Charles Blattberg (University of Montreal) has posted The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights (Charles Blattberg, PATRIOTIC ELABORATIONS: ESSAYS IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, Chapter 3, McGill-Queen's University Press) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
With the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea of human rights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Of course one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that human rights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely.
To be clear, my concern is specifically with the language of human rights, not the values it expresses, values which I certainly endorse. The problem with this language is that it is abstract. And the problem with abstraction is that it demotivates, it 'unplugs' us from the 'moral sources,' as Charles Taylor would call them, which empower us to act ethically. After showing why, I then go on to describe how the rise of human rights has constituted an ironic tragedy of sorts for those philosophers who have attempted to lend it intellectual support. On the whole, they may be divided into two groups. One, led by cosmopolitans such as Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Pogge, tries to interlock rights within systematic theories of justice, thus fixing the priorities between them. The other, led by value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, rejects such theories as infeasible and asserts that the best we can do when rights conflict is to negotiate. Yet both approaches, I argue, are counter-productive.
And from the paper:
[S]ince “humanity” is an abstraction, we ought to object to all the loose theoretical cosmopolitan talk about the existence of a “community of human beings” – not because there is no global community but because those who belong to it need to be seen as particular, culture-endowed persons, not as members of a biological species. Otherwise put, real communities are in a fundamental sense thick, historical entities. The theoretical cosmopolitan, however, would have us transcend the particular and affirm the universal since anything else is said to give “an accident of history a false air of moral weight and glory.”47 Indeed, as Nussbaum adds: “the accident of being born a Sri Lankan, or a Jew, or a female, or an African-American, or a poor person, is just that – an accident of birth. It is not and should not be taken to be a determinant of moral worth. Human personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth, and this worth is equal.” 48 Yet surely, that one has been born human and not, say, a canine is just as arbitrary.49 If the reply is that animals should be added to the category of those who deserve recognition as morally equal, one has only to mention vegetation. For the moment that the life of a vegetable is considered as important as that of a person, it should be evident to all that something has gone terribly wrong.
I find this argument somewhat puzzling. So far as I can tell, no reason is provided for the assertion that members of the global community "need to be seen as particular, culture-endowed persons, not as a members of a biological species." Nussbaum's point is that membership in the human species confers moral worth because of the capacities that inhere in that membership. Her point is that membership in particular cultures is not required for possession of the capacities. So membership in the human species (as opposed to another species) is not, in fact, morally arbitrary.
