#212 Human Rights

The Problem of Human Rights

• Both Hobbes and Locke helped establish a “social contract” theory of individuals’ relationship with the state. For Locke, the purpose of that contract was explicitly articulated as the defense of rights that derived from the “law of nature”: “life, health, liberty, or possessions” (Second Treatise in Reader, 44).
• Locke’s ideas were influential in shaping the language of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, 1789).
• Bentham questioned Locke’s premise as “nonsense upon stilts” (Sandel, 1). He was neither the first—nor last—to do so.
• The horrors of World War II (1937-45) further tested the notion of “natural rights,” and it was, perhaps, the systematic murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust (1941-45) that finally showed the fundamental problems with earlier idealistic assumptions. Shortly after the war, Hannah Arendt noted that natural rights:
  • “had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. . . . The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 9) [Note: The book was published in 1951, but the chapter was substantively drafted in 1946]
• The task, then, was to construct a new regime, one which would guarantee, in Arendt’s words, “the right to have rights” (Arendt, Origins, chapter 9).
• So, on one hand, we can see the necessity of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—even agree that we haven’t gone far enough to realize Arendt’s hope of leaving nobody behind. On the other hand, the very notion of a universal set of rights raised new questions: could a Lockean and a Marxian agree on the same fundamental rights? What about a Confucian and a Christian? And what do you do about systematic hierarchies that separate men from women in Saudi Arabia or white and non-white citizens of apartheid-era South Africa?

Reading and Winnowing the UDHR

• First, take a few minutes to read through pages 57-63 of your Reader. These thirty articles are the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Next, in groups of 3-4, if you could choose to keep just twelve of these rights, which would you keep? Why?
• With time remaining we will discuss our choices.
  

Homework: Assignment ​#213