Chris Blattman recently asked if Human Rights might be a morally dubious concept, following Adam Martin’s unearthing of an old interview with the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek. Hayek, who was making the argument that apartheid South Africa should have been left alone to run its own business as a ‘civilisation of a kind’, made the claim that intervention was being encouraged by the recent acceptance of human rights in America, just a few years prior to the video being recorded.
Leaving aside the irony of a libertarian regarding a situation in which 90% of humans had severely restricted liberty as unworthy of intervention, I really have to take issue with another point he makes: that human rights were a recent concept to the US when he was interviewed in the 1970s. Martin quotes:
I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd.- An absurd statement itself, considering the contents of the Declaration of Independence. In the comments, Adam defends this statement, arguing that Hayek was referring to a new, modern conception of human rights:
… human rights are claims about how governments should act to produce particular patterns of outcomesAdam contrasts this with the idea that classical human rights were statements about how individuals should treat each other. I’m dubious; a glance at the history of the ideas underlying statehood and rights suggests that the concept of rights was far more amorphous than this dichotomy would indicate, and spoke directly to the actions of the state as well as individuals. In fact the revolutions of America and France were specifically about the responsibilities of the state.
Human rights emerged as the basis of modern states (including the independent America) more than two centuries ago and their expansion from their original base began almost immediately – first incorporating new people and then new rights. The American and French Revolutions pioneered the ideas of 'human rights' as actionable concepts. The Declaration of Independence famously holds certain truths to be self-evident, notably that ‘all men are created equal’. France’s revolution was founded on the principles of liberté, egalité, fraternité – still the central elements of the French identity.
Nor were these the first time that universal rights had been invoked. The intellectual foundations for universal rights were laid by the very first Greek and Roman philosophers, and independently by Asian philosophers. These philosophers attempted to isolate the conditions for happiness, rightness and dignity that apply to all men: and thus laid the foundation for the idea of human rights as conditions that must be protected to allow the pursuit of these. As early as the third century BC, Mencius took these ideas further: he claimed that a ruler who tyrannises his subjects loses his divine right to rule and the people have the right to revolution – thus directly linking rights to the actions of states and leaders. The 1776 and 1789 revolutions made this explicit through the ideas they laid at the foundation of the new states they created.
What was amazing in the 1776 and 1789 revolutions was that they established as part of their basic justification the idea that Government had responsibilities and requirements that gave or denied it legitimacy, and that this was a truth that did not derive from exclusively from divine mandate (as with Kings who were either 'chosen' or descendent from Gods or the heavens) nor divine knowledge (i.e. from textual religion) - rather that these concepts were immutable, and derived from the condition of humanity. It was the failure to meet these responsibilities that motivated revolution.
The ideas of basic human rights established in these two revolutions have had an incredible enduring power. It is ahistorical to claim that the Sen-inspired approach to rights-based development is anything new. Rather, it’s a further modernization of a conceptual basis to the state that has existed for a great deal of time. The modification and expansion of rights is also not a new phenomenon. The original ideas were immediately passed into common currency and modified even in the few years following the revolutions. And these ideas have always been controversial and open to debate.
The first expansion was in who was covered by these rights. The concepts of the French Revolution were originally restricted to those white, free-born Frenchmen who powered and directed the revolutionary impulse in 1789. Yet within two years the first expansion of these emerging human rights occurred: in St Domingue, slaves took arm and rose under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, adopting the ideological framework of the French Revolution to their own struggle for freedom from the tyrannical plantation owners.
After an epic struggle, fighting off Napoleon’s armies, a British attempt to seize control of a new slave colony and a Spanish invasion, the free Republic of Haiti emerged. Within a few years, the British abolished slavery internationally and set about policing the newly expanded right of liberty for Africans. (Incidentally, Hayek’s justification for non-intervention in Apartheid South Africa would equally have applied to British attempts to police the end of the slave trade – the limits of libertarianism become quickly apparent in extreme circumstances). At the time, these expansions of human rights were profoundly controversial, shaking the very foundations of how the world was perceived in the West.
The second dimension of expansion was in the rights themselves. The original rights were limited to a basic legal equality and freedom; yet others argued that legal equality and nominal freedom meant very little when conditions of rule and economy denied vast swathes of humanity the ability to earn or harvest enough to avoid periodic starvation. This was considered to be a failure of equality of opportunity and a failure of freedom. This observation was taken in two different directions. On the one hand a new series of revolutions, starting in 1917 in Russia, created states with founding ideals that expanded on those of the French and American Revolutions. These new revolutions asserted that equality must be functional to eradicate the failures of the original rights in securing life. These attempts have either collapsed or been forced to re-examine their methods. The rights they sought to expand came at too great a cost in the other rights that had been established in 1776 and 1789. Yet for a while, these new rights were actively pursued through coercive state action.
