The Fuzziness of Human Rights

The modern human rights movement traces its lineage to the passage of the non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. The declaration was spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt in response to the horrors of World War II. And, in the sixty years since, the cry of "human rights" has become a catch-all phrase for everything that is good. Human rights activists are always the good gals and guys and the human rights abusers are always dastardly. However, a sustained look shows that this concept is in crisis. If we are not careful, the term "human rights" will become like the word "democracy" — used by good and evil alike to justify whatever activity they wish to pursue.

"Rights" language dominates social discourse today. Yet, cries of "give me my rights" often rob movements of the power to unite people in common purpose. Power to gain some control along with one's peers in one's village, or neighborhood, or workplace is not the same as simply securing one's individual rights. Contemporary liberal theory and cultural practice has devalued the role of our sociality and our community in favor of an emphasis on individual rights.

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, part of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, is sponsoring a semester-long "Faith in Human Rights" project, consisting of courses, talks, art, and films. The project is dedicated to encouraging religious traditions to play a greater cooperative role in preventing human rights abuses. To the extent that the school's Faith in Human Rights project clarifies what human rights truly are and how they fit into activity to end injustice, this is a wonderful exercise. To the extent that the project mushes all that is good and just into the "rights" framework, it is not helpful. For instance, the project's film series covers a range of topics, including stories of the West Oakland recycling community, the effects of war on children in Northern Uganda, and a comparison of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution to current struggles of ethnic Guatemalan peasants. All these are important and laudable struggles to reduce suffering, but what really binds them? Is it the rubric of "human rights?" I am not so sure. To their credit, most of the films in the series seem to emphasize communal activity. But as such, these struggles do not fit into the individualism of human rights. Likewise, the project includes an art exhibition that features embroidered and appliquéd fabric pictures created by women of art cooperatives located in Pamplona Alta, a shantytown situated on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Again, while this sounds like a very cool project and exhibit, why does this come under the umbrella of human rights?

For many reasons, the human rights approach is an imprecise template to place over many cases of injustice. For one thing, the question of what to do with competing rights has yet to be fleshed out. Reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, numerous possible conflicts emerge between individuals claiming certain rights. How are they to be resolved? For example, how do we square the human rights protection of property rights with the advocacy of labor rights in the document? We know that property rights nearly always win in our country and most others. Why is that?

Human rights discourse also has proven to be especially ineffective when used to confront economic hardship. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, notes that human rights arguments are of limited efficacy when "distributive justice" is the goal, and "in the amorphous realm of costs and benefits." However, most struggles of the less fortunate take place in exactly this realm. Struggles for justice, in the main, are about substantive equality. What human rights language claims to offer is procedural equality. They are not the same. Where do human rights come from and who should enforce them? Are human rights based on a common morality or do they represent the common morality? How do individual human rights help us face common problems?

Finally, an emphasis on "rights" in a legal sense downplays the innate morality of human dignity. Contemporary society has been under the sway of a morality of the market, which privileges money-making and greed. In his work "The Moral Imperative of the Market," Frederick Hayek, the hero of Wall Street, wrote that "people must be willing to submit to the discipline constituted by commercial morals." Our nation and world have been operating in submission to this standard of legality and morality for far too long, and the results can be seen in our deepening social and economic crisis. Human rights framing offers little in rebuttal to this obscene formulation.

The next talk in the GTU lecture series could be especially helpful in thinking about the question of where to find justice and where to find rights. Do we find the answers in the makeup of our species or in the laws we have passed? Catholic feminist theologian and Notre Dame professor Jean Porter, who will speak on March 12, is working hard to construct a basis in "natural law," or morality, for legal rights. Natural law is that set of ethics and morals that most global civilizations have clung to since the dawn of our species. Human rights could be seen as natural law that influences legal rights. Porter's work attempts to provide a basis upon which to make common decisions about what rules, responsibilities, and entitlements should be available to all. Implicit in the natural law discussion is that legal rights do not fall from the sky nor are they contained in the human genome; they are the product of the political forces at the time. Also understood is that this natural law can provide a common basis for morality, something sorely lacking today.