Abstract
In this article, written with Tom Wren, the authors set out to reconcile the traditional, normative foundational idea of human rights with a social constructivist point of view. Here, they argue that one can make perfect sense of human rights as social constructions without committing to the universalist position that human rights are a basic set of claims for all human beings everywhere. Rather one should think of human rights as candidates or nominees for universal principles – candidates that are continually vetted and revised just as persons revise mindsets and social constructions. Whether or not this preserves a strong notion of human rights is still the subject of contention and controversy.
Original publication: Werhane, Patricia H. and Wren, Thomas E. “Human Rights as Social Constructions.” Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture (2014) 49: 121–36. ©2014 Reprinted with permission.
Werhane, Patricia H. and Wren, Thomas E. “Human Rights as Social Constructions.” Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture (2014) 49: 121–36. ©2014 Reprinted with permission.
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Notes
- 1.
For us, the word “concept” is an umbrella term covering a plurality of relatively specific conceptions, just as H. L. A. Hart’s “concept of law” and John Rawls’s “concept of justice” cover a plurality of related but importantly different uses of those two terms. See Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), and Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
- 2.
For example, see J. M. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), and R. P. George and C. Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
- 3.
James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 4.
Ian Hacking rings the changes on the terms “construction,” “constructivism,” and “constructionalism,” but concludes that “the themes and attitudes that characterize these ‘isms’ are not so different.” Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 48–44.
- 5.
See Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990; 2006), and Patricia H. Werhane, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 6.
As Carol Gould has put it, social epistemology studies “the ways in which processes of knowledge creation and human modes of cognition can be said to structure or constitute what is known.” See Gould, Constructivism and Practice: Toward a Historical Epistemology (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), ix.
- 7.
Werhane, Moral Imagination, 53.
- 8.
See Senge, The Fifth Discipline; Werhane, Moral Imagination; Hacking, Social Construction; and Michael Gorman, Simulating Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).
- 9.
Hacking, Social Construction, 24 (emphasis added).
- 10.
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 2–3.
- 11.
Barry Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory (London: UCL Press, 1995).
- 12.
Hacking, Social Construction, 37, 65. See also Finn Collin, Theory and Understanding: A Critique of Interpretive Social Science (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
- 13.
For a relatively “strong” version of social constructionism see Thomas Wren, Conceptions of Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 161–63. For a relatively “weak” version; see Werhane, Moral Imagination, 53, and Patricia Werhane, Tara J. Radin, and Norman Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights (Boston: Basil Blackwell, 2003), especially Chapter 1.
- 14.
Hacking, Social Construction. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 199–201.
- 15.
Patricia Werhane, Laura Hartman, Crina Archer, Elain Englehardt, and Michael Prichard, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21.
- 16.
One exception to this generalization is Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), who takes vigorous exception to the notion of a metaphysical base for any theory, including theories of rights and human rights.
- 17.
Hacking, Social Construction, 10.
- 18.
Amartya Sen, “Positional Objectivity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 2 (1993): 126–45.
- 19.
In what follows we take Griffin’s normative agency approach as the most adequate representative of will theory.
- 20.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
- 21.
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1994).
- 22.
See Joseph Wronka, Human Rights and Social Policy in the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 85–112; and Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
- 23.
Wronka, Human Rights, 123.
- 24.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 25.
Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Human Rights in Commonwealth Africa (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), 2–15.
- 26.
The literature on the so-called Asian Values Debate is quite sophisticated, especially its explication of the relationship between human rights and socio-cultural concepts like “the Asian Identity.” On this topic and other East-West discussions of human rights, see Thomas Wren, “Principles and Moral Argumentation,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 16 (l989): 309–15; Lynda Bell, Andrew Nathan, and Ilan Peleg, eds., Negotiating Culture and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Peter Van Ness, ed., Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia (London: Routledge, 1999).
- 27.
The symposium appeared in Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 120, no. 4 (2010): 679–760. Its participants were all prominent philosophers who have their own views of human lights, namely John Tasiolas, Allen Buchanan, Rainer Forst, and of course James Griffin.
- 28.
Griffin cites Carl Wellman’s An Approach to Rights (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997) several times in Chapters 4 and 12 of On Human Rights; see also Carl Wellman, A Theory of Rights (Lanham MD: Rowman and Allenheld, 1985).
- 29.
“Neither Kant nor Mill was trying to explore the notion of human rights as it appears in [their] historical tradition. They were just commandeering the term ‘human rights’ (or ‘natural rights’ or, in Mill’s case, just plain ‘rights’) to do service in the exposition of their own general moral theory. There is nothing wrong with that so long as we are not misled by it. The extension of their term ‘rights’ is so substantially different from the extension of the [pre-Kantian] Enlightenment notion that we may well think that Kant and Mill are introducing a different concept, that they are, in effect, changing the subject” Quoted in Griffin, Human Rights, 1.
- 30.
This bit of philosophical jargon refers to a seemingly simple distinction often used in the literature of analytic philosophy. A term’s extension is its range of reference (i.e., the things it points to) and its intension is its sense or meaning (i.e., the ideas that constitute its definition). Here we pass over the fact that some philosophers think the distinction is not simple at all. See Thomas Wren, Conceptions of Culture, 6–13.
- 31.
Note that Tasiolas’s contribution to the symposium is entitled “Taking Rights Out of Human Rights,” Ethics 120 (2010): 647–78.
- 32.
James Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 9.
- 33.
Presumably such conversations would suspend the question of whether the objections that political leaders of those societies sometimes make to human rights declarations are truly representative of the citizens of those societies.
- 34.
Robert Putnam, Bowing Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
- 35.
See for example, David Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Frazer, The Problem of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Thomas Wren, “The Liberalism-Communitarian Debate.” in Patricia Werhane and Edward Freeman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Business Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2002).
- 36.
Michael Gardiner, Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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Werhane, P.H., Wren, T.E. (2019). Human Rights as Social Constructions. In: Bevan, D.J., Wolfe, R.W., Werhane, P.H. (eds) Systems Thinking and Moral Imagination. Issues in Business Ethics(), vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89797-4_10
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