Various kinds of rights talk have existed for a long time, but it has been argued (see here, for instance) that the concept of human rights as we know it is only as old as the 1970s. It isn't timeless or universal, and I don't think we can explain why something is wrong by appealing to a human right that it violates. Rather, we should identify rights (if we're going to do so at all) by thinking about what is unjust or unacceptable. And I think that we should try to identify human rights and protect them. Basically I think the work of such groups as Human Rights Watch (formerly Helsinki Watch) is valuable and that they should not feel that they ought to change their names (no offense to Helsinki!). To my ears these are pretty minimal claims, and they might not sound worth defending. But my sense is that they need to be defended.
I won't go into why I have this sense here (although I could if anyone wanted me to), nor will I spend much time on arguments against rights talk. Instead, I'll mention a couple of apparent problems with the notion of human rights, and say a little about why I don't think these are major concerns for a certain kind of metaphysically innocent talk about rights.
Tommi Uschanov, in a comment on a previous post, brought up this passage from Raimond Gaita, and suggested that talk about violating someone's rights would be right at home in the list of parodies:
[...] if one puts in the mouth of the remorseful person many of the philosophical accounts of what makes an obligation a moral obligation or a principle a moral principle, of the nature of morality and of its authority, we get parody. 'My God what I have done? I have violated the social compact, agreed behind a veil of ignorance.' 'My God what have I done? I have ruined my best chances of flourishing.' 'My God what have I done? I have violated rational nature in another.' 'My God what have I done? I have diminished the stock of happiness.' 'My God what have I done? I have violated my freely chosen principles.' An answer must surely be given to why, at one of the most critical moments of moral sobriety, so many of the official accounts of what it is for something to be of moral concern, the accounts of the connection between obligation and what it means to wrong someone, appear like parodies. (Gaita, Good and Evil, 2nd edn., p. xxi)I agree that "My God, what have I done? I have violated someone's human rights" sounds like a parody. But all of these examples seem to sound ridiculous because they substitute an account of why an act might be wrong for a description of the wrong act. Think of murder. What belongs after "What have I done?" is something like "I have killed a man. Someone's husband. Someone's father. Someone's son. I have ended, taken, a human life." Perhaps what belongs is also a certain amount of incoherence. Weeping and wailing would not be out of place. Rational accounts of why murder is wrong would be. I think that Gaita has a point, but it would be unfair (or simply a mistake) to dismiss all attempts to explain the wrongness of killing out of hand.
I think that killing people is always bad (that doesn't sound strong enough, but I hesitate to say 'evil' because it sounds both melodramatic (and what does that say?) and religious), even if sometimes it is the least bad thing one can do. Why it is bad is hard to say, just as why life is good is hard to say. Killing someone harms them, of course (at least usually), but it also harms the world. It is like an anti-miracle. So it isn't only bad because of what it does to the victim. And reference to the victim's rights will not explain what is so bad about it. Such reference is only a kind of shorthand for talking about this badness. But shorthand has its uses.
What about rights violations other than murder? Rape and torture are morally similar to murder, I think. Arguably not as bad, but in their worst forms probably just as bad, and maybe even worse. I don't know how much sense it makes (nor how decent it is) to make comparisons like this among them, which is partly why I put them in the same ballpark or category. I'm not sure that anything else belongs here, that anything else is as bad as murder, rape, and torture, but it doesn't follow that the only rights are those not to suffer these things. As to what other rights there might be, I can't do better than Mill's idea that rights concern the essentials of human well-being. What these are needs to be seen.
Some are obvious. Not to everyone, of course, but almost nothing is obvious to babies and animals. It takes education to learn to see what's obvious. This does not mean that it isn't obvious after all. It just means that what is obvious is relative in some sense. 'Obvious' means something like very easy to discern, but discernment is not possible for every being (a slug could not have a discerning eye for fake Dalis) and takes training, education, or acculturation for everyone. Discernment, even of the very easy kind, is for the connoisseur. The very basic requirements of human well-being ought to be pretty obvious things, but a) they need not therefore be obvious to everyone, and b) they might only be obvious after they have been pointed out. This is, I think, how Wittgenstein describes Indian mathematics somewhere. A demonstration is written or drawn and the words "Look at this" are added. Once seen there is no need for any further proof of the truth demonstrated, but the demonstration presupposes that what is there to be seen will not already have been seen by everyone. And it might take some looking even then to see it, I imagine.
