the rights of Man are just nonsense is merely a muscular expression of the general doubts that are shared – mildly or strongly by a great many people. The doubts demand serious analysis both for ascertaining their relevance to the idea of justice.

What exactly are human rights ? Are there, as is often asked, really such things. ? There are some variations in the ways in which the idea of human rights is invoked by different people. However, we can see the basic concerns behind these articulations by examining not only the contemporary practice of utilizing the concept, but also the history of its use over a very long period. That sustainable history includes the invoking of ‘inalieanable rights’ in the American Declaration of Independance and similar affirmations in the French declaration of the rights of man in the eighteenth century, but also the relatively recent adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The existence of human rights is obviously not like the existence of say Big Ben in the middle of London. Nor is it like the existence of a legislated law in the statute book. Proclamations of human rights, even though stated in the form of recognizing the existence of things that are called human rights, are really strong ethical pronouncements as to what should be done. They demand acknowledgement of imperatives and indicate that something needs to be done for the realization of these recognized freedoms that are identified through these rights. One thing they are not are claims that these human rights are already established legal rights, enshrined through legistation or common law.

If this is the way we understand human rights, then two questions immediately arise, concerning content and viability . The issue of content is the subject of the ethical assertion that is being made through the declaration of human right. To answer briefly , the ethical assertion is about the critical importance of certain freedoms and correspondingly about the need to accept some social obligations to promote or safeguard these freedoms. Both of these claims about freedom and obligations will have to be examined more fully .

The second question concerns the viability of the ethical claims that are involved in a declaration of human rights. Like other ethical claims that their proponents promote, there is an implicit presumption in making pronouncements on human rights that the underlying ethical claims will survive open and informed scrutiny. This is where the understanding of what is being discussed earlier . Indeed, the invoking of such an interactive process of critical scrutiny, open to arguments coming from others and sensitive to the relevant information that can be obtained, is a central feature of the general framework of ethical and political evaluation already explored in this work. Viability in impartial reasoning is seen, in this approach, as central to the vindication of human rights, even if such reasoning leaves considerable areas of ambiguity and dissonance. The discipline of scrutiny and viability has to be applied to the specific field of human rights and I shall return to that issue towards the end of this chapter.

The ethical pronouncements, with distinct political content, that belong to a declaration of human rights may come from persons or from institutions and they may be presented as individual remarks or as social pronouncements. They can also be rather prominently asserted by particular groups of people charged to examine these issues, such as the drafters of the American Declaration of Independance and of the French rights of man, or by the United Nations committee that authored the Universal Declaration. These group articulations may also receive some kind of an Institutional ratification, as happened, for example, in the vote in 1948 in the newly established United Nations. But what is being articulated or ratified is an ethical assertion – not a proposition about what is already legally guaranteed.

Indeed, these public articulations of human rights are often invitations to initate some fresh legislation, rather than relying on what is already seen as legally installed. The framers of the Universal Declaration in 1948 clearly hoped that the articulated recognition of human rights would serve as a kind of template for new laws that would be enacted to legalize those human rights across the world. The focus was on fresh legislation, and not just on more humane interpretation of existing legal protections.

Ethical proclamations of human rights are comparable to pronouncements in, say, utilitarian ethics – even though the substantive contents of the articulations of human rights are altogether different from utilitarian claims. Utilitarians wanp utiilities to be taken as the only things that ultimately matter and demand that policies be based on maximixing the sum total of utilities , whereas human rights advocates want the recognition of the importance of certain freedoms and the acceptance of some social obligations to safeguard them. But even as they differ on what exactly is demanded by ethics, their battle is on the same and shared general territory of ethical beliefs and pronouncements. And that is the point at issue here in answering the question: what are human rights. ?

Thus understood, an assertion of human right can indeed be compared with other ethical proclamations, such as happiness is important or autonomy matters or personal liberties must be preserved. The question , Are there really such things as human rights . ? Is thus comparable to asking , Is happiness really important. ? Or Does autonomy or liberty really matter. ? These are eminently discussable ethical questions and the viability of the particular claims made depends on the scrutiny of what is being asserted. The proof of existence that is often demanded from human rights activists is comparable to askhng for validation of ethical claims of other types from the Utilitarian to the Rawlsian or Nozickian. This is one way in which the subject of human rights relates closely to the focus of this article since public scrutiny is central to the approach that is being taken here.