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On Human Rights
Are there any human rights that apply to all women and all men in all cultures at all times? Can we ground human rights in an abstract rationality possessed by every human being? Or, as some philosophers have claimed, are attempts to ground human rights doomed to failure? Do human rights in any case need such grounding? On Human Rights, the second book in the Oxford Amnesty Lecture Series, presents the opinions of seven distinguished contributors who approach the problem of universal human rights from a variety of perspectives using a wealth of contemporary and historical material. The essays make a significant contribution to the theory and practice of human rights . They grapple with the hard questions that confront anyone concerned with responding appropriately to the numerous violations of human rights that surround us.
- GenresPhilosophy
272 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 1994
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July 13, 2020
This is a collection of essays by seven philosophers on the subject of human rights, sponsored by Amnesty International in 1993. Many of the essays discuss then-current events and human rights abuses that occurred during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). I read the book because a friend recommended I read Richard Rorty, and this happened to be the only book my local library had with Rorty as an author. So I started with Rorty's essay, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," which ended up being my favorite of the collection.
Rorty argues that atrocities happen because the perpetrators don't view their victims as real human beings, so the perpetrators don't see themselves as violating human rights, but instead often see themselves as good people doing the right thing. Per Rorty, rationalist philosophers like Kantians and utilitarians have tried to create rational grounds to compel everyone to attribute humanity and human rights to all people, but this hasn't worked very well, and has been countered by the ideas of irrationalist philosophers like Nietzsche. What has worked better to protect human rights has been the growth of cultures with a shared consensus of believing in human rights, reinforced by education in that belief. And what has been most effective in expanding that culture and broadening our vision of who is really human is sentimental stories that help us empathize with others who aren't like us.
Interestingly, another author I recently read, Amos Oz (in Dear Zealots) makes a similar argument that imagination and curiosity might be the best remedies against the various kinds of fanaticism that drive people to violence against one another. And Rorty's argument, which I think is correct, also puts Zadie Smith's reflections on the importance of fiction into a different light where fiction in which authors represent people unlike themselves should be considered crucial for fighting prejudice, rather than as one of the most egregious forms of prejudice which ought to be censored, as far-left orthodoxy would sometimes seem to have it.
It's funny because I suppose in theory, stories as sentimental education should be able to work both ways, to increase prejudice by portraying certain groups as inhuman and wicked, but you don't often hear about the literature of prejudice having a seminal effect on regressing human rights or being wildly popular. E.g., there is a certain novel I won't link to by a French author, that was translated into English and has been taken up enthusiastically by the alt-right and white nationalists in the U.S., which presents non-white refugees as disgusting swarming animals who threaten European civilization. But I haven't seen it on any bestseller lists, unlike American Dirt, which, despite the controversy around it is a sentimental novel that clearly has the ambition of humanizing refugees (and which the far left subjected to intense hate on the grounds that its author was writing about things she hadn't personally experienced, i.e. fiction).
Another interesting case is Gone with the Wind, which of course was a mega-bestseller; did Gone with the Wind increase prejudice with its nostalgic views of slavery? Or did it create more empathy for all its subjects, Southerners as well as the Black characters, and result in the first Oscar win for a Black actress, Hattie McDaniels - despite being justly criticized for infantilizing the Black characters it meant to portray positively? In general, I think the nature of fiction makes it an ineffective tool for dehumanizing ideologies, since even villains of popular novels and movies tend to get their own fandoms, as people make up humanizing backstories for them.
And I think Rorty is right that one can't reason oneself or others into empathy. In fact, I would argue, the reason humanism is often thought of as the unbeliever's replacement for religious faith is precisely because humanist ethics relies on taking a leap of faith, just as religion does - and I would argue that we shouldn't have a problem with that; the fact that we can choose to put our faith in humanist values is how we know we're free human beings.
My second favorite essay of the collection was by the French postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Other's Right." This was a beautifully written, lyrical and poetic reflection on the relationship of speech to human rights. Since topics like free speech, open debate, and cancel culture have been very much in the news this week, it felt urgently contemporary despite having been published almost 30 years ago. Lyotard writes about how the ability to speak is fundamentally bound up with being considered human within a civic community, so being silenced, shut out from the possibility of discourse, is a form of "abjection" or painful suffering. But there is no right without a corresponding duty, and being granted the right to be in the community of speakers comes with a corresponding duty of civilization.
As Lyotard see it, civilization is a learning process, and learning requires voluntary silence so as to listen and absorb knowledge. Responsible membership in the community of speakers also entails a duty to speak, to help inform and educate others. "By authorizing every possible speaker to address others, the republic makes it every speaker's duty to announce to others what they do not know. It encourages announcements; it instructs. And, on the other hand, it forbids that anyone be arbitrarily deprived of speech. It discourages terror. In this way it governs silence in everyone's best interest, authorizing the silence of discipline and outlawing the silence of despotism."
