The universality of the UDHR
Anthony Grayling is doing a series on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It is easy now, as it always has been, to think that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fine-sounding efflation of rhetoric, or, conversely, to think that it is a piece of Eurocentric Enlightenment imperialism whose highminded pronouncements – for example, about the equality of men and women – do not please all members of all cultures.
Indeed. Highminded pronouncements about rights and equality of anyone are bound to fail to please some members of all cultures because there are always some members of cultures who want to be able to exploit and dominate other people. The UDHR is intended to be an obstacle in the way of that project.
Grayling says as much in the next installment.
[T]he aim of the first three articles is to erect a presumption of rights as a stockade around individuals to shield them from arbitrary depredation. It is to guard them against becoming prey to the unscrupulous and the more powerful, against hostile majorities, and against tyrannical government. To the sceptic who asks, “Who says that individuals have these rights?” the argument of experience about the minimum required for a chance of human flourishing, and the vividly recent history of circumstances in which millions were regarded as not having any such rights, is a definitive reply.
I don’t say that indivduals actually have the rights, but I do say that we should all act as if they do – which is much the same thing as ‘a presumption of rights as a stockade around individuals to shield them from arbitrary depredation.’ A presumption of rights; that’s all; the sceptic can relax.
The UDHR was devised as an exhortatory document, a statement of aspirations; its preamble says that it is a proclamation of “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”, and enjoins UN members states and their citizens to “strive … to promote respect” for them. So although the emphatic rhetoric of the articles makes them sound legalistic and marmoreal, their force is primarily moral.
Sure. A declaration of intent – and one that we had all better adhere to.
But there are dissenters.
One of the standard objections to the UDHR is that it is a western Enlightenment invention, and that its claim to universality is spurious. Few things refute this allegation so swiftly as thoughts of torture and slavery…Doubts about the UDHR’s universality were voiced early, and not at first by people in colonised and developing countries, who welcomed the UDHR with open arms (it was the big powers who were suspicious of it, as threatening to interfere with the exercise of their hegemony), but rather by bien pensants in the western world itself. In 1947 the American Anthropological Association voiced concern that ideas of human rights are ethnocentric…
Because of course highminded pronouncements – for example, about the equality of men and women – do not please all members of all cultures. Good that anthropologists were and are alert to the injustice of expecting unpleased members of cultures to treat other people as rights-bearers, isn’t it.
In any case, cultural bias is not always a bad thing. Those cultures that condemn genital mutilation of girls are justified in condemning the cultures that practice it, because they can make a case that members of the latter cultures would be bound to accept in other respects…[S]o much for relativism. And that is an important point, because Articles 4 and 5 are an explication of Article 3’s “life, liberty and security”, and show that it applies without borders.
I wonder if we can make a deal – we’ll give up SUVs if you give up FGM. A win-win situation.
I am not entirely sure I am fair, but I also have an issue with anthropologists.
I do definitley understand the professional need to disregard one’s own “cultural luggage” and prejudices when trying to “understand the others”.
Unfortunately the urge to understand how other societies “tick” have been extended to also include an avoidance of reasonable normative evaluation of cultural practices.
A great disservice to those oppressed by these cultural practices.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
I will offer my SUV rights too, for that.
Yeah – anthropologists seem to confuse their own vocational epistemic requirements with universal moral requirements. Not very clever.
I think the anthropologists just feel guilty because they come from a long line of “western imperial oppressors”. They do not realize that the only reason they _can_ feel guilty is because those “oppressors” were part of a movement that eventually got rid of torture and slavery. The rest of the world came along (some parts still cling to the peculiar institution and to energetic forms of interrogation) only after the west decided that they were not a good idea. (I am not going to get into a discussion about GTMO or Abu Graib(sp?)).
If it was not for western “civilization”, they would likely be living in a much less sensitive society, which would not tolerate this sort of hand-wringing.
What are they going to propose in place of the UDHR, and can they show that it is “better”?
“Few things refute this allegation so swiftly as thoughts of torture and slavery”
So slavery and torture were invented by the Enlightenment?
No – the meaning is clearer if you read what follows. Torture and slavery are universally unpleasant, thus the need for the UDHR is universal, thus its claims to universality are not spurious. (I perhaps should have included more of that passage, for clarity.)
Pragmatically, I don’t see much of a difference between acting as though everyone has rights and saying people actually “have” rights in some metaphysical sense.
A.C. Grayling rocks, though.
Well, pragmatically, if you say people actually ‘have’ rights then you might have to answer a lot of questions that are very hard to answer, and if you don’t say that, you don’t. That’s my thinking anyway. I don’t think people do ‘have’ rights so I have no idea how to defend the claim that they do, so I feel happier and safer and more cozy if I just never make the claim.