Gaita was preceded by William Gass, who made a similar point in "The Case of the Obliging Stranger" (Phil. Review, 1957). After presenting a hypothetical vignette (at least, I hope that it is hypothetical) in which he bakes a man in an oven, the author invites us to consider the reasons that various "moralists" would give for why his action was wrong:
ReplyDeleteConsider:
My act produced more pain than pleasure.
Baking this fellow did not serve the greatest good to the greatest number.
I acted wrongly because I could not consistently will that the maxim of my action become a universal law.
God forbade me, but I paid no heed.
Anyone can apprehend the property of wrongness sticking plainly to the whole affair.
Decent men remark it and are moved to tears.
But I don't like the word 'fiction' because it seems to undermine the sense that such rights are important.
ReplyDeleteI see clearly what would make you dislike the word, but isn't one way of responding to the dislike to point out that fiction is itself important - even morally important - and that calling something fiction is not necessarily an accusation? (Indeed, isn't the view that fiction is morally important widely taken to be one of the distinguishing marks of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy?)
I agree that "My God, what have I done? I have violated someone's human rights" sounds like a parody. But all of these examples seem to sound ridiculous because they substitute an account of why an act might be wrong for a description of the wrong act.
But that's exactly what rights talk seems to me to consist of - this same substitution. In other words, I don't see what the addition of rights talk to (say) the public pronouncements of a human rights organisation is adding to the same human rights organisation's merely describing various wrong acts. Certainly, when I read the reports of a human rights organisation such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, what stirs me is always the description of the wrong acts themselves, not the rights talk surrounding them. The latter sounds often enough like a Wittgensteinian idling wheel or fake corbel. Unsere Forderung ist eine architektonische. (Remember though that I defended the legitimacy of architectural requirements in our recent discussion, as long as they are seen for what they are!)
As to what other rights there might be, I can't do better than Mill's idea that rights concern the essentials of human well-being. What these are needs to be seen. Some are obvious. Not to everyone, of course, but almost nothing is obvious to babies and animals. It takes education to learn to see what's obvious.
Compare the proto-Gaita "Anyone can apprehend the property of wrongness sticking plainly to the whole affair" quoted from Gass in the comment above.
This is the part where reminders of the historicality of human rights are relevant. If "rights concern the essentials of human well-being", and this can be seen with the kind of discernment that is the result of education, the rights cannot be very universal, considering the very wide intertemporal and intercultural variation in conceptions of human well-being.
I was reminded of A. E. Murphy's critique of Brand Blanshard, to which D. Z. Phillips refers in the introduction to Rhees's Moral Questions (pp. xi-xiii). To even argue about human rights violations requires at least some common ground, but the average human rights violation is itself something that bespeaks the absence of such common ground. And progress in human rights very often comes not because something comes to be seen as a human right, but because violations of that human right come to be seen as something that has lost the moral meaning it had in an earlier historical phase to such a degree that the moral meaning no longer outweighed the nastiness of the violation. (The earlier comment by j. on MacIntyre was good on this.)
Thanks, MKR! I hadn't heard of this paper before, but it sounds like a must read.
ReplyDeleteThe last three "reasons" don't really seem like reasons to me ("God forbade me" might be a reason, but that isn't all that's said), but they don't sound too ridiculous as things to say. The first three do sound silly, but maybe they could be re-worded to save their respective theories from embarrassment. The first one, for instance, might be put in terms of the agony and despair of the murdered man. The Kantian one is the hardest to save, I think, but even Kant might talk about failing to respect the man's humanity and treating him like an animal. Maybe that wouldn't sound absurd if it was put well.
What do examples like these show? I think they show that the precise words used matter in a way that philosophers usually don't think about much. (Although the mattering in question might not be to philosophy.) I think they also suggest that explaining why certain things are wrong (e.g. murder, but not, perhaps, apparently victimless crimes) is itself a foolish activity. But they don't prove this, and I'm not sure that meditating on the nature of evil is necessarily a waste of time.
