Some Notes from Ignatieff's "Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry"

Some Notes from Michael Ignatieff's 

"Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry"

 

 Introduction by Amy Guttman

• "Covenants without swords are but words, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote."
• "The purpose of human right is to protect human agency and therefore protect human agents against abuse and oppression. Human rights protect the core of negative freedom, freedom from abuse, oppression and cruelty."
• "When human rights are honored and enforced, they are effective instruments to protect instruments to protect individuals from abuse, cruelty, oppression, degradation, and the like. This purpose of human rights - which Ignatieff calls pragmatic, which is not to deny that it is moral in its core purpose of protecting human agency (just as pragmatism is a moral and political philosophy) - can provide a guide to the content of a human rights regime. Human rights institutions and agencies - both governmental and nongovernmental - should not try to proliferate human rights beyond what is necessary to protect persons as purposive agents, or to realize a similarly basic purpose of human rights (such as the dignity of persons, a purpose that Ignatieff rejects and to which I shall return). Proliferation of human rights to include rights that are not clearly necessary to protect the basic agency or needs or dignity of persons cheapens the purpose  of human rights and correspondingly weakens the resolve of potential enforcers."
• "The U.S. government is famous - or infamous, depending on one's perspective - for not acknowledging the legitimacy of human rights enforcement against its own authority on grounds that its authority is rooted in the "consent of the governed" to constitutional democratic sovereignty."
• "Nationalism is often asserted as human rights claim on behalf of a self-determining "people." Ignatieff perceptively argues that nationalism is a double-edged sword. Universalized as a human right, nationalism is conceived as the right of collective self-determination. This raises the question of whether collective self-determination is part of the minimal set of human rights... The idea that secure states can better guarantee rights than any available alternative is an instrumental defense of collective self-determination, but not a defense of nationalism per se. To defend collective self-determination as a right that is instrumental to protecting individuals against cruelty, one need not believe that every "people" has a right to its own self-determining society, which would permit it to exercise sovereignty over its members."
• "When a right to collective self-determination is identified with a defense of nationalism, understood as self-determination of a people, the right loses its clear connection to protection of human agency against cruelty, oppression, and degradation. This is because, as Ignatieff recognizes, 'nationalism solves the human rights problems of the victorious national groups while producing new victim groups, whose human rights situation is made worse.'"
• "There is no right to victimize individuals in the name of being a people or nation."
• "Like nationalism, intervention is a double-edged sword. It must be used sparingly lest it become an unintended excuse for human rights violations on the part of intervening states."
• "'Human rights may be universal, but support for coercive enforcement of their norms will never be universal.'"
• "To say that a universal regime of human rights should be compatible with moral pluralism is not to say that it must be compatible with every belief system. Human rights cannot be so indiscriminately embracing of every existing belief system, or at least not of every dominant interpretation of every existing belief system."
• "The meaningful sense in which human rights are universal is that they are morally defensible instruments even - or perhaps especially - in the face of oppressors who fail to recognize the human agency or dignity of those whose loves and liberties they are discounting. As Ignatieff puts it: 'Rights are universal because they define the universal interests of the powerless.'"
• "What human rights protection seeks is not the destruction of cultures, as critics too often accuse, but their integration of human rights protection, as critics too often deny is possible."
• "When foundations are treated as more important to honor than the rights themselves, and disagreement about foundations becomes a cause for violating rights, then 'idolatry' of abstract ideas, quite apart from the practical consequences of such idolatry, becomes a serious political problem."
• "If we could all agree on what counts as not harming others, we might be able to settle for toleration in the sphere of international human rights. We would then not need to deliberate about the content of human rights. but as Ignatieff recognizes, we disagree, and deliberation is a way - a mutually respectful wy - of trying to come closer to a reasoned agreement about human rights. Even when people who deliberate do no succeed in reaching agreement, they demonstrate some minimal degree of respect for one another by their efforts at deliberation.  

 

Human Rights As Politics and Idolatry by Michael Ignatieff

Human Rights As Politics

• "Yet if human rights has not stopped the villains, it certainly has empowered bystanders and witnesses a stake in abuse and oppression both within and beyond their borders, and this has called forth an advocacy revolution, the emergence of a network of nongovernmental human rights organizations - Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch being only the most famous - to pressure states to practice what they preach. Because of this advocacy revolution, victims have gained historically unprecedented power to make their case known to the world."
• "Many of these NGOs espouse the universalist language of human rights but actually use it to defend highly particularist national groups or minorities or classes of persons. There is nothing wrong with particularism in itself... The problem is that particularism conflicts with universalism at the point at which one's commitment to a group leads to countenance human rights violations toward another group. Persons who care about human rights violations committed against Palestinians may not care s much about human rights violation committed by Palestinians against Israelis, and vice versa."