Grayling does rock. It’s very cheering to see that he has joined Roy Brown and David Littman and Austin Dacey. The resistance is expanding; excellent.
I have an idea that there is more to be said for some form of naturalistic ethics than is being allowed for here. Rights may not belong to people in the sense that some of their bodily attributes do, but there is no reason to think that they are not moral possessions that derive from abilities that are universal, like the capacity for thought, planning, living a life project, and therefore for suffering, restriction (of thoughts and projects) and finally, of course, the fact that we can die, and all our thoughts and plans can be terminated together. To suppose there is not, in that complex of abilities, something on which to ground the real possession of rights, is, it seems to me, unwarranted. I don’t want to be treated ‘as if’ I had rights. I want people to respect the rights I have.
I think there is reason to think that ‘rights’ aren’t those things, for the very simple reason that if there was anything natural or universal about them in any kind of practical and, [to put it bluntly] real and meaningful, sense, they would have been clearly understood and acted upon throughout history, rather than being an appendage, and a bitterly-resisted one at that, to the history of the last few hundred years in one small corner of the Atlantic world, and the last half-century on a slightly wider canvas. Rights, like ‘citizenship’, like ‘welfare’, like many other things we hope we can rely on in the relatively humane societies we and our ancestors have worked hard to create, are a political and historical construction, and will only ever be defended through politics, not wishful thinking.
Yeah; I’m with Dave. I’d love to be able to think rights are something we have, but I’m not. Abilities are (broadly) universal, but as Dave points out, rights obviously are not. It doesn’t work to try to derive rights from abilities because you just will get those people reminding you that you can’t derive an ought from an is.
I am not convinced that Hume was right, and that ought and is must be kept in separate ‘ontological’ compartments. There are certain things, just by being the things they are, that are values and disvalues. Pain, for instance, is, other things equal, a harm, and a disvalue, unless it is done with the approval and for the benefit of the one suffering pain. I find it hard to think that these things are not quite obvious, and have been obvious for a long time, since the time of the Greek philosophers, at least. And most religions include these recognitions too, though imperfectly, at least for those who occupy the charmed circle of the religious tribe.
I think that rights are as universal as abilities are, as harms and interests are, and that we know this, because no one can think of the furtherance of his/her own interest as a disvalue, and no one can think of a frustration of one’s interest as other than a harm. These are, at least in some sense, facts about the human world. We don’t have to have political constructions in order to recognise this, though we may need political constructions in order to protect people from harm and to protect their interests from frustration.
So I am much more inclined to think of rights as obviously universal, as pertaining to the futherance of interests and the preventing of harms, though clarity about which rights are so is perhaps harder to come by, since interests and harms are bewilderingly diverse. But I do not think that their being universal is something that must necessarily have been easily recognised, any more than it is easy to recognise what it means to know something about the regularity of the natural world, and to express that in terms of scientific theories or laws. Just as science is achieved in small steps, so our knowledge of morality may likewise be restricted to a process of discovery and consolidation. I think this has been happening with regard to rights for some time now, and I think it can be appropriately characterised as a discovery process, by which we come to understand our duties and our rights more fully.
I think we know that treating women as chattel, for instance, is a harm to women, and that they have a right not to be so treated. We may have to fight people who refuse to recognise that this is an obvious fact about women as well as men, but this does not diminish one whit the fact that women have, as a matter of fact, universal rights to self-determination.
“because no one can think of the furtherance of his/her own interest as a disvalue”
Not true – not in the terms which you yourself are using, at least. People can indeed think that they are and should be formally and officially subordinate to other people. Millions and millions of women think exactly that. People can also think that the furtherance of their own interests take second place to the furtherance of the interests of certain other people, or of a group, or both.
Well, yes and no, Ophelia. Certainly, it is possible for someone to think (or be convinced or cajoled into believing) that subordinating their interest to someone else’s interest is in fact in their interest. This is done all the time. But it would be very strange to think of a person subordinating their interest to someone else’s interest, believing that subordinated interest to be still in their interest, and feel that that subordination was not a disvalue.
But people do believe that, Eric. To be specific, lots of women do. Lots of women do believe that the interests of other people matter more than their interests do. They don’t believe ‘that subordinated interest to be still in their interest’ – they believe that their interest is not what counts.
This is one reason universal rights are difficult, not easy. If all women already knew they were being ripped off – things would be much much easier.
In other words they don’t think that subordinating their interest to someone else’s interest is in fact in their interest – they think it’s required, or their duty, or both. They think it’s God’s will. ‘Their interest’ doesn’t come into it. They can learn that their interest does come into it – but they don’t already think that.