I should read Gass's paper before I say anything more though.
Thanks, Tommi. I think you posted your comment at exactly the same time I was posting my previous one. Thanks very much for the links, too, although clicking on them just now caused me to lose my almost-finished comment, which I'm now re-typing. Doh!
ReplyDeleteI see clearly what would make you dislike the word, but isn't one way of responding to the dislike to point out that fiction is itself important - even morally important - and that calling something fiction is not necessarily an accusation?
Good point. I agree. But talk of fiction in the sense of talk about unicorns suggests something that is not morally important. That's what I object to. And I think that any reference to fiction in this connection would need to be qualified so that it was clearly not a dismissive use of the word. I still might prefer some other word to 'fiction,' but I don't have one to suggest.
I don't see what the addition of rights talk to (say) the public pronouncements of a human rights organisation is adding to the same human rights organisation's merely describing various wrong acts. Certainly, when I read the reports of a human rights organisation such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, what stirs me is always the description of the wrong acts themselves, not the rights talk surrounding them.
I agree again. I don't think that talk of rights adds anything here. All it does is provide a convenient shorthand way to refer to the kinds of wrong acts that these organizations monitor and try to stop. Rather than saying "murder, rape, torture, and things like that" they say "human rights violations." Maybe they could say "serious injustices" instead, but it would probably have less impact.
(Part 2 of my reply follows.)
If "rights concern the essentials of human well-being", and this can be seen with the kind of discernment that is the result of education, the rights cannot be very universal, considering the very wide intertemporal and intercultural variation in conceptions of human well-being.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this follows. If people have varying ideas about human well-being then they will have different ideas about what rights people have, if any. But it doesn't follow that everyone is equally right, that all such conceptions are equally good. Nor does it follow that no one is right. And it's not as if human beings haven't generally agreed that it is a terrible fate to be murdered, raped, or tortured.
To even argue about human rights violations requires at least some common ground, but the average human rights violation is itself something that bespeaks the absence of such common ground. And progress in human rights very often comes not because something comes to be seen as a human right, but because violations of that human right come to be seen as something that has lost the moral meaning it had in an earlier historical phase to such a degree that the moral meaning no longer outweighed the nastiness of the violation.
Yes, I shouldn't think that progress in human rights ever comes because something comes to be seen as a human right. By which I mean that I don't think that would ever be an illuminating way to explain why people had changed their minds. It might, though, be fine as a way of saying that they had changed their minds. As for common ground, I don't know what to say about the average human rights violation. Leaving the ancient Assyrians aside, I imagine that most people today who violate human rights know or recognize in some sense or at some level that what they are doing is wrong, or at least contrary to the way they were raised to behave. I believe it's standard practice, for instance, to torture people as part of the process of conditioning them to be torturers. It's not the kind of thing that most people can comfortably do without some conditioning. Drugs, alcohol, threats, and emotional appeals are used to get people through the crimes they are ordered to commit. Or so I believe based on what I've read. But it's true that some crimes seem to be carried out without much difficulty, that civilized behavior comes to an end with frightening ease (e.g. in the former Yugoslavia). The cases I'm thinking of, though, are ones where there seems to have been common ground at one time. So recovering it is not hopeless and, indeed, seems to have happened in some cases. Peace and reconciliation can and do occur. How and why they sometimes do and sometimes don't, though, is a mystery to me.
Thanks very much for the links, too, although clicking on them just now caused me to lose my almost-finished comment, which I'm now re-typing.
ReplyDeleteThe thing to do is to draft the comments in a simple word processor (in Windows, Notepad is ideal) and then copy and paste. I do this for all my comments except the very briefest. This way, they're available for any number of attempts it takes to post them successfully. Similarly, links can be opened in most browsers in a new window by right-clicking and selecting that option from the menu that appears.
Good point. I agree. But talk of fiction in the sense of talk about unicorns suggests something that is not morally important. That's what I object to.
