Historical Origins of Human Rights

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Historical Origins of Human Rights

• Lecture 9
• Explaining the Historical Success and Function of
  Humanitarianism
• October 6, 2005

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outline

• the historical problem how to make sense of
  widespread moral change? of humanizing moral
  change?
• explaining the moral revolution involved in
  abolition
• the Marxist approach
• Karl Marxs critique of rights in On the Jewish
  Question
• from critique to explanation
• success and selectivity
• Thomas Haskells alternative
• comparing Marxs and Haskells approaches
• Haskell on selectivity
• caring and indifference
• a balance sheet

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recalling basic facts about the campaign

• David Brion Davis The emergence of an
  international antislavery opinion represented a
  momentous turning point in the evolution of mans
  moral perception, and thus in mans image of
  himself.
• where torture was on the decline the campaign
  against it simply dealt it its death-blow -- the
  18th century was slaverys golden age 
• explanatory problem activists and followers 
• a small number of moral entrepreneurs cause
  large-scale value change 
• perhaps like human rights today, antislavery
  began as a moral preference held by a social and
  spiritual elite 
• main problem not explaining the elite but why
  they succeed in effecting widespread shifts in
  moral perception and belief

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the historical problem

• the its obvious thesis
• W.E.H. Lecky among the three or four perfectly
  virtuous acts recorded in the history of
  nations.
• the most altruistic act man has taken since
  Christ allowed himself to die for others sins.
• the civilization thesis
• the Marxist thesis
• David Brion Davis The new hostility to human
  bondage cannot be reduced simply to the needs and
  interests of particular classes. Yet the needs
  and interests of particular classes had much to
  do with a given societys receptivity to new
  ideas and thus to the ideas historical impact.

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antislavery and economics

• Quaker role in the rise of capitalism
• sociological convergence
• Republican party free soil, free labor, free
  men
• abolition as a movement is bound up with a
  characteristically nineteenth-century belief in
  the market as the realm of naturally equal and
  autonomous agents that is, antislavery as a
  historical matter cant be separated from the
  connected belief that the free market is its
  alternative
• historical linkage of antislavery to
  nineteenth-century free labor ideology
• without that connection, slavery might have come
  to seem wrong to some, but would it ever have
  reached a tipping point leading to widespread
  condemnation and universal abolition?

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Karl Marxs critique of rights

• On the Jewish Question
• Edmund Burke human rights not particular
  enough
• Marx human rights too particular
• human rights not a doctrine of universal
  emancipation but the mechanism by which a
  particular group controls or transforms society
  in accordance with its particular ends

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Marxs premises

• the kind of society that human rights (e.g., in
  the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and
  Citizen) provides is still too limited
• Political emancipation certainly represents a
  great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form
  of human emancipation, it is only the final form
  of human emancipation within the framework of the
  prevailing social order.
• competition, alienation, misery
• thus, calls for human rights collude with that
  order rather than changing it

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implications for Jewish emancipation

• Do the Jews want to be placed on a footing of
  equality with the Christian subjects? If they
  recognize the Christian state as legally
  established they also recognize the regime of
  general enslavement. Why should their particular
  yoke be irksome when they accept the general
  yoke? Why should the German be interested in the
  liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not
  interested in the liberation of the German?
• comparison with womens rights

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are rights egoistic?

• current contents of the so-called rights of man
  highly individualistic, indeed egoistic
• None of the supposed rights of man, therefore,
  go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a
  member of bourgeois society that is, an
  individual separated from the community,
  withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with
  his private interest and acting in accordance
  with his private caprice.

