Abstract
The concept of human rights remains a challenging concept and some of its aspects have yet to be further explored. As James Griffin notes in the introduction to his book, On Human Rights, there is a common “belief that we do not yet have a clear enough idea of what human rights are.” In a similar vein, Michael Rosen observes that “Human rights are obviously deeply puzzling— almost everyone nowadays professes commitment to them, yet few people would claim that they had a good, principled account of what they are and why we have them.” Following this same line of thought, Charles Beitz writes, “the problem is that, although the idea and the language of human rights have become increasingly prominent in public discourse, it has not become any more clear what kinds of objects human rights are supposed to be, why we should believe that people have them, or what follows from this belief for political practice.”
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Notes
- 1.
James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.
- 2.
Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 54.
- 3.
Charles Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xii.
- 4.
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 55.
- 5.
David Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 176.
- 6.
Rainer Forst, Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 69.
- 7.
Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10.
- 8.
Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, cited by Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (Malden: Polity Press, 2012), 95.
- 9.
Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), ix.
- 10.
Ibid., xi.
- 11.
Mutua uses this metaphor (savage-victim-savior) to question the Western discourse on human rights. He argues that “the main authors of the human rights discourse, including the United Nations, Western states, international nongovernmental organizations, and senior Western academics, constructed this three-dimensional prism” (p. 10) in order to impose Western culture and values on non-Western countries. The first dimension of the prism is the savage, which is the state. The real savage, argues Mutua, is not the state but a cultural deviation from human rights… The state itself is a neutral, passive instrumentality that conveys savagery by implementing the project of the savage culture (p. 11). Thus, he continues, when human rights norms target a deviant state, they are really attacking the normative cultural fabric of variant expressed by that state. The culture, and not the state, is the actual savage. From this perspective, human rights violations represent a clash between the culture of human rights and the savage culture (p. 23). The second dimension of the prism is the victim. The victim is a human being whose “dignity and worth” have been violated by the savage. In human rights literature, writes Mutua, the victim is usually presented as a helpless innocent who has been abused directly by the state, its agents, or pursuant to an offensive cultural or political practice… A basic characteristic of the victim is powerlessness, an inability for self-defense against the state or the culture in question (p. 28). For Mutua, “the metaphor of the victim is the giant engine that drives the human rights movements. Without the victim there is no savage or savior, and the entire human rights enterprise collapses” (p. 27). The third dimension of the prism is the savior, or the redeemer, the good angel who protects, vindicates, civilizes, restrains, and safeguards. The savior promises freedom from the tyrannies of the state, tradition, and culture. In the human rights story, he contends, the savior is the human rights corpus itself, with the United Nations, Western governments, INGOs, and Western charities as the actual rescuers, redeemers of a benighted world (p.11). According to Mutua, in the human rights narrative, savages and victims are generally nonwhite and non-Western, while the saviors are white (p.14). For him, the metaphor of the savior is constructed through two intertwining characteristics: Eurocentric universalism and Christianity’s missionary zeal (p. 31).
- 12.
Makau Mutua, Human Rights, 7.
- 13.
Mutua, Humain Rights, 15.
- 14.
Ibid., 34.
- 15.
Here I use “burdened societies” in its Rawlsian sense. That is, societies whose historical, social, [political], and economic circumstances make their achieving a well-ordered regime, whether liberal or decent, difficult if not impossible. See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 90.
- 16.
Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 52.
- 17.
The “other” here is to be understood in its Habermasian sense. For Habermas, inclusion does not imply locking members into a community that closes itself off from others. The “inclusion of the other” means rather that the boundaries of the community are open for all, also and most especially for those who are strangers to one another and want to remain strangers (Jurgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, xxxvi).
- 18.
Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998b), 326.
- 19.
David Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 137–8.
- 20.
Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 50.
- 21.
BFN, 107.
- 22.
Ingeborg Maus, “Liberties and Popular Sovereignty: On Jurgen Habermas’s Reconstruction of the System of Rights,” in Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 17 (1995–1996): 833–34.
- 23.
Translator’s Introduction, BFN, xxv.
- 24.
Hugh Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 66.
- 25.
Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 66.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Jurgen Habermas, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty: The Liberal and Republican Versions,” in Ration Juris, vol.7, issue 1 (March 1994): 1.
- 28.
I.O, 190.
- 29.
Thomas Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” in The Journal of Ethics, vol. 4, no.1/2 (Jan. – Mar., 2000): 46.
- 30.
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 66.
- 31.
Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 109.
- 32.
Ibid., 101.
- 33.
Jon Mahoney, “Rights without dignity? Some critical reflections on Habermas’s procedural model of law and democracy,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol.27, n.3 (May 2001): 22.
- 34.
Ibid., 23.
- 35.
David Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 177.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
I.O, 190.
- 38.
Ibid., 191.
- 39.
Jürgen Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” in Metaphilosophy, vol. 41, no. 4 (July 2010), 464.
- 40.
David Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 178.
- 41.
Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity,” footnote 10, p. 470.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
BFN, 84.
- 44.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 46.
- 45.
Ibid., 49.
- 46.
I.O, 190.
- 47.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 49, footnote 8.
- 48.
Ibid., 50.
- 49.
BFN, 449.
- 50.
I.O, 245.
- 51.
Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity,” 464.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15.
- 54.
Michael Rosen, “Dignity Past and Present,” in Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights, 81.
- 55.
George Kateb, Human Digntiy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5.
- 56.
Hugh Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 181.
- 57.
I.O, 182.
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Moka-Mubelo, W. (2017). Introduction. In: Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49496-8_1
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