Human Rights and Responsibilities in the World Religions

Joseph Runzo, Arvind Sharma, Nancy M. Martin

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781780746814
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

This volume outlines the approaches to human rights and responsibilities within the different world religions. Featuring contributions from over 15 scholars, the book covers such key issues as women's rights, the role of international law, and responsibility for the environment. It also includes a "Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions", presented at the third Parliament of the World Religions.

Part I

SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS ETHICS

Plate 1 Statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, commemorating the beginning of his satyagraha or non-violence movement. Pietermaritzburg is the city where Gandhi, as a young lawyer, was thrown out of his train compartment because of his lower social standing as an Indian in the era of apartheid. Photo: Joseph Runzo

1

SECULAR RIGHTS and RELIGIOUS RESPONSIBILITIES

Joseph Runzo

No other issue in the twenty-first century may be more crucial than human rights, and no other aspect of more practical importance for this issue than the positive role that religion can play in human rights. While the stirrings of war and, even more, the nuclear posturing that have already marked the beginning of the century remind us of the one issue that might supersede human rights – that is, war – paramount issues of human rights and responsibilities are at the heart of any ethics of war. And just as the sincere religious perspective has done much to mitigate the call to war, sincere religious perspectives can greatly lessen the violation of human rights. The lives and work of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are paradigms of the powerful transformation toward a just world which secular law and religious sensitivity can achieve together as positive partners. The work of Gandhi and King (and others like them) should serve as examples of the means to an interrelational global community, a means which recognizes both human rights and human responsibility.

In the last century, the exemplary leadership of figures like Gandhi, King, Archbishop Tutu, Mother Teresa, and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama set a positive tone for the contribution that the spiritual and moral resources of the world religions could bring to human rights in the secular and political world. Yet, as we enter the twenty-first century, religion is now often seen as an enemy of human rights.“Religion is the cause of wars” has become an unfounded but frequent mantra of the anti-religious, and religion has moved from its characterization in the anti-religious imagination as “opiate of the people” to “cause of oppression.” But this attitude not only belies the actual history of the religious life of humankind, it also stands as an impediment to accessing the rich positive resources for human rights and responsibilities that the world religions do have to offer. And while secularism is meant to provide the negative function of protecting everyone’s individual rights in society, the world religions are meant at their core to provide a positive vision of human interdependence and a compelling motivation for moral responsibility. Both may fail at their respective core goals. But it is a tragedy of our contemporary world that the moral/legal structure of the secular and the moral/spiritual commitments of the religious might be seen as acting in opposition even as they need each other if we are to move toward a better world of global justice and care within the community of humankind.

Humankind forms a global community, a community of persons with inherently shared needs and interests, even if those shared needs are approached through often opposing and culturally diverse desires and attitudes. In order to achieve a stable society, any community must develop consensus on a unified vision both of the common good and of the good in common. If the global community of humankind is ever going to achieve a vision of the common good, if global humanity is ever going to see itself as a “community of ends,” as Kant would say, we must not only (1) seek commonality on a global scale but (2) tolerate and even cherish human differences.

Genuine religion supports global community on both counts, and as such, genuine religion is not only a necessary part of, but will also make a significant contribution to, a just world incorporating both human rights and human responsibilities. For despite the bad press in the popular media about religion, despite violence and oppression and acts of hatred carried out in the name – but not the spirit – of religion, I will argue that what I shall call “the religious point of view” provides a foundational understanding of the commonality and interdependence of humankind. In my own country, the United States, there is a particular phobia about allowing the “private” concerns of religion into the “public” spaces of law and social ordering. As the thoroughly secular U.N. Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 evidences, this pattern is paralleled in contemporary international law. So to convince the skeptical about the role of religion, the question is whether religion has anything important to add – and not just reinforce – about human rights and responsibilities.

THE IDEA OF RIGHTS

The first modern use of the term “rights” to designate a legal status – that is, to designate something enforceable under law – can be found in the English Bill of Rights of 1688. By 1779 Thomas Jefferson had turned this political/legal/philosophical notion into a cornerstone concept of the nascent American Republic: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”¹ To this theistic – or at least deistic – view of the origin of rights, Alexander Hamilton added in 1787: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for amongst old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured.”²

However, these pious underpinnings to early American “rights” talk³ carried the early seed of the danger of identifying state ends with God’s ends, an identification which not only suffers from hubris and the epistemological problem of whether humans can ever actually know with certainty what God intends, but also has more recently run headlong into the claim that the contemporary United States is a pluralistic nation, a nation with sizable populations of both religious and non-religious citizens who do not believe in the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, as the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham said in the nineteenth century:“When I hear of natural rights, I always see in the background a cluster of daggers and pikes introduced into the National Assembly…for the avowed purpose of extermination of the King’s friends.”⁴ It is all too easy to use talk of “rights” as a cudgel against others, either to upset or to sustain the status quo. And of course even in the early American Republic, the “inalienable” rights of all men as created equal did not apply to slaves in America or to American women.

As Geoffrey Robertson observes in Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice regarding these earlier attempts to give a metaphysical grounding to the notion of rights:

“Natural rights” were of uncertain provenance: if from God, their content (apart from biblical injunctions) was unknowable; if from “nature” they were unprovable and unpredictable. The force of Bentham’s arguments was partly responsible for “natural rights” falling out of fashion in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. When they returned, it would be as “human rights” rather than “natural rights”, sourced in the nature of humans rather than in the laws of God or the seasons.⁵

Moreover, “The force of this early critique [also] led Marxist thinkers in the next century to characterize human rights as a device to universalize capitalist values, notably freedom of enterprise without social responsibility.”⁶

However, war, as I observed, forces us – perhaps more than anything else – to think about rights. After the disheartening world disaster of the “war to end all wars” and the rise of the Axis powers only two decades later in the 1930s, Robertson suggests:

The revival of the human rights idea in the twentieth century really began at the instigation and inspiration of the British author H.G. Wells, in the months immediately following the declaration of the Second World War. It can be traced to letters he wrote to The Times in October 1939, advocating the adoption by “parliamentary peoples” of a Declaration of Rights – a fundamental law defining their rights in a democracy and drafted to appeal “to every spirit under the yoke of the obscurantist and totalitarian tyrannies with which all are in conflict.”⁷

This new talk of human rights spread, so that by the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allied Nations were to declare that “complete victory over their enemies is essential…to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”⁸

After the horrific slaughter and mass violation of rights during the Second World War, the U.S. was one of the leaders in placing the language of human rights in the U.N. charter. The preamble affirms “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women,” and article I sets out this purpose of the U.N.: “To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”⁹ In an important further development in this international support for human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948.¹⁰ However, the continued large-scale violation of human rights forced a continual reassessment of these documents so that a number of specific types of rights needed to be more exactly delineated in a series of refinements rooted in the U.N. Charter and the 1948 Declaration. These conventions and declarations notably included:

• 1959 – Declaration of the Rights of the Child
• 1963 – Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
• 1967 – Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
• 1987 – Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religious Belief
• 1992 – Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities

However, even the 1987 and the 1992 Declarations, which deal specifically with religion, offer a secular or extra-religious prohibition against discrimination, not an appeal to religions as an ally of the legal and moral. As the 1987 Declaration states:

For the purposes of the present Declaration, the expression “intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief” means any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on religion or belief and having as its purpose or as its effect nullification or impairment of the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis.

While many of the framers of these international rights documents were themselves either religious or influenced by the religious traditions of their cultures, these are purely secular documents. As Abdullahi A. An-Na‘im suggests in his essay, “The Synergy and Interdependence of Human Rights, Religion, and Secularism” (chapter 2 in this volume), the notion of human rights articulated in the 1948 Declaration is that such rights

are universal claims of rights that are due to all human beings by virtue of their humanity, without distinction on such grounds as race, sex (gender), religion, language, or national origin. The key feature of human rights in this specific sense is universality, in the sense that they are rights due all human beings, everywhere.¹¹

This secular conception of rights which has been developed in the modern era offers the restrictive legal and moral parameter that there should be no discrimination on the basis of religion. It offers a protection for religion, but it does not envision a positive rights role for religion.

In view of this, a number of scholars around the world – including those in the Global Ethics and Religion Forum – have worked under the leadership of Arvind Sharma to produce a counterpart to the 1948 U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, namely A Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions.¹² The purpose of the framers of the latter document is neither to circumvent nor to counter the 1948 U.N. Declaration (and the refinements in subsequent declarations), but to enhance the moral force and broaden both the appeal and the perview of the 1948 Declaration. This raises the question of the proper relationship between religion and morality regarding questions of rights, i.e. the proper relationship between the religious point of view and the moral point of view.

RIGHTS AND THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW

To answer this question, let us look first at morality itself. Individual moral decisions are often difficult, requiring a weighing of alternatives. When we think globally, the situation is made more complex by the fact that particular moral imperatives and values vary among individuals and cultures. As a result, considerations of global morality should not be conceived of in terms of a set of categorical imperatives. For example, the 1993 document “Towards a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration,” which came out of the Second Parliament of the World Religions, echoes Kant when it states that “No woman or man, no institution, no state or church or religious community has the right to speak lies to other humans.” But surely such a categorical imperative is mistaken, as ethicists as diverse as Aristotle and W.D. Ross have pointed out. Normally humans should not lie, but if I am a woman of the underclass and mercenaries come to my door, demanding to know where my child is in order to kill him or her, I not only have a right but a moral duty to lie and misdirect the mercenaries away from my child. As this example demonstrates, categorical imperatives do not provide any means to resolve moral dilemmas in which two prima facie moral duties – such as not lying and protecting a life – come into conflict.

However, the very possibility that moral dilemmas could be adjudicated presupposes a foundational ethical commonality. Underlying the various moral systems – or else they would not be systems of the same type – is what we may call “the moral point of view.” The most important feature of what it means to take the moral point of view is to take others into account in one’s actions because one respects them as persons.¹³ But what is the origin or source of this obligation to take others into account because one respects them as persons?

I do not think that respect for others as persons amounts to their possession of moral rights.¹⁴ It seems to me that there are objections on both ethnocentric and egocentric grounds to treating rights as the most foundational element of morality. To take the ethnocentric objection, the notion of inalienable moral rights is, as we have seen, historically a fairly recent Western conception – highly motivated by politics and based on a notion of humans (at least some hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Secular and Religious Ethics
• Part II Being Human and Having Rights
• Part III A Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions
• Part IV Rights and Religious Traditions
• Select Bibliography
• Index