Oh yes. This discussion had just travelled so far already from the initial quote from MacIntyre that I had managed to forget about the unicorn bit completely. I too certainly do object to it. (But at the same time I'm often amused by the strange position which a phenomenon we might call "fairytale talk" has assumed in contemporary public debate. Someone like Richard Dawkins wants children to be shielded from religion, while at the same time he says that religion is nothing but a fairytale - as if children were an obvious candidate for shielding from fairytales.)
I agree again. I don't think that talk of rights adds anything here. All it does is provide a convenient shorthand way to refer to the kinds of wrong acts that these organizations monitor and try to stop.
I don't really have that much against thinking of it as "a convenient shorthand". But somehow I just remain uncomfortable with it. A large part of this has to do with the fact that the contingent causal story about the emergence of rights talk is always in the forefront of my mind when I hear or read rights talk. ("Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas" - Lord Acton.)
There is a black box in my mind where this thought about the contingent causal story goes, and at the other end there emerges a view of rights talk as somehow speaking of rights, nnoticed by the speakers, in merely some kind of secondary sense - in the Wittgensteinian sense of "secondary sense": humans have human rights in (only) the same sense that Tuesday is lean.
Earlier you wrote something about wanting to defend rights talk, but not for the usual reasons, or something like that. A part of what's interesting for me in a philosopher like Geuss is the fact that he personally wants largely the same political and moral outcomes, or so to say, that you and I want personally, but simultaneously he thinks that rights talk, and all the candidates for philosophical underpinnings of rights talk that have ever been presented, are just a load of old nonsense. He wants the good things the cause of which rights talk is typically used to further, but he is at times almost viscerally repelled by the rights talk used to further them (certainly to a much greater extent than I).
Perhaps I should think of you as seeking to do to rights talk roughly the same thing Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion seeks to do to God talk. That would immediately make it both more interesting and less uncomfortable.
And it's not as if human beings haven't generally agreed that it is a terrible fate to be murdered, raped, or tortured.
ReplyDeleteWell, for pretty much the entire history of humanity up until a mere 100-200 years ago, the norm was that it is a terrible fate for us to be murdered or tortured, but not that terrible for not-us.
Leaving the ancient Assyrians aside, I imagine that most people today who violate human rights know or recognize in some sense or at some level that what they are doing is wrong, or at least contrary to the way they were raised to behave. I believe it's standard practice, for instance, to torture people as part of the process of conditioning them to be torturers. It's not the kind of thing that most people can comfortably do without some conditioning. Drugs, alcohol, threats, and emotional appeals are used to get people through the crimes they are ordered to commit.
In the part of the paper elided by Phillips (p. 238), Murphy writes: "We need not go to Assyria for that kind of argument:there was plenty of it in Japan during the second World War, and some much nearer home." Even a Lieutenant Calley had his ardent defenders - among thoroughly respectable pillars of society. And even right here in supposedly civilised Finland, we had one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history so recently that one of my grandfathers fought in it.
Nevertheless, what you say is of course true. On the other hand, there are things like the Milgram experiment, which point the other way. The jury is still out, I'd say. From what I've read myself, the most significant unifying factor in large-scale atrocities seems to be a demographic surfeit of males old enough to fight and young enough not to think things through. Young enough not to listen to rights talk?
(Surfacing of the day: I first read "Drugs, alcohol, threats, and emotional appeals ..." as "Drugs, alcohol, treats, and emotional appeals ...")
Thanks, Tommi.
ReplyDeleteI agree with almost all of this, so I won't reply at length. It is a great treat, though, to receive such intelligent, thoughtful, and knowledgeable comments in response even to some of my most half-baked posts (I don't mean this one in particular).
I have thought about the idea of human rights as rights in a secondary sense. In a way the use of 'rights' in "human rights" or "natural rights" clearly is secondary (on the model of legal rights), but it might also be secondary in the specifically Wittgensteinian sense. I'm not sure what to say about that idea right now, but I think it's worth exploring.
As for rights and God, I'm in two minds. On the one hand, I wouldn't at all want to do anything that made it sound as though belief in rights was a kind of religion. On the other, rescuing rights talk from "the rights of the philosophers" might be exactly what I want to do. And that does sound a bit like Wittgenstein on religious belief (and is surely much closer to what you mean).