Fascinatingly, Lyotard quotes Edmund Burke, who "termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night." A further point is that people who are traumatized by undergoing atrocities have difficulty communicating about their experience, and this is its own form of abjection, as is being forbidden to speak of such experiences.
This is getting long, so I won't go too deeply into the other essays. The first one is by Steven Lukes, and was also well-written and engaging, using storytelling to compare what life would be like in countries governed by different philosophies like utilitarianism, Marxism, communitarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarianism, where the first three reject the notion of individual human rights, and the latter two elevate such notions. He makes an engaging argument for balancing aspects of the different utopias in developing real-world systems of governance. An essay by Marxist-feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon was focused on the legal issues of prosecuting crimes such as mass rapes in the Bosnian War. There was an essay by John Rawls that I was excited to read just because I'd never read Rawls before, and his Theory of Justice is such a seminal work in 20th-century thought; but sadly I didn't get much out of it because on the one hand, the tone was very dry and abstract, and on the other hand, it seemed to be a continuation of other arguments rather than a stand-alone essay, so I had a hard time following some of the ideas.
Then there was an essay by Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller that focused on questions of punishing war crimes. Her style was quite readable and well-organized, and her approach is to lay out a bunch of different arguments and then consider each one in turn without right away agreeing or disagreeing with them, which I liked because it felt like she was striving hard for objectivity. She considers some oddly persuasive arguments for positions I would never have thought could be compelling, such as that war crimes shouldn't punished because of the issues they raise with regard to the rule of law (can you be punished in retrospect for doing what was legal at the time?).
I like her points that "moral conflicts are always contextual," and that evil is different from moral badness, in that evil people are those who create confusion between good and evil, convincing others that evil is good, and thereby causing large numbers of people to do terrible harm. It's hard to punish evil, because evil people tend to be shameless. She concludes that "Evil cannot be punished, but it is self-destructive," which intuitively sounds right to me. In fact, that was part of why I chose the ending I did for my own novel, The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment, where the hero tells the villainness at one point, "You've always been your own worst enemy."
And lastly, there was an essay by Jon Elster, which examined anti-majoritarian elements of different countries' constitutions. That one was a bit technical, but the interesting thing was that he concludes that "despotism overthrown gives rise to new forms of despotism." He sees it as being the Eastern European countries that had been subjected to the worst despotism whose new democratic constitutions had the least curbs on majority oppression of minority and individual interests - Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. He finds the opposite true of countries like Hungary which suffered less despotism. That's just interesting because 30 years later, it's Hungary, along with Russian and Poland, that has done the worst backsliding from democracy into illiberal autocracy, neo-fascist ethnonationalism, and mafia state oligarchy ...
Rorty argues that atrocities happen because the perpetrators don't view their victims as real human beings, so the perpetrators don't see themselves as violating human rights, but instead often see themselves as good people doing the right thing. Per Rorty, rationalist philosophers like Kantians and utilitarians have tried to create rational grounds to compel everyone to attribute humanity and human rights to all people, but this hasn't worked very well, and has been countered by the ideas of irrationalist philosophers like Nietzsche. What has worked better to protect human rights has been the growth of cultures with a shared consensus of believing in human rights, reinforced by education in that belief. And what has been most effective in expanding that culture and broadening our vision of who is really human is sentimental stories that help us empathize with others who aren't like us.
Interestingly, another author I recently read, Amos Oz (in Dear Zealots) makes a similar argument that imagination and curiosity might be the best remedies against the various kinds of fanaticism that drive people to violence against one another. And Rorty's argument, which I think is correct, also puts Zadie Smith's reflections on the importance of fiction into a different light where fiction in which authors represent people unlike themselves should be considered crucial for fighting prejudice, rather than as one of the most egregious forms of prejudice which ought to be censored, as far-left orthodoxy would sometimes seem to have it.
It's funny because I suppose in theory, stories as sentimental education should be able to work both ways, to increase prejudice by portraying certain groups as inhuman and wicked, but you don't often hear about the literature of prejudice having a seminal effect on regressing human rights or being wildly popular. E.g., there is a certain novel I won't link to by a French author, that was translated into English and has been taken up enthusiastically by the alt-right and white nationalists in the U.S., which presents non-white refugees as disgusting swarming animals who threaten European civilization. But I haven't seen it on any bestseller lists, unlike American Dirt, which, despite the controversy around it is a sentimental novel that clearly has the ambition of humanizing refugees (and which the far left subjected to intense hate on the grounds that its author was writing about things she hadn't personally experienced, i.e. fiction).
Another interesting case is Gone with the Wind, which of course was a mega-bestseller; did Gone with the Wind increase prejudice with its nostalgic views of slavery? Or did it create more empathy for all its subjects, Southerners as well as the Black characters, and result in the first Oscar win for a Black actress, Hattie McDaniels - despite being justly criticized for infantilizing the Black characters it meant to portray positively? In general, I think the nature of fiction makes it an ineffective tool for dehumanizing ideologies, since even villains of popular novels and movies tend to get their own fandoms, as people make up humanizing backstories for them.
