Five Fables About Human Rights
Lukes, Steven
I propose here to discuss the topic of human rights as