On Human Rights. - book reviews

Commonweal, May 6, 1994 by David Hollenbach

In the run-up to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna under United Nations auspices, some governments argued that cultural and religious differences among peoples undercut the universality claimed for human rights. This was a politically convenient argument, for these governments had their own reasons for wanting the world to keep its nose out of their authoritarian internal affairs. The Vienna Conference rejected this defense of difference," but doing so cost much energy that could have been devoted to a more positive agenda.

The seven contributions to this intellectually challenging book were originally presented as the 1993 Amnesty Lectures in Oxford. They reveal the ambiguous relationship that exists between some of the most important currents of moral theory running through the academy today and the active struggle to secure human rights on the front lines where Amnesty International works.

The central issue is skepticism about transcultural moral norms versus the assertion that there really are universal human rights. There is no agreement in this book on the intellectual basis of human rights. In fact there is something like a consensus on the futility of any search for indubitable "foundations." But the essays do provide a vivid picture of some of the main trends in current moral theory and of their "cash value" in practice.

John Rawls makes a valiant case for the universalist side of the argument. Since his 1971 Theory of Justice, Rawls appeared to move from a universalist idea of justice to a more modest effort to systematize the political-moral ideas latent within the democratic traditions of the West. This led some critics to suggest that he ended up with a historicist understanding of justice applicable only to the Western tribe that is heir to these traditions. Here Rawls sets out to lay these suspicions to rest. With his typical precision, he argues that, beginning from Western liberal democratic presuppositions, it is possible to construct an international law of peoples that will be seen as reasonable not only by other democracies but also by what he calls "well ordered" hierarchical regimes. Rawls clearly has Islamic societies in mind here, though he does not say so.

To be "well ordered" these regimes must meet certain conditions. Principally, they must be rational--i.e., on "due reflection" they recognize that their own interests are served by international standards that reject the use of force and that they can reasonably advance their conception of the good life only through non-expansionist, peaceful means such as diplomacy, trade, and persuasion. Internally, they can see that, even though they are not liberal, they must be "reasonable consultation hierarchies." This means that associations of people can make their voices heard, that the government must listen to their dissent and give at least a conscientious reply, and that people are not persecuted for their beliefs even if they do not enjoy liberal Western liberties. When a government deliberately fails to respect such rights, it becomes an outlaw regime and international sanctions or perhaps even military intervention may be appropriate.

Richard Rorty has much less hope for the power of reasonableness to reach these conclusions. He rejects strong claims for the power of reason inherited from the likes of Plato and Kant. But he is also pretty pessimistic about the more pragmatic reasonableness of Rawls's recent theorizing. For Rorty, growth in human solidarity is a matter not of knowledge but of sentiment--our ability to feel for each other. "Sentimental education" has the goal of breaking through false solidarities like those that lead Serbs to regard Bosnian Muslims as only quasi-human. It is not knowledge of the dignity of the Muslims or of the fact that they share a common human nature that will lead Serbs to stop raping Muslim women. It is the capacity to feel that "they" are "like us." So expansion of the "human rights culture" that has grown in the West is not a matter of convincing people to hold new ideas. Ideas, in fact, are the problem. People often kill each other in their name. Rorty's alternative is to find ways of manipulating sentiments to produce a greater number of nice," people around the world. And to become "nice" they need to relax in security, the way we in the rich democracies do--to enjoy the novels and plays that help us feel sympathy for the poor people who don't enjoy bourgeois comforts. Rorty writes that this shows that Christ was right in saying that love is more important than knowledge. But somehow "niceness" doesn't sound to me quite like what Jesus of Nazareth had in mind.

Catharine MacKinnon also rejects universal rational standards as a basis for human rights. She begins from the concrete horrors inflicted upon women in the Balkan slaughter and generalizes to the abuse heaped upon women by men throughout history. The whole ethos of human rights generated in the aftermath of the Holocaust was an ethos for men and how they should treat men. Only by restructuring the concrete basis of this ethos in the particular experience of violated women can the true issue be confronted--who has power? MacKinnon deconstructs the alleged universality of human rights and wants to construct an ethic of the rights of women as the only adequate response to the concrete particularity of the experience of women now and in the past. Universal, formal standards of equal rights are entirely inadequate. Only a socially and historically contextualized approach to equality has a chance of making a difference for those denied power.