Note to self: There seems to be an American exception when it comes to human rights. The US has been consistent in calling out other countries in their observance of human rights but has been less enthusiastic on submitting itself to the international community on allegations of human rights violations. It reasons out that there has been consent given by its citizens in exchange for government stability. There is also mention about state interventions being used at a minimum lest we run the risk of having imperialism under the guise of protecting human rights.

Ignatieff said, "The human rights covenants that states have signed since 1945 have implied that state sovereignty is conditional on adequate human rights observance, yet this conditionality has never been made explicit in international law, except in human rights instruments of the European continent." In addition, intervention must not be liberally used not because it is ineffective, but because it is inconsistent.

Four criteria for rationing of interventions:

1. the human rights abuses at issue have to be gross, systematic, and pervasive;

2. they have to be a threat to international peace and security in the surrounding region; and

3. military intervention has to stand a real chance of putting a stop to the abuses.

4. the region in question must be of vital interest, for cultural, strategic, or geopolitical reasons, to one of the powerful nations in the world and another powerful nation does not oppose the exercise of force.

For all intents though, intervention is not that simple. For instance, when the West intervened in Kosovo and supported Kosovan self-determination, a genuine human rights disaster emerged as 800,000 Kosovan citizens (Serbs) were forcibly evicted to Albania and Macedonia, followed by the massacre of up to 10,000 of those who remained.

Ignatieff summarizes, "We are intervening in the name of human rights as never before, but out interventions are sometimes making matters worse. Our interventions, instead of reinforcing human rights may be consuming their legitimacy as a universalistic basis for foreign policy.

The crisis of human rights relates first of all to our failure to be consistent - to apply human rights criteria to the strong as well as to the weak; second, to our related failure to reconcile individual human rights with out commitment to self-determination and state sovereignty; and third, to our inability, once we intervene on human rights grounds, to successfully create the legitimate institutions that alone are the best guarantee of human rights protection."

Human Rights as Idolatry

"There are three distinct sources of the cultural challenge to the universality of human rights. Two come from outside the West: one from resurgent Islam, the second from East Asia; and the third, from whitn the West itself. Each of these is independent of the others; but taken together, they have raised substantial questions about the cross-cultural validity and hence legitimacy of human rights norms."

There has been mention of how moral individualism has been too biased and that it should soften it a bit by putting emphasis on the communitarian parts of the UN Declaration.

• "Rights are inescapably political because they tacitly imply a conflict between a rights holder and a rights 'withholder,' some authority against which the rights holder can make justified claims."
• "Rights are universal because they define the universal interests of the powerless, namely, that power be exercised over them in ways that respects their autonomy as agents."
• "[I]ndividual and group interests inevitably conflict. Human rights exist to adjudicate these conflicts, to define the irreducible minimum beyond which group and collective claims must not go in constraining the lives of indoviduals."
• "Believing in your right not to be tortured or abused need not mean adopting Western dress, speaking Western languages, or approving of the Western way of life. To seek human rights protection is not to change your civilization; it is merely to avail of yourself of the protections of 'negative liberty.'"
• "It is simply not the case, as Islamic and Asian critics contend, that human rights forces the Western way of life upon their societies. For all its individualism, human rights does not require adherents to jettison their other cultural attachments. As Jack Donnelly argues, human rights 'assumes that people are pribably best suited, and in any case are entitled, to choose the good life for themselves.' What the  Decalration does mandate is the right to choose, and specifically the right to leave when choice is denied. The global diffusion of rights language would never have occurred had these not been authentically attractive propositions to millions of people, especially women, in theocratic, traditional, or patriarchal societies."

It is very enlightening for me to read that human rights is not to overturn the decisions of women in traditional societies. Human rights is about informing them of the implications of their decisions. This is not to give a moral prescription to a group but to enfranchise them.

•  "A more likely assumption is that human morality in general and human rights in particular represent a systematic attempt to correct and counteract the natural tendencies we discovered in ourselves as human beings. The specific tendency we are seeking to counteract is that while we may be naturally disposed, by genetics and history, to care for those close to us - our children, our family, our immediate relations, and possibly those who share our ethnic or religious origins - we may be naturally indifferent to all others outside this circle. xxx We defend human rights as moral universals in full awareness that they must counteract rather than reflect natural human propensities. So we cannot build a foundation for human rights on natural human pity or solidarity. For the idea that these propensities are natural implies that they are innate and universally distributed among individuals."

• "To repeat a point made earlier: We need to stop thinking of human rights as trumps and begin thinking of them as a language that creates the basis for deliberation. In this argument, the ground we share may actually be quite limited: not much more than the basic intuition that what is pain and humiliation for you is bound tp be pain and humiliation for me. But this is already something. In such a future, shared among equals, rights are not the universal credo of a global society, not a secular religion, but something more limited and yet just as valuable: the shared vocabulary from which our arguments can begin, and the bare human minimum from which differing ideas of human flourishing can take root."

Read Ignatieff's "Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry" in full:
https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Politics-Idolatry-University-Center/dp/0691114749