A second approach to the same ends began to emerge a few decades later, alongside a development of a new vocabulary of rights. This is the new ‘creeping expansion’ of human rights which forms the basis of much current development discourse. Sen’s Entitlements Theory was essentially an attempt to expand the locus of human rights and give it a new vocabulary. In the modern world, we have been much more responsive to these ideas than we would have been in the 1700s. Back then, food insecurity was common for all but the most privileged, and any attempt to make material well-being a human right would have been utopianism. Now, though, many countries are almost completely free of food insecurity and in these places the attractiveness of labeling such things rights is massively increased: they are seen as an achievable basic condition of humanity.
These are arbitrary expansions and, like the previous expansions in the ideas of human rights, they’ve attracted controversy. Intellectual critics claim these rights are not immutable; but in a world conceived without a God, no concept is immutable because nothing is delivered to us from without the world. So immutable concepts are no longer feasible, unless we seek a religious world order. Other critiques are from the technical point of view – what do human rights achieve? What does it mean when we talk of them?
These arguments have been going on for 200 years; but what gives them such legs on the battleground of this newest expansion is that for the first time since the 18th Century, rights are being coined without any basis in the coercive power of a state. When the French Revolutionary or Soviet states made something a right they would fight, discipline and punish until these rights were adhered to. There is no such possibility for these universal rights to a better life that development actors now champion. As a result, they are far weaker than the rights as first conceived. What it’s crucial to understand is that the rights themselves are not necessarily weak, but the context in which they are delivered is. To have power, they must be backed by coercion, not an organ of discussion like the United Nations.
Human Rights have only ever been political constructs; as such, they function when they are associated with powerful political entities. Debate about the usefulness of a rights-based approach to development needs to recognise this or risk redundancy.
7 Comments
Thanks for the comments. Allow me to again try to clarify:
The question is not whether rights are universal. The question also isn't positive or negative rights. The question is whether the language of human rights--in the usage to which Hayek was referring--means the same thing now as it did back in the day (1776, etc.).
Both interactional and institutional conceptions of rights usually hold that rights are universal. So that's not the relevant distinction. The distinction is whether they refer to interpersonal conduct (interactional)--which includes the conduct of the state's agents--or apply specifically to the state itself. The latter would say that an isolated murder, theft, or rape is not a HUMAN rights violation, while the former would say that it is an rights violation. A human rights violation requires some systematic abuse or neglect. So a human rights advocate might say that human rights have been violated if, e.g., one ethnic group was subject to a systematically higher murder rate. Again, this is an excellent overview of the literature: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
That's clearly a difference in meaning, though not necessarily an antagonism. You could potentially believe in both kinds of rights. But plainly, different sorts of normative claims are being advanced.
If Hayek is wrong about the distinction, then so too are the philosophers of human rights (e.g., Pogge). They themselves make this distinction. The question is whether we ought to believe in or act upon one or the other or both sets of rights, not whether there is a distinction. And the advocates of human rights--at least in the literature to which I and I believe Hayek refer--themselves freely admit it is a much more recent idea than the French and American revolutions. There's no doubt that it's an outgrowth of the older idea, but they make fundamentally different sorts of claims. The human rights folks I've read see 1776 and 1789 as sorts of precursors to their ideas, but trace their more immediate beliefs to the UN Declaration on Human Rights. So Hayek is taking for granted a distinction that those he is critiquing themselves make. He and they may be right and they may be wrong. But that's far from "absurd." And it's anything but ahistorical to claim that Sen's approach (which falls squarely in the institutional category) isn't fairly new; quite the opposite. If you want to make a case that the distinction is bunk, you'll have to actually engage that literature.
One last nitpick: it's far from ironic for a libertarian to be skeptical of foreign intervention. That is the standard (but not universal) belief of libertarians. For a philosophy that considers government to be the problem, exporting government is rarely seen as desirable. It might be wrong, but it's certainly not inconsistent enough to be "ironic."
Hi Adam,
thanks for the detailed comment. Just to make it clear, the post takes your very interesting first one as a starting point - it's not aimed directly at refuting it.
I'm not a human rights specialist, so I'm not intimately familiar with the how the literature paints itself in terms of its novelty. However, from a historical perspective, it's certainly not uncommon for people to claim greater novelty to their ideas than truly exists.
However, what I've argued above is that in establishing the state as the ultimate safeguard for the universal rights espoused in their ideologies both the 1776 and 1789 revolutions cover both individual and systemic abuses to the rights they claim to be espousing.
From this basis, these rights have expanded in coverage both in population and in the manifestations of these rights. Thus, the Sen and UN Declaration on Human Rights approaches are easily traced to the founding ideals of the modern states created by America and France.
