A Shared Vision? Human Rights and the Church
From: Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland 2000
Some Problems with Human Rights
There is little sense in political and public discourse that human rights is anything other than a good thing. While concerns have been raised by some, their voices are rarely heard in the public debate. Indeed, so great is the consensus on human rights that there is scarcely anything that could be called a public debate. It is, therefore, important to be aware of some of the problematic dimensions of the pursuit of a human rights culture. The human rights tradition is no different from any other - no matter how noble its aspirations or how worthy its intent it can still shape society in ways that are anything but benign. There is no reason to suppose that this tradition is free of the difficulties that have faced other movements that aspire to human well-being. The human rights tradition can easily become a human rights ideology, that is, it can be elevated to the level of an unchallengeable principle. Yet at best human rights provisions are simply one legal means among many other legal and non-legal means for pursuing justice in society. In this section we want to note briefly eight areas of concern in relation to human rights.
The moral basis of human rights
Why do human beings have human rights? Most human rights declarations simply assert that human beings have rights by virtue of their being human. However, they rarely offer any moral or philosophical argument to justify this assertion. Human rights scholars do sometimes attempt to provide some moral justification. So, Louis Henkin suggests, "For our time, one can - one has to - justify human rights by some contemporary universal version of natural law, whether religious or secular, by appeal to a common moral intuition of human dignity."1
Yet while it is usually recognised that there is a need to justify human rights morally, some advocates and practitioners concern themselves more with the legal implementation of existing human rights law rather than the ethical justification of the concept. This approach is demonstrated in the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report on Human Rights (1998).2 The report, commenting on the testimony of a panel of academics, concludes:
Professor Rodley and Professor Greenwood did not see the implementation of instruments designed to secure human rights primarily as an ethical issue: Professor Greenwood commented "if you want to call it ethical, that is fine . . . we are not just talking ethics, we are talking international legality". While a philosophical concern for the ethical treatment of others underlies the whole debate over the nature of rights and the best way to secure them, it appears to us that the debate over the means whereby these rights are secured at present is far more clear-cut, and it is in the context of this debate that the foreign policy of any state must operate, governed as it is by the present-day structures of international law. Dr Evans raised an interesting question - whether the ends secured by these means are in themselves legitimate when put to an ethical test based upon philosophical and political theories - but this lies beyond the scope of the present report.3
More questionably, the Report also asserts that, "the legitimacy of the Universal Declaration derives from its universal acceptance and application."4 Thus the core issue of the moral legitimacy of the Declaration's assertions is dismissed.
In fairness, it should be noted that this problem of justification is not unique to the question of human rights. Indeed, it only arises because advocates of human rights wish to make moral claims. To the extent that these claims are moral in nature they then get caught up in the age-old argument about the justification of morality.
The moral vision of human rights
Human rights declarations make moral claims. However, it could be argued
that these moral claims are not incorporated within a wider moral framework
or common vision. Consequently, a host of competing and incommensurate moral
claims are demanded with all the force rights talk can muster and no moral
framework exists for assessing them. This is not surprising given the emphasis
on individual autonomy that is built into human rights thinking and practice.
So David Walsh argues that "by removing more and more of the controverted issues from the public sphere and placing them in the private realm, it conveys the inexorable sense that there is no common moral order. There are only the 'values' we choose to apply to ourselves. All that matters is that we are legally right in asserting our rights claims, and the legal order is finally accepted as the only moral order."5 |