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two distinctions

• is the relationship between human rights and the
  particular society Marx says they accompany
  rhetorical or essential?
• are they camouflage or causal?
• how are they selective?
• content-selectivity versus function-selectivity
• implications of these distinctions

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applying the critique to antislavery

• from critique to history
• the Marxist thesis is not that abolition isnt
  good, its that it could not have happened (at
  least in the way it did) without substituting one
  kind of subordination by another
• most challengingly, Marxism raises this
  disturbing question what if humanitarianism is
  only carried out on condition that it is carried
  out selectively?
• specific form of Marxist critique from physical
  to wage slavery

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wage slavery

• nineteenth-century critics from chattel to
  wage slavery
• The negro slave in the West Indies, if he works
  under a scorching sun, has probably a little
  breeze of air sometimes to fan him he has a
  space of ground, and a time allowed to cultivate
  it. The English spinner slave has no enjoyment of
  the open atmosphere and breezes of heaven. Locked
  up in factories eight stories high, he has no
  relaxation till the ponderous engine stops, and
  then he goes home to get refreshed for the next
  day no time for sweet association with his
  family they are all alike fatigued and
  exhausted (speech of journeyman cotton spinner).
• A slave is at least assured of his daily bread
  by the self-interest of his master, while the
  serf at any rate has a piece of land on the
  produce of which he can live. The proletarian
  on the other hand is thrown wholly upon his own
  resources, and yet at the same time is placed in
  such a position that he cannot be sure that he
  can always use those resources to gain a
  livelihood for himself and his family.
  (Friedrich Engels).

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antislavery and ideology

• but abolitionists were not, as a rule, actually
  motivated by class or particular interests
• were they self-deceived?
• is that Marxs point?
• systemic argument history required change in
  labor organization humanitarianism served that
  history
• how do individuals idealistic intentions work
  behind their backs to promote other ends?
• Antonio Gramsci on hegemony

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Thomas Haskell on intention

• Haskells critique the only way this argument
  could work is if actors intended to substitute
  one form of subordination for another. but they
  didnt (not even unconsciously) because they did
  not understand the free market to be an analogous
  wrong. the selectivity charge only works as a
  causal explanation if there were an intent (at
  some level) to substitute.
• the thought experiment of future vegetarianism
• Is not our comparatively intense concern for
  oppressed human beings a highly selective
  response to the general problem of predation, one
  that provides an outlet for demonstrating concern
  for suffering yet thereby gives a certain moral
  insulation to even more ruthless predatory
  practices in our society? Does it not give
  tacit sanction to the systematic slaughter of
  nonhumans?
• the selectivity thesis fails in tacitly assuming
  that everyone must know in their hearts that
  market or animal depredations are wrong and can
  only maintain a clear conscience by deceiving
  themselves. It is conceivable to me that I may
  someday become convinced that eating meat is
  wrong, but by no stretch of the imagination can I
  persuade myself that in some way I already know
  that it is wrong.
• thus, abolitionists could not possibly have
  intended to substitute one evil for another.
  rather, they wanted to free the slaves and
  happened to believe that there was nothing wrong
  with market-based forms of subordination and
  immiseration

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is there a response?

• Marx on ideology
• objection ideology works through individuals, to
  be sure, but the primary level of analysis is
  systemic individuals participate in a larger
  design, and obey systemic imperatives, of which
  they are unaware (at any level)
• is Haskells critique too individualized?
• how important is it to fill in the link
  provided by individuals if there is a correlation
  between market expansion and antislavery
  idealism?

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Haskell on what accounts for moral action

• local cultural conventions determine who and what
  counts as morally relevant from society to
  society
• conventions determine perceptions of involvement
  who to care about
• but what Haskell wants to explain here is how
  changing conventions push certain people over the
  line between abstract belief in a moral rule and
  action to help bring the world into conformity
  with that rule
• case of the starving stranger. What is crucially
  important to see is that we never include within
  our circle of responsibility all those events in
  which we are causally involved. We always set
  limits that fall short of our power to intervene.
  Whatever limits we do set can therefore always be
  challenged and made to look arbitrary or
  selective by insistent questioning for they
  are finally nothing more than conventions.
• the key question is what shifts the line in
  history for large numbers of people that
  originally placed slaves in the class of people
  we dont care about and shifted them into the
  class of people we do care about
• note in effect, Haskell is talking about
  anthropological extension and how it comes about
  in history (and also the potential future
  extension of moral concern beyond humans to
  animals)

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Haskell, contd

• part of what makes a person perceive that his
  beliefs should lead to action is that he
  possesses recipe knowledge to affect that
  persons life
• New technology can change the moral universe
  in which we live. New techniques, or ways of
  intervening the course of events, can change the
  conventional limits within which we feel
  responsible to act. This drastic change in our
  operative sense of responsibility could be
  brought about without any change at all in our
  ethical convictions. This point constitutes an
  especially telling objection to whose who believe
  that humanitarianism can be explained merely by
  pointing to the proliferation of sermons and
  other texts on the importance of love and
  benevolence.
• but where Marxist asserts that the real added
  factor is class motivation to selectively
  alleviate suffering, Haskell says that what
  changes is my sense of what it would take to
  intervene
• this sense is crucially dependent on recipe
  knowledge
• objection but dont such shifts occur all the
  time without giving rise to major moral change?