Yes, Ophelia, that’s true. They believe that their interests don’t count. I agree. However, when people who have subordinated their interests to another out of a sense of duty come to see that their interests do actually count, they don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ve just made something new,’ but ‘I didn’t know that before,’ or ‘That’s something worth knowing,’ or even, ‘I had a right to that all the time.’ I don’t think, as I said, this has to be pellucid and obvious, as though everyone who thinks about interests has to say, ‘Well, it’s obvious that the subversion of my interests is a disvalue.’ It’s not obvious, but it can be learned.
Moral value is not necessarily obvious, for all sorts of reasons. Religion is a good one, despite its claim to underwrite morality. We learn about moral value like we learn about the world, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything there to learn. In the same way, evolution is not obvious, otherwise Darwin would have been an also ran. But it can be learned. Even some creationists learn it, and when they do, they don’t think they’ve created a new world, but that they’ve learned something about this one.
This, I think, is the point of Dacey’s secular conscience. There is a moral world that has to be learned, and anyone who wants to make claims about morality has to submit those claims to the judgement of public discussion. It’s like the fucking skirted idiots in the Vatican thinking that it’s okay to execute gay men. They don’t just disagree about the construction of the moral world. They’re wrong.
Eric, true about what people who have subordinated their interests to others say when they learn that their interests do count…but what about people who have taught their daughters to subordinate their interests to others, what do they say? The issue isn’t just what people say about themselves, it’s what they say about other people, especially other people they’re quite certain they have the right to tell what’s what. Parents are high on that list.
Ophelia, I’m not sure. I did some work on children’s rights way back in the early 70s. It seemed to me then that there is a sense in which children’s interests (rights) are indeed justly subordinated to the interests of their parents (assuming those interests to be in children’s interests) and that, then, accordingly, the interests of children do consist (at least partly) in their being directed by, if not subordinated to, the interests of parents and other adults who have rightful control of their development and education.
(It’s interesting, in connexion with that, that as a priest I was never comfortable with the idea of the religious indoctrination of children, and had a very stormy relationship with parents and SS teachers who thought it was their task to induct children into the formal belief system of the church.)
But that we can distinguish between what kinds of subordination and control are in children’s intrests, and what would constituted a disvalue for them, indicates that there is something objective about this, something there that we can learn, criticise, and, if need be, delimit by law or custom.
“we can distinguish between what kinds of subordination and control are in children’s intrests”
Can we? Really? What about for instance the kind of subordination and control that teach boys that girls are subordinate to them? There are many senses in which that could be considered to be in boys’ interests.
Furthermore, if it were true that we can distinguish, Wisconsin v Yoder would not have been decided the way it was. And that decision stands for a lot of other law and practice.
I’d love it if you were right about all this, but…
Oh, hey, Ophelia! Of course, we can do it wrong too. We do it wrong every day. That’s precisely why you can say what you say. Some subordinations of interest are in the interest of the interests subordinated, some are not, and we can easily make mistakes about this. There is no question. But they are mistakes, and we can also correct them.
In fact, the assumption that we can’t make these kinds of distinctions has had some harmful effects on the education and development of children, in my view, though of course, in the past, children were subordinated in ways that were harmful. I think, for instance, my best interests in growing up with the ability to think rationally about issues of world view were wrongly subordinated to religious interests. But I think this was a mistake, and I think that people then should have known better.
So, while I agree with all your buts, I also think you are really just confiming my claim that there is something here for us to know and understand, not just something to be argued for and constructed. It’s not just a matter of politics. For the same reason AC Grayling believes that, the more we learn about animals, the less it seems that we can morally use many animals, but especially mammals, for experimentation. These are things that come with greater knowledge. I agree with him.
Well yes – I agree that more knowledge tends to help (though not always of course – consider Tariq Ramadan). But…I still think knowledge doesn’t get you directly to moral facts. I still think you can know an enormous amount about how people flourish, what people need, what suffering is like, and still choose to be a moral thug. Lots of people do. Notice that the fact that we can’t morally use animals doesn’t stop us from doing so.
The fact that we do isn’t a factual mistake. Yes we can make mistakes, but ‘mistakes’ can be moral or factual.
Well, I won’t push this much further, Ophelia, though I think there’s more to be said for naturalism in ethics than you suggest. Let me just end by saying that Ramadan’s kind of knowledge is not what I had in mind. In fact, he seems to me to ignore facts that are staring him in the face! I know you can do it, but it is ignoring something – call it a moral mistake, if you like, but it’s something there that you can be mistaken about. I don’t know why this isn’t being mistaken about a fact.
Jumping in here late–I agree with Eric.
I still think you can know an enormous amount about how people flourish, what people need, what suffering is like, and still choose to be a moral thug. Lots of people do.
Do they?
I’m not at all sure about this. Everything I’ve read about the most truly evil people in the world suggests that (1)they believe that what they’re doing is good or at least permissible, and (2) they believe this because they choose to ignore certain facts, as Eric points out Tariq Ramadan does.
Personally, studying biology has inclined me towards naturalistic ethics.