David Reidy, “An Internationalist Conception of Human Rights,”
Philosophical Forum 36 (2005), pp. 367-371.
I. We are living through what might be called the human rights revolution. Since the end of World War II, and more dramatically, since the end of the Cold War, human rights have emerged as a fundamental concern of international relations and morality. This is as it should be. While human rights constitute but a part of an adequate theory and practice of international relations and morality, they constitute a core or fundamental part. It is crucial, then, that we properly understand and fully secure human rights.
As with so many other revolutions, the human rights revolution has brought both progress and confusion. It is clear to almost everyone now that there are some rights held by all individual persons, simply by virtue of their being persons, and binding against all bodies politic regardless of their voluntary undertakings, and that the sovereignty of states over their members is accordingly conditional. But the content, nature, and justificatory basis of these rights are not clear. Nor is their relationship to those rights articulated in the various human rights documents and treaties increasingly signed and ratified (though often with significant reservations) by existing states.1
[368] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) expresses what might be called the cosmopolitan orthodoxy with respect to human rights. According to this orthodoxy, human rights belong to a moral code, thin and surely incomplete, but nevertheless fundamental and binding on all individual persons worldwide, and thus all peoples and states. Human rights are justified in terms of the foundational axiological commitments and basic moral norms belonging to that code. This view fits comfortably with the language and tone of the UDHR. The Preamble to the UDHR affirms the “inherent dignity and [thus] the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” and “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.”2 And Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Taken together, the thirty Articles of the UDHR would appear to entitle all human persons as a matter of basic morality to, and thus to commit all bodies politic to securing, the social conditions essential to any decent or minimally good life.3
There are many species of the cosmopolitan orthodoxy genus. Some assert that human rights depend fundamentally on the theistic underpinnings of traditional natural law theory.4 Others assert that they depend only on a secular conception of the rationality and reasonableness of persons as agents.5 Still others set aside the search for unassailable moral foundations and ground human rights explicitly in liberal aspirations, a liberal project addressed to the conditions of modernity, with its centralized and powerful states and ubiquitous and unforgiving markets.6 But what all species of the cosmopolitan orthodoxy have in common is that human rights are thought to exist and to be derivable independent of and prior to any practical inquiry into the morality of international relations.7 Human rights belong to a fundamental (even if partial or incomplete or minimalist) moral code applicable to all individual persons, a code set out at the level of interpersonal relations and universal in reach. They thus function as an independent and prior moral constraint on international relations. They are, as it were, already in hand [369] when we take up the practical questions of international morality. Indeed, they are already in hand when we take up the questions regarding the moral credentials of our own domestic political order.
Further, most, if not all, species of the reigning cosmopolitan orthodoxy count all or nearly all the rights set out in the UDHR and subsequent human rights conventions and treaties, as genuine human rights. The upshot is that human rights require something like a liberal democratic egalitarian welfare state.8
With Michael Ignatieff, I suspect that one reason for the dominance of this orthodoxy regarding human rights is the often unacknowledged yearning of many in the West for a new universal creed, a new Catholicism, a secular religion, to replace the more familiar but now no longer plausible claimants to the one true creed or religion.9 That a doctrine or conception of human rights satisfies such a yearning, of course, is not a good philosophical reason, even if it is a psychological or sociological explanation, for endorsing it. But what are the alternatives to (one or another form of) the reigning cosmopolitan orthodoxy?
The standardly mentioned alternatives here, realism and relativism, are skeptical in nature and thus not morally attractive. On the realist view, human rights never amount to anything more than either the self-interested will of the most powerful states or the contingent content of a prudential modus vivendi between more or less equally vulnerable states. On the relativist view, the universality of human rights can be purchased only at the price of ethnocentrism, intolerance, moral imperialism, and a failure of reciprocity. Given these as the alternatives, it is no wonder that the cosmopolitan orthodoxy reigns.
But the cosmopolitan orthodoxy has its own difficulties. In particular, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan orthodoxy, the content, nature, and justification of human rights remain as contested, reasonably contested, as ever. Is there really a human right to what comes, more or less, to life in a liberal democratic egalitarian welfare state? Are human rights really best understood as part of a universal
moral code binding on all individuals and articulable and understandable without any essential reference to international relations? If so, do they belong within that code to its conception of the right or of the good? Where is the line, if there is a line, between human rights as minimal standards the violation
of which is simply intolerable and human rights as aspirational political goals [370] or moral targets at which we, as individuals, as states or peoples, and as an international community, ought to aim? How are human rights to be justified in a world divided over moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines as well as conceptions of justice and the good society, institutional history, national self-understanding, and so much else? The failure of those who subscribe to the cosmopolitan orthodoxy to generate any significant consensus on these matters is surely a good reason to search for other nonskeptical conceptions of human rights.
Footnotes
1 Three articles featured in a recent issue of Political Theory all undertake to shed some light on, and
thereby underscore, the confusion surrounding contemporary human rights theory and practice. See,
Alessandro Ferrara, “Two Notions of Humanity and the Judgment Argument for Human Rights,” Political Theory, 31 (2003): 392–420; Fred Dallmayr, “Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political,” Political Theory, 31 (2003): 421–42; and David Ingram, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism: Toward an Alternative Theory of Human Rights,” Political Theory, 31 (2003): 359–91.
2 Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
3 James Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1987) 51–52.
4 See, e.g., Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).
5 For very different examples, see, e.g., Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification
and Applications (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1982); Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights;
Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
6 See, e.g., Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights: In Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 2003).
7 Charles Beitz makes this point in his “Human Rights and the Law of Peoples,” The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, ed. Deen Chatterjee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).
8 See, e.g., Carol Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2004). Gould stands at the frontier of the cosmopolitan orthodoxy, arguing that human rights require
not just the liberal democratic egalitarian welfare state, but also the democratization of international
institutions, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization
and so on.
9 See Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 2001).
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