A Shared Vision? Human Rights and the Church
From: Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland 2000
While the emphasis on the individual is not wrong in itself, when it is accompanied by an implicit reduction of all social relationships to inter-individual ones - and perhaps to contractual ones - it becomes problematic. For this reductionist emphasis on the individual is highly questionable in its assumptions and highly destructive in its consequences. The autonomous rights bearing individual is a philosophical and legal fiction. No one exists in this state and no one ever has existed in this state. Human beings are essentially social. From the moment of birth to the moment of death human beings exist in and are formed by relationships. These relationships exist at a host of different levels - some are chosen, some are not. It is as social beings, not autonomous individuals, that human beings define themselves and come to understand their rights, duties and responsibilities.
More than this, to the extent that the language of individual rights reflects this reductionist approach, it is socially impoverishing. "Rights language offers a rich vernacular for the claims an individual may make on or against the collectivity, but it is relatively impoverished as a means of expressing individual's needs for the collectivity. It can only express the human idea of fraternity as mutual respect for rights, and it can only defend the claim to be treated with dignity in terms of our common identity as right bearing creatures. Yet we are more than rights bearing creatures and there is more to respect in a person than his rights."7
Finally, it is worth noting the extent to which the individualist emphasis of human rights plays into the hands of some of the worst dimensions of human nature. In particular, the focus on the individual endorses and reinforces the focus on the self. Consequently, the pursuit of rights can often be no more than a cover for the pursuit of self-interest, even if that is at the expense of others.
The ideological captivity of human rights
Human rights is not ideologically neutral. It is a product of societies with certain sets of values and practices. While the human rights tradition often challenges some aspects of these values and practices, more often it serves to legitimise or endorse them. Examples of this are not hard to find.
The same Western societies that profess a commitment to human rights are also committed - to a greater or lesser extent - to making abortion available. Yet few of these societies see any conflict between the widespread provision of abortion and the commitment to the right to life. But this is hardly surprising since the particular shape the commitment to human rights takes in these societies reflects the liberal commitments of these societies. And another of these commitments is to the availability of abortion. Even where there is some recognition of a potential conflict it is dealt with by prioritising rights. So abortion is dealt with under the right to choose. This, in turn, rests on two high priority rights - the right to property (that is, one's own body) and the right to privacy. Both of these are understood in an individualistic way. Yet the right to choose can hardly be said to have general priority over the right to life. So, the next step is to redefine the foetus, so that it is no longer characterised as human in the full sense of the rights bearing adult. It is, rather, a piece of property. Thus, in the case of the foetus, the right to life does not exist. In the process the human rights tradition demonstrates its ideological captivity to western liberalism. On this core issue of the right to life the human rights tradition has nothing to say.
A second example concerns the use of force in pursuit of human rights. The
protection of human rights has been advocated as a justification for the
use of force in a number of recent military campaigns - most notably that
in Kosovo. Governments are increasingly advocating that some nations or
international bodies should go to war to secure or protect human rights.
At the same time, human rights NGO's absolve themselves of the task of morally
evaluating the legitimacy of these practices, retreating instead behind
the legal criterion of the 'rules of war'. So Amnesty International, in
its recent report on NATO's campaign in Kosovo wrote, "Amnesty International takes no position on the political issues surrounding the status of Kosovo. The organization does not judge whether recourse to force by anyone is justified or not and therefore takes no position on the legal or moral basis for NATO's military intervention against the FRY. Amnesty International focuses strictly on the conduct of such intervention in light of the rules of international humanitarian law."8 Even those Christian traditions which advocate just
war theory cannot be comfortable with this position. For just war theory
is precisely about assessing the use of violence within a moral framework
in order to limit and control the human inclination to resort to violence.
|