Newer writers may have drawn their distinctions quite emphatically in order to carve new ground or state their agenda clearly, but the evolution towards the Sen/UN approach has been gradual by my reading of the historical evolution of it, rather than marked by a sudden emergence of a new conception of human rights. So perhaps my wording could be tighter: it might be new, but it is not a new development and things have been tending this way since the establishment of the first states based on ideals rather than divine mandate of some sort.
The most important point I'm making though, is that what does distinguish the newest phase of rights/human rights expansion is that this phase is not backed by explicit state power, and that's why it's the most problematic in terms of what it means and can achieve.
Also on the final point, my own piece of pedantry - a foreign intervention need not export Government, it may just administer a pretty strong shock. It may even destroy Government and lead to statelessness - a situation that has obtained in parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a little dig at what I would have classed a morally indefensible position (laissez-faire response to apartheid). Perhaps a little intellectually loose though.
again, thanks for the comment.
You're right that human rights are meaningless unless they are enforced by someone. Hence a lot of discussion about rights, particularly in the field of jurisprudence, has been about when a right puts an obligation on someone, how, when, etc.
However, in terms of your historical narrative, I'm not sure that what you describe is an increasing application of rights backed by the use of coercion. I would read it more as a case of people advocating for their political interests, often forcefully, often failing. But can we really believe that Thomas Jefferson was keen to defend human rights when he was happy to own slaves? Rather, the American War of Independence was a struggle for a small elite to push forward their political interests, triggered by the annoyance of smugglers at falling duties. To be sure, they were influenced by ideas on the rights of man which were current at the time (as in Latin America, France, etc., too) but at heart these conflicts were about interests rather than rights.
Are interests the same as rights? Yes and no. They quite often coincided, which is why I think it could look as though people were advocating and / or fighting for rights. But ultimately, I think they're different.
If I'm right (highly unlikely, of course), the consequence is that rights-discourse could be a colossal waste of time. Rather than declaring all people to be equal and to have a right to a family life, etc., we need to be encouraging people to advocate for their interests within their political systems, and using those political mechanisms we have access to to ensure that they are able to do so.
What do you think?
Philip -
Very interesting take on things.
One of the issues that I raise is the expansion of coverage of human rights, as for example in the Haitian slave rising. In essence, there have always been restrictions on which humans were considered 'human'. Ancient philosophers discussed questions of freedom while happily owning slaves; similarly some academics have taken the argument that a crucial part of the Atlantic slave trade was the use of language to dehumanise the African slaves: calling them beasts, savages etc. - anything but human. In this context, it's quite likely that it never crossed Jefferson's mind that his slaves should qualify for rights (in particular 'all men are created equal'), since he probably considered them to be little more than better-skilled cattle.
As an aside, you see something similar in the language of genocide: in Rwanda the propagandists referred to Tutsis as cockroaches for this very reason.
Almost all conflicts contain an element about interests: however, the ideology chosen to anchor the conflict is also important and independently important. The power of ideas can stimulate new conflict or mobilise resources to support a conflict and so on.
While I do agree that the rights discourse needs to anchored in a political and coercive framework to make it really, really work, it's not necessarily the case that interests will be the governing aspect of this: after all, when Britain began policing the end of the slave-trade, it did so on the basis of rights and ideology, not self-interest.
Ranil - interestingly that's not the only interpretation of the reasons the British ended slavery, although it was clearly one motive (a hard left source, but a plausible narrative):
http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article502
"If the motives of the slaves themselves for resistance and revolution are clear, the motives for the abolition movement in Britain are less so. First, it was not just a moral crusade by a few upper class leaders but a political movement with a social base that was mainly plebeian who saw slavery as a threat to their own liberties. The movement was a broad alliance of artisans, small farmers and other petit-bourgeois layers, together with exploited workers, many of whom sympathised with the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the French Revolution and in a few cases socialism, but whose leaderships were often drawn from the articulate professional classes and the gentry, like Wilberforce himself, and his allies in parliament."
I tend to think that interests trump idealism, but it helps to have both; the way they interract (often in heterogeneous groups) is the tricky bit.
hi Adam,
That is right. I'm also reading CLR James' book, The Black Jacobins at the moment (it's hyperlinked in the text), and it explains that there were also powerful incentives by the elites: namely that Britain had discovered the economic preferability of cheap but free labour in India, and wanted to restrict slaving to stave off the economic and potentially military competition of the French, Spanish and Dutch, who still depended much more on slavery.
It's difficult to unpack what was the cause and what was enabling. It may be that the discovery of conflicted interests enabled the new ideologies to coalesce into a politically powerful force, and as such I guess we could say that ideologies need to reinforce or at least not run contrary to the major interests of those with power.
Funnily enough, btw, I'm also quoting a hard-left quote. CLR James was a Marxist writing in 1938.