Common Humanity As a Justification for Human Rights Claims Simon Hope

Common humanity as a justification for human rights claims Simon Hope I Anyone familiar with the modern language of human rights will have heard the phrase human rights are held in virtue of our common humanity. In this chapter, I want to examine this phrase further; or rather, one sense thereof, for the claim under consideration is ambiguous – in virtue of the “in virtue of” clause – and this ambiguity must be cleared up. The claim might be deployed in a descriptive sense: human rights track certain features of our common humanity, but are justified on entirely different grounds (by, say, appeal to what would be chosen under certain con- straints in an idealized thought experiment.)1 However, the claim that human rights are held in virtue of our common humanity has appealed to many defenders of human rights as a justificatory claim: we can iden- tify features of our common humanity that count as reasons for some conception of human rights. It is the justificatory claim that I consider here. More precisely, my target is the following thought, basic to many philosophical conceptions of human rights: that, by appealing to the moral significance of features of human nature that all of us – of course – share, human rights can be justified by a conception of the human good that is accessible to all. My complaint will be that these bold invo- cations of common humanity idealize away the depth and breadth of moral diversity, and so cannot give a satisfactory account of the intelli- gibility of moral reasons in the face of this diversity. My argument pro- ceeds as follows. In section II, I highlight the constraint on ordinary moral reasoning that applies when the domain of agents to whom moral reasons must be offered is an unbounded one. Then, in sections 1 For an excellent and far more thorough discussion of the various ambiguities in the phrase see Gardner (2008). DOI 10.1515/9783110263886.211, ©2017 Simon Hope, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs3.0 License. 212 Simon Hope III and IV, I discuss two versions of the bold appeal to common humanity, and argue that neither can account for the constraint on moral reasoning. Finally, in section V, I argue that reasons for human rights claims can be grounded in common problems humans face: in particular, problems stemming from our vulnerabilities. Two further preliminary points are in order. Firstly, the claim human rights are justified in virtue of our common humanity raises more philosophical questions than those I am asking here.2 I hope the reader will allow me one simplifying assumption. I shall assume that the claim “human rights are held in virtue of our common humanity” implies that human rights are held equally by all human beings. That need not be the case, as §57 of Nietzsche’s Antichrist reminds us. One could say that which rights one holds depends very much on the sort of person one is: “a right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the very nature of his being” (Nietzsche 1968, §57). The question of whether anyone has given good reasons for a Nietzschean-inspired view will not, however, concern me here. Secondly, my argument takes place at one remove from the main philosophical battlefields in the current human rights literature: on the one hand, the debate over the concept of a right (are rights neces- sarily claimable, for example); and, on the other, the debate between natural rights theorists and Rawlsian-inspired ‘political’ conceptions of human rights over the broader philosophical approach within which the concept of a right should be embedded.3 This chapter will make no contribution to the debate over the concept of a right. The questions “In what sense are human rights held in virtue of our common humanity?” and “In what sense are human rights rights?” are too complex for me to address both adequately here; accordingly, I focus only on the issue of justification by appeal to some feature of common humanity, i.e. on the “human” rather than the “rights” aspect of human rights. Nor shall I comment directly on the debate between defenders of natural rights and “political” conceptions of human rights, although my conclusion has implications for that debate. The strongest argument offered in defense of a ‘political’ conception of rights is that moral reasoning breaks down within a sufficiently broad domain of agents, so that human rights must be seen as artifacts of various United Nations declarations, and their justification rests on nothing more than the way in 2 For discussion of some of these other questions, see ibid. 3 For an excellent overview see John Tasioulas’s chapter in this volume. Common humanity 213 which the UN declarations function as a widely recognized and effec- tive mode of legitimation in international and domestic politics (Beitz 2009, ch. 3 and 4).4 Against this, defenders of natural rights conceptions, such as John Tasioulas, have argued that “ordinary moral reasoning” about morally important features of human beings can provide a philosophically robust justification for a conception of human rights.5 As will become clear, I do not disagree with Tasioulas’s claim; what I shall argue is that ordinary moral reasoning must take a specific form if it is to be intelligible to the domain of agents to which human rights claims must be justified. II John Dunn once splendidly remarked that “no adequate political philos- ophy can simply take the form of a theory of what is intrinsically desirable”. Dunn explains the point as follows: At the very least any such theory must also offer an account of what sort of claims in the face of what sort of costs the intrinsically desirable can ration- ally levy upon individual historical agents or groups of such agents. If these claims constitute at all a heavy burden, it must add at least a sketch of the reasons why such agents would themselves be epistemically well-advised to regard the claims as valid (Dunn 1985, 38). The first point Dunn registers, which for my purposes addresses the de- mandingness of a conception of human rights, will not concern me here. My focus is on the second point – the sketch of a justification – and the difficulties one faces in giving one for human rights. Salient to any plausible justificatory argument must, I think, be the fact that reasons are among the many things people exchange with one another. If we go in for moral argument at all, we must go in for the claim that we must justify our moral principles to all agents we expect to comply with those principles – to insist on compliance without ad- ducing moral considerations that count in favor of compliance is to enter an amoralist’s worldview, where reasons are grounded in force or deception. At the core of a plausible justificatory argument, there- fore, will be an appeal to considerations that all agents the argument ad- 4 See also Rawls 1993, 54ff, for the terminology “political”. 5 Tasioulas, “On the Nature of Human Rights”, in this volume. 214 Simon Hope dresses can find intelligible as points in favor of the principles one is try- ing to justify.6 What makes it difficult to sketch out a justification for a conception of human rights is that the content of that conception – like any univer- sal moral principle – applies to, and thus must be justified to, an inclusive domain of agents. The practical activity of justifying oneself to others typically operates well within the confines of a set of safe assumptions – we justify propositions to friends and fellow citizens whose own en- semble of convictions we (often, but not always, rightly) take to vary little from our own, and we construct reasons accordingly. But when the domain of agents to whom principles apply is not exclusive –is not limited to the holders of a specific worldview or set of worldviews – it becomes much harder to determine the contours of a shared ensem- ble of convictions, should any even exist. One is dealing, rather, with a limit case where philosophical questions of objectivity in ethics coincide with questions about the limits of interpretation (Williams 1995). Our respective standpoints for under- standing the world and evaluating actions are constructed out of the re- sources made available to us by the web of concepts and beliefs that con- stitutes a cultural worldview (or conceptual scheme or, in a Wittgenstei- nian frame of mind, a “form of life”). As Clifford Geertz once splendidly put it, “no one lives in the world in general” (Geertz 1999, 62). One upshot of this fact is that we should see an inclusive domain of agents – the domain to which justifications of human rights must be addressed –asanindefinitely varied domain of agents; and we are, accordingly, en- titled to make as few assumptions as possible about settled agreement on moral claims within that domain. The broader the domain of agents in question, the more assumptions about shared values or intuitions appear as unjustified and unhelpful idealizations. Philosophically, this makes things harder, but not impossible. It all depends precisely how human rights are taken to be justified in virtue of our common humanity. My target is the following feature of many philosophical conceptions of human rights: the appeal to common humanity is intended to justify, to an inclusive domain of agents, obligations that we owe to others in virtue of some features of our common humanity that bear absolute moral value (couched in terms of status or interest).

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