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Haskell applied

• capitalism changed conventions to lead to the
  rise of modern humanitarianism
• Elias capitalism as pacification, the passions
  and the interests
• the advancement of market presupposes
  characterological shifts as man becomes ethical
• the capitalist is by definition shaped by culture
  into someone who obeys moral rules
• In the long history of human morality there is
  no landmark more significant than the appearance
  of the man who can be trusted to keep his
  promises. The norm of promise keeping (observed
  often in the breach, as all norms are) is so
  basic to the form of life that prevails today
  that we take it for granted, forgetting how
  recently it came into being

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Haskell applied, contd

• Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals on the
  origins of conscience
• Historically speaking, capitalism requires
  conscience and can even be said to be identical
  with the ascendancy of conscience.
• markets as premised on trust and reliability
• It is not merely coincidental that
  humanitarianism burst into bloom in the late
  eighteenth century, just as the norm of promise
  keeping was being elevated to a supreme moral and
  legal imperative. At the most obvious level, the
  new stress on promise keeping contributed to the
  emergence of the humanitarian sensibility by
  encouraging new levels of scrupulosity in the
  fulfillment of ethical maxims.

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Haskell on capitalism and strangers

• In the Age of Contract those who engaged in
  market transactions were, more often, strangers,
  people who shared to tie of blood, faith, or
  community.
• was it capitalism, then, that by placing
  self-interest at the core of human identity, that
  also allowed humans to overcome ancient divisions
  and see one another as potential fellows?
• did people become potential moral fellows only
  because they were potential customers?
• but capitalism also gave rise to a way of life in
  which what happens remotely matters and in which
  its good to follow principles in light of the
  importance, and partial unforseeability, of what
  happens remotely.
• caring and indifference
• individual abolitionists consummate
  interpreters of a new moral universe
• the changes that allowed abolitionism also
  allowed their acceptance

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what Haskell leaves out

• put simply Haskell doesnt explain selectivity,
  substitution, double standards, blindness --
  why some things became objects of humanitarian
  sentiment rather than others, some people rather
  than others
• Haskell There was nothing distinctively
  selective about the abolitionists preoccupation
  with chattel slavery all human action involves
  selectivity.
• but doesnt the Marxist critique begin with the
  fact that this perception operated selectively
  or even substitutionally?
• Haskell doesnt say who people start caring about
  then he leaves an important aspect of Marxs
  account without a plausible replacement
• why slavery?

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caring and indifference

• objection Marxism sees hydraulic sentiment
• but couldnt caring about one form of oppression
  help lead to new caring about other kinds?
• the indictment of the nineteenth-century market
  drew on the authority of the moral change levied
  against slavery
• antislavery agitation provided model for the
  international indictment of social crime and
  defense of rights
• prostitutes as white slaves

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caring and indifference, contd

• yet as a matter of fact, the humanitarian
  denunciation of slavery did not, with anywhere
  near the same level of practical success, lead to
  the sequel of the humanitarian denunciation of
  either the depredations of colonialism or of
  capitalism
• indeed, the British often advertised their early
  abolition of slavery as proof of their national
  virtue and thus of their entitlement to rule the
  world in a period of massive imperial expansion
• success if later humanitarian campaigns
  succeeded less well than antislavery, why?

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conclusion

• both arguments Marxs and Haskells  present
  highly relevant models for the course theme
  overall trying to understand why change in
  values happens in general, and change in values
  in the direction of humanitarian concern
  happens in particular
• antislavery left out international law as primary
  source of meaning and authority suggests theres
  still some work to do in constructing the origins
  of contemporary human rights culture