And I think Rorty is right that one can't reason oneself or others into empathy. In fact, I would argue, the reason humanism is often thought of as the unbeliever's replacement for religious faith is precisely because humanist ethics relies on taking a leap of faith, just as religion does - and I would argue that we shouldn't have a problem with that; the fact that we can choose to put our faith in humanist values is how we know we're free human beings.
My second favorite essay of the collection was by the French postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Other's Right." This was a beautifully written, lyrical and poetic reflection on the relationship of speech to human rights. Since topics like free speech, open debate, and cancel culture have been very much in the news this week, it felt urgently contemporary despite having been published almost 30 years ago. Lyotard writes about how the ability to speak is fundamentally bound up with being considered human within a civic community, so being silenced, shut out from the possibility of discourse, is a form of "abjection" or painful suffering. But there is no right without a corresponding duty, and being granted the right to be in the community of speakers comes with a corresponding duty of civilization.
As Lyotard see it, civilization is a learning process, and learning requires voluntary silence so as to listen and absorb knowledge. Responsible membership in the community of speakers also entails a duty to speak, to help inform and educate others. "By authorizing every possible speaker to address others, the republic makes it every speaker's duty to announce to others what they do not know. It encourages announcements; it instructs. And, on the other hand, it forbids that anyone be arbitrarily deprived of speech. It discourages terror. In this way it governs silence in everyone's best interest, authorizing the silence of discipline and outlawing the silence of despotism."
Fascinatingly, Lyotard quotes Edmund Burke, who "termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night." A further point is that people who are traumatized by undergoing atrocities have difficulty communicating about their experience, and this is its own form of abjection, as is being forbidden to speak of such experiences.
This is getting long, so I won't go too deeply into the other essays. The first one is by Steven Lukes, and was also well-written and engaging, using storytelling to compare what life would be like in countries governed by different philosophies like utilitarianism, Marxism, communitarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarianism, where the first three reject the notion of individual human rights, and the latter two elevate such notions. He makes an engaging argument for balancing aspects of the different utopias in developing real-world systems of governance. An essay by Marxist-feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon was focused on the legal issues of prosecuting crimes such as mass rapes in the Bosnian War. There was an essay by John Rawls that I was excited to read just because I'd never read Rawls before, and his Theory of Justice is such a seminal work in 20th-century thought; but sadly I didn't get much out of it because on the one hand, the tone was very dry and abstract, and on the other hand, it seemed to be a continuation of other arguments rather than a stand-alone essay, so I had a hard time following some of the ideas.
Then there was an essay by Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller that focused on questions of punishing war crimes. Her style was quite readable and well-organized, and her approach is to lay out a bunch of different arguments and then consider each one in turn without right away agreeing or disagreeing with them, which I liked because it felt like she was striving hard for objectivity. She considers some oddly persuasive arguments for positions I would never have thought could be compelling, such as that war crimes shouldn't punished because of the issues they raise with regard to the rule of law (can you be punished in retrospect for doing what was legal at the time?).
I like her points that "moral conflicts are always contextual," and that evil is different from moral badness, in that evil people are those who create confusion between good and evil, convincing others that evil is good, and thereby causing large numbers of people to do terrible harm. It's hard to punish evil, because evil people tend to be shameless. She concludes that "Evil cannot be punished, but it is self-destructive," which intuitively sounds right to me. In fact, that was part of why I chose the ending I did for my own novel, The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment, where the hero tells the villainness at one point, "You've always been your own worst enemy."
And lastly, there was an essay by Jon Elster, which examined anti-majoritarian elements of different countries' constitutions. That one was a bit technical, but the interesting thing was that he concludes that "despotism overthrown gives rise to new forms of despotism." He sees it as being the Eastern European countries that had been subjected to the worst despotism whose new democratic constitutions had the least curbs on majority oppression of minority and individual interests - Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. He finds the opposite true of countries like Hungary which suffered less despotism. That's just interesting because 30 years later, it's Hungary, along with Russian and Poland, that has done the worst backsliding from democracy into illiberal autocracy, neo-fascist ethnonationalism, and mafia state oligarchy ...
January 17, 2024
Sobre Crímenes de guerra - Crímenes de paz: Otorga ejemplos muy útiles sobre delitos contra las mujeres y sobre el carácter sexuado de los derechos humanos. ¿Cómo se puede hablar de derechos humanos si estos excluyen a la mitad de la población? Es un genocidio universalmente ignorado.
January 31, 2022
read Rorty's piece where he talks about phallogocentrism lol. but mainly this lecture is about sentimentality and rationality in the human rights movement in light of the recent Bosnian Genocide
July 28, 2012
In 90's the essays by Richard Rorty and Katherine MacKinnon affected me, particularly, having sympathy on those who are very different from ouselves.
December 7, 2014
Really useful for mah asignment.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews