eBook - ePub
The Debasement of Human Rights
How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom
Aaron Rhodes
This is a test
Share book
- 296 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Debasement of Human Rights
How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom
Aaron Rhodes
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
The idea of human rights began as a call for individual freedom from tyranny, yet today it is exploited to rationalize oppression and promote collectivism. How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes, recognized as "one of the leading human rights activists in the world" by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased. Rhodes identifies the fundamental flaw in the Universal Declaration of Human of Rights, the basis for many international treaties and institutions. It mixes freedom rights rooted in natural law— authentic human rights—with "economic and social rights," or claims to material support from governments, which are intrinsically political. As a result, the idea of human rights has lost its essential meaning and moral power.The principles of natural rights, first articulated in antiquity, were compromised in a process of accommodation with the Soviet Union after World War II, and under the influence of progressivism in Western democracies. Geopolitical and ideological forces ripped the concept of human rights from its foundations, opening it up to abuse. Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain saw clearly the difference between freedom rights and state-granted entitlements, but the collapse of the USSR allowed demands for an expanding array of economic and social rights to gain legitimacy without the totalitarian stigma. The international community and civil society groups now see human rights as being defined by legislation, not by transcendent principles. Freedoms are traded off for the promise of economic benefits, and the notion of collective rights is used to justify restrictions on basic liberties. We all have a stake in human rights, and few serious observers would deny that the concept has lost clarity. But no one before has provided such a comprehensive analysis of the problem as Rhodes does here, joining philosophy and history with insights from his own extensive work in the field.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Debasement of Human Rights an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Debasement of Human Rights by Aaron Rhodes in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Política y relaciones internacionales & Derechos humanos. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
PART I
What Happened to Human Rights
CHAPTER 1
The Achilles’ Heel of International Human Rights
The idea of universal human rights emerged from within the philosophical tradition of natural law and natural rights, which formed around the principle that the innate rights of individual human beings are prior to and above the laws of states. Detached from that tradition, the concept of human rights falls apart. It becomes a hollow shell, susceptible to invasion by contradictory notions, and that is what has happened in the international human rights system.
The foundation of that system is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which diverges from the principles of natural rights by mixing in rights of a political character that require positive state action. Its contents reflect accommodation with totalitarian states and the influence of the progressive political tradition, devaluing human rights in favor of creating a fair and efficient planned society, and emphasizing collective rather than individual rights. Fundamental rights were originally conceived as rights that cannot be impinged upon by other considerations. But if human rights are essentially no different from other kinds of rights, then they can be subject to conditions like other rights. They are no longer sacrosanct. The Universal Declaration politicized the meaning of human rights, calling their distinctive character into question while reifying state-granted rights based on ideological values.
Reason, Freedom, Natural Rights and the State
Reasoning from the natural law tradition established that human rights are different from other kinds of rights. Natural law refers to an “objective moral standard independent of human conventions.”1 Socrates taught that laws contravening nature should not be obeyed, but the idea of natural law really took shape with the Stoics, the philosophical school started by Zeno in about 300 B.C. The Stoics distinguished the law of nature from conventional laws promulgated by governments, and in so doing they arrived at basic elements of liberalism and the principles of fundamental human rights. According to Heinrich Rommen, a German lawyer who opposed the Nazis in the 1930s, the Stoics grasped “the rights of man and the idea of mankind.”2 They understood the principle of universalism, seeing universal commonalities in human nature beneath disparate religious values and cultural traditions. While human law reflects and serves diverse political interests, individuals are all naturally equal and entitled to natural freedom.
In the Stoic view, natural law provided a fixed and transcendent moral standard to constrain the arbitrary laws of governments.3 Human rights based on natural law are not created or granted by governments; instead, they are to offer protection from state power, and are to be honored by governments. They are not part of the positive law made by governments and legislatures, nor of the same nature as rights granted by states.
The distinction between natural and conventional law entered into Roman law as ius naturale versus ius civile. The laws created by men were seen as distinct from sacred laws rooted in the natural order. Cicero wrote in The Republic (III:33) that sound civil law had to be based on natural law consistent with human nature, and that natural law is universal because human nature is universal.
We cannot be exempted from this law by any decree of the Senate or the people; nor do we need anyone else to expound or explain it. There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law . . . .4
The author of natural law is God, the “lord and master of us all.” Cicero won a court case by arguing that a particular law was contrary to natural law, and thus he established a precedent as the prototypical human rights lawyer.
Natural law as understood by the Enlightenment philosophers was not the same thing as sacred law, but inhabited the moral space it had formerly occupied. Rommen clarified the distinction between natural law and sacred law this way: “The idea of natural law emerged along with the realization that not all law was sacred and with the recognition of cultural diversity.”5 In Nazi Germany, Rommen had seen how positive law, the law of governments and legislatures, could be perverted to legitimize atrocities when driven only by political will, unconstrained by reference to fixed moral principles. Natural law is prior to civil law and puts limits on it—limits grounded in reason. It protects what is vital to human nature from harm by society and the state. In the natural law tradition, states may not pass legislation that infringes on the freedom and dignity of the individual, and rulers are subject to the same positive laws as other citizens.
Natural law is the foundation for the idea of human rights. Universal human rights have their basis in a common human nature, not in any particular culture or society. Natural law is the basis for rational judgments about what is and is not a human right. If we do not approach human rights from this perspective, the idea has neither logical boundaries nor any compelling basis for respect. But very few actors in the international human rights community at present appear to understand or be guided by the notion of natural law and natural rights. In about twenty-five years of working in international human rights, I have heard virtually no references to natural law or natural rights in the hundreds of seminars, conferences and briefings I have attended. The foundation of human rights in natural law has been eroded by ignorance or torn away by opposition. In its place are international standards and laws purporting to be concerned with universal human attributes but actually reflecting specific ideologies and time-bound geopolitics.
True human rights, in order to be firmly respected on a principled basis, must be understood to exist as natural rights, intrinsic to human beings.6 These rights are “discernable by reason,” which is transcultural and trans-historical. The ability to reason unites mankind, and reason is at the core of our common human nature. Natural rights are universal in their rationality, providing logical grounds for respecting the freedom and dignity of others, not as a matter of faith or dogma but as “principles of practical reason.”7 This does not imply that such principles are universally known, however, because reason is not universally respected.8
If we are to regain respect for authentic, universal human rights as distinct from those established by particular political communities, we must respect the idea of natural law as the source of human rights, existing prior to positive law and setting moral limits on state power. As societies have become secularized and have sought a rational foundation for ethics, natural law has assumed the place of sacred law, retaining a sense of the transcendent character of what is universally innate to human beings. Governments must honor human rights based on natural law if they are to respect human dignity and allow individuals to fulfill their human potential—if they are to respect the sacredness of personality and the sanctity of life, the highest teachings of our civilization.
The State’s Obligation of Restraint
True human rights compel governments not to infringe on individual freedom; they do not require positive actions to change society. John Locke (1632–1704), considered to be the father of classical liberalism, showed that the primary obligation of governments was to reject the arbitrary exercise of power and to respect natural rights. He understood respect for natural rights as indispensable to peaceful and secure societies. Locke saw the main challenge of modern societies, and of the international community, as the tolerance of diversity. With the end of monarchical absolutism and the growing social and religious diversification in societies, a new social order required laws consistent with pluralism. (In fact, the challenge of all societies is diversity, because all cultures are pluralistic and dynamic, despite claims to the contrary.) Respecting rights in the situation of diversity called for protecting adherents to minority religious and political ideas from tyrannical rulers who aimed to suppress any possible threats to their power. The alternative to tolerance was oppression, bloodshed and endless chaos. Pluralism became an urgent challenge in premodern Europe, and it had to be addressed in a rational way. What would be the features of a state that allowed all to live in dignity and to “pursue happiness”?
In the tradition of empirical philosophy, seeking practical ideas based on observed reality, Locke found the main natural rights to be life, liberty and property. The state must not arbitrarily take life, because man by nature has a right to life. This means more than a right to be alive; it means a right to make of one’s life what one chooses.9 It means the right to a free life, because a life under coercion is not one’s own. Since the right to life depends on the state to preserve law and order, some freedoms must be traded for the service of protection from criminals and invaders. But beyond this, governments should leave people free to take care of themselves. In the state of individual freedom from oppression by government, property rights have a central place, for property reflects what one has made of one’s life. If governments or criminals can arbitrarily take an individual’s property, then the freedom to acquire it means nothing, and the effort and ingenuity exercised to acquire it mean nothing. Brute force would become morally equal to intelligence and perseverance.
The rules to protect liberty are primarily rules about what states should not do with respect to the individual’s choices, dignity or security. All of the early human rights declarations were about such “negative liberties,” beginning with the Magna Carta of 1215, which Lord Denning described as “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”10 Negative liberties are not hard to define, to measure or to enforce. The major historical human rights charters were simple, and they emphasized the virtue of simplicity. The preamble to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), for example, refers to its “simple and incontestable principles.” Bills of rights need to be simple and accessible so that citizens can know and understand their rights.
Today, human rights law has all the clarity of a tax code, observes Jacob Mchangama, a Danish human rights lawyer. The average person needs the mediation of experts to understand human rights, and experts often disagree. This complexity owes largely to the mixing of human rights with positive law, with schemes to “enable freedom” by state intervention, through the regulation of economic, social and cultural life. The result is a system whereby individuals need to engage with complex and remote bureaucracies in order to make claims against the state for their basic liberties.
My experience in defending human rights against authoritarian governments has confirmed for me that violations of authentic human rights—of natural rights—are obvious, and so are their solutions. If a government is interfering in the work of a church or a club, the problem can be solved if it ceases to do so. If a government does not protect the equal rights of members of a certain religion, it can change its policy and start treating them equally. If a government is censoring ideas and information, or using torture, it can simply stop engaging in those practices. The guarantee of negative liberties does not mean passivity on the part of the state, for positive law and regulations are required in order that states treat all individuals equally. Training and monitoring are needed to ensure that torture is not used. Apologists for the extension of human rights as positive rights often adduce this kind of state action as a ploy to blur the distinction between negative and positive liberties. But simple common sense tells us that what states must do in order to respect fundamental rights is mainly to refrain from interfering with individual freedom and civil society. The first priority of a liberal state is to ensure the rights of its citizens against its own power.
The Individual Human Right to Freedom
The subject of human rights is the individual person; only individual humans can have human rights. The rational foundation for this understanding draws upon Aristotle’s analysis of the nature of man in the Nicomachean Ethics (350 B.C.). Aristotle said that in order to understand what is good for man and for communities, we must first understand the individual person and what is good for the individual. All individuals have a particular and unique existence; their character and their potential are not fully determined by any group, not even by the family, and in this respect they are free and self-determining. All individuals have the capacity to make sense of the world, to act independently, to appreciate moral ideas and intellectual challenges. While Aristotle concerned himself with the problem of maintaining security and order in society, he also established that individual freedom is necessary to human fulfillment.
Individuals are objectively the basic unit of human life everywhere, so we need to begin with the individual in seeking answers to ethical and political questions about freedom, authority, and the obligations and limits of governments. Individuals are a universal and irreducible human reality; there is nothing less than an individual. Social formations are not universal; some would say they are artificial. Families are defined in various ways in different societies and cultures; so are racial, ethnic, tribal, national, religious and other communities. Members of specific age cohorts do not have the same rights everywhere. Gender is more and more the source of category disputes, with individuals challenging gender categories as well as social traditions. Categorical identities become more fluid and irrelevant to dignity and rights. Because group identity is arbitrary, the assertion of individual human rights makes rational sense. Human rights apply to individuals per se.
The classical concept of human rights is based on core human characteristics found across all cultures. This view is in sharp contrast to any form of tribalism or ethnic nationalism, to any form of coercive collectivism, and to any project of universalizing a political idea. Ethnic or religious or political chauvinism can encourage human rights violations under a suffocating conformism, and may condone aggression against other peoples and against nonconforming members of the society. Communists may say that economic class determines character and outlook, and therefore dictates the rights of particular individuals within states organized to meet collective interests. Nationalists may say that a person is fundamentally an element of an organic “nation,” and that human fulfillment is impossible outside the context of one’s nation. Extreme ethnic nationalists may believe that individual existence is only an abstraction and that individualism is a threat to the ethnonationalist state. Feminists may emphasize gender as determinative. To think of our core identity as being defined by group affiliations is inherently divisive, but the principle of individual human rights brings us together in mutual respect and freedom.
Although human rights focus on individuals, they have given us an ideal of brotherhood across ethnicities and creeds, political or religious, and across national borders. The idea of universal human rights draws upon the ethical foundation of monotheism—the moral teachings of Jerusalem and the rational philosophy of Athens. The Old Testament tells us that all human beings descended from common parents and are members of a single family; therefore none of us can claim a special birthright. It teaches that we are all subjects of one transcendent God, equal to one another and owing to each other the respect due to an equal. No earthly king can have total dominion over us, for monarchs too are subjects of the same God, a transcendent power beyond human understanding. Political power cannot be absolute; it is intrinsically arbitrary and must be judged against the principles of an eternal moral order. Each human soul, each personality is sacred. It is in our individuality, not in political or social structures, that we find a relationship to ultimate, universal truth. Religions have provided a basis for appreciating the freedom and dignity of individuals, which human rights are to protect, although no religious tradition includes any legal concept of human rights.11
Aristotle cannot be considered to have established the idea of human rights, since he shared his contemporaries’ expectations that the state should coercively shape the character of citizens. Aristotle did not value freedom above all else, and he had no problem with governments restricting freedom. He was certainly...