Historical Origins of Human Rights

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Historical Origins of Human Rights

• Lecture 24
• The End
• April 30, 2007

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outline

• an invention of recent date
• elements and crystallization
• doing history against continuity
• doing history studying norms
• analysis v. advocacy
• the inevitability of advocacy

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an invention of recent date

• elements of human rights not that old
• their crystallization as an operative ideology
  yet more recent

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elements

• the discovery of human unity
• the civilizing process
• the rise of sympathetic emotions the caring
  personality
• the technological availability of strangers
• the centrality of the suffering body as
  universally shareable object of moral concern
• the technological availability of suffering
• stages of individual reform action
• legalization
• immediate post-WW II consensus

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crystallization

• the 1970s
• from one stage of the Cold War to another
• implausibility of alternative idealism except
  humanitarianism
• dissidence
• NGOs
• moral criticism in the name of pre-political
  values
• humanitarian engagement in the name of those
  values
• international legalization in the name of those
  values
• search for agents, affirmation of states as
  potential agents of the enforcement/realization
  of such values

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some other elements

• Holocaust memory
• the effect of Holocaust memory of the idea of
  where human rights came from
• the effect of Holocaust memory on humanitarian
  imagination
• the rise of social rights
• global justice

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doing history in general

• continuity
• contingency

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doing the history of values in particular

• the varieties of history
• emotions
• representations
• cultural context of law
• alongside diplomatic, political, and intellectual

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discovery or invention?

• the class never resolved  this alternative
• why not
• one view the contingencies of the discovery of
  truth does not affect its necessity
• the philosophical distinction between genesis and
  validity
• separating the historical question from the
  historical question
• discovering how recent and contingent values are
  makes it especially important not to believe too
  quickly or unthinkingly in their necessity
• all people at all times have believed their
  values were the eternal verities
• if were different (if we not only think this but
  were right or entitled to do so), what makes
  this the time and place in which moral values
  become less culturally-dependent and
  context-dependent than before and elsewhere?

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Nietzschean genealogy

• M. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
• wrong describing the history of morality in
  terms of a linear development
• genealogy opposes itself to the search for
  origins. If he the genealogist listens to
  history, he finds not the timeless and
  essential secret, but the secret that things have
  no essence or that their essence was fabricated
  in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.

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the importance of critics

• Nietzsche against humanitarianism
• Marx the predictable limits of present idealism
  and need for a new kind
• these figures do not simply provide alternative
  values (though it is important that they do), but
  they also challenge us to gain distance on our
  values in order to examine them more impartially
  because these figures make it clear that our
  values are not the only possible ones to hold
• again, the existence of alternative does not by
  itself make our values wrong, and may simply
  increase the stakes in proving them right
• but its possible that theyre wrong and have to
  be abandoned
• if so, human rights are not simply an invention
  of recent date, but are potentially nearing their
  end

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analysis or advocacy?

• the need for analysis as opposed to advocacy
• Paul Kahn theory and practice
• the dangers of analysis as a permanent substitute
  for advocacy
• distance from ones own commitments and need to
  return to them
• analysis as an important stage in intelligent
  advocacy
• but advocacy of what?

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evaluating values

• Under what conditions did man devise these value
  judgments? And what value do they themselves
  possess?