Abstract
This chapter begins with two recent, contrasting historical accounts of when human rights were invented. In Inventing Human Rights (2007), Lynn Hunt tells the story of how the psychological foundations for human rights were laid with the rise of the humanitarian sentiment in the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. In The Last Utopia (2010), on the other hand, Samuel Moyn goes against the grain of most recent scholarship by focusing on a crisis of political utopianism in the 1970s as the locus for the roots of the contemporary resonance of human rights. Both historians draw our attention, though in different ways, to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These competing stories about the origins of human rights raise two important issues for philosophers of human rights: (1) whether and how to try to connect earlier and later episodes in the history of “human rights,” and (2) how to understand the complex relationship between the politics of humanitarianism and human rights. Drawing on recent work by discourse theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, I argue that focusing on social and political struggles for human rights as motivated by violations of human dignity provides a way of connecting a theory of human rights with their meaning in both past and present practice. In this way, human dignity is used not as a philosophical concept for deriving the content of human rights, but as part of a framework for understanding the moral dynamic of human rights in practice. I also argue for the need to distinguish the logic of humanitarianism (viewing others as objects of suffering) from the logic of human rights (viewing others as subjects of rights). Rather than proposing that we try to purify human rights practice of humanitarian motifs, I maintain that we simply keep in mind the potential underside of the latter. The ultimate aim of human rights in practice must be to go beyond viewing others as merely objects of concern to viewing them as subjects of rights.
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Notes
- 1.
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- 3.
Hunt (2007b, 40). Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.
- 4.
See Moyn (2010), 82–3, and 307 n15, where he cites historical work on when exactly and how “Holocaust memory” came to be a powerful force in popular consciousness.
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For more on the ways in which humanitarian sentiment can fail and its complicated relation to human rights, see the fascinating recent account in Festa (2010).
- 8.
At another point Moyn challenges the connection between natural rights and human rights by stressing that “the founding natural rights figures were… anything but humanitarians” (2010, 21), implicitly acknowledging that the contemporary commitment to human rights is by contrast more bound up with humanitarianism.
- 9.
A full assessment of this point would certainly require more research. But for another indication of the connection, see the presence of humanitarian motifs in David Kennedy’s (2004) candid reflections on his work as a human rights lawyer and activist. “At its most effective,” he writes, “human rights portrays victims as passive and innocent” (14) and makes the activist into an “heroic agent for an authentic suffering elsewhere” (150). He admits that the more passive the victim, the more motivated he was to help. The more politically active prisoners he worked with in Uruguay he saw as “equals” who “needed no rescue.” The “passive victim,” on the other hand, “awakens my indignation and motivates me to act” (66). Admittedly, he is writing about his work in the mid-1980s, but one can imagine that this also accurately reflects much human rights work in the 1970s.
- 10.
Moyn states that, “the essential novelty of human rights… still goes unmentioned in histories of human rights penned by philosophers today” (2010, 215). This may have been more or less true for a while, but there are quite a few philosophers today who take seriously the novelty of contemporary human rights. Aside from the ones I discuss here, see also Pogge (1995, 103–20) and (2000, 45–69). For a contrasting account that does view human rights as another name for natural rights, see Simmons (2001).
- 11.
Beitz (2009, 102), henceforth cited parenthetically.
- 12.
For more critical analysis of Beitz, and Rawlsian approaches more generally, see my “Two Models of Human Rights: Extending the Rawls-Habermas Debate” (2010).
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Griffin (2008, 2, 29), henceforth cited parenthetically.
- 14.
For a more comprehensive account of Habermas’s position, see Flynn (2003).
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Habermas (1998, 190).
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- 18.
This shows how significant Axel Honneth’s recognition theory has become for Habermas’s discourse theory of human rights. See Honneth (1995). Habermas’s recent focus on human dignity is certainly not a complete departure from earlier work either, with regard to the formulation of rights documents or the role of struggles for recognition. See Habermas (1996, 389 and 426).
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On the differences between Habermas and Forst, see Forst (2011).
- 21.
Forst (2010, 737), henceforth cited parenthetically.
- 22.
Moyn (2010, 26, 13, 12, 220, italics added). Thus, he sees the shift from “revolutionary rights” to “human rights” as “the move from the politics of the state to the morality of the globe.” See also 135, where Moyn highlights how the “homegrown and domestic sources of dissident strategy” make it an unlikely candidate for a “human rights movement at all.” This implies that the former is not very well subsumed under the latter.
- 23.
My critical question deliberately parallels Volker Heins’s critique of Honneth’s theory of recognition in Heins (2008). Heins builds on Honneth’s tripartite theory of recognition to analyze how NGOs have focused on the needs of others, the rights of others, and the denigration of ways of life (10). But one of the significant flaws Heins identifies is that Honneth neglects “other-regarding modes of political action” (31). Honneth stresses how experiences and feelings of disrespect are the moral engine of progress. And his examples hearken back to the labor movement and to some extent struggles against colonialism as the “moral templates,” as Heins puts it, for modern emancipatory social movements. But this misses the form of activism oriented toward the “liberation of distant strangers” (66), the moral template for which is the abolition of slavery and the slave trade and which is central to the contemporary human rights movement.
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Acknowledgment
I want to thank the students in my Honors Ethics class at Fordham University in Spring 2010 for stimulating discussion of many of the texts discussed here (by Hunt, Moyn, Beitz, Griffin, and Laber), and Sam Moyn for making his book manuscript available to our class prior to publication.
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Flynn, J. (2012). Human Rights in History and Contemporary Practice: Source Materials for Philosophy. In: Corradetti, C. (eds) Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2376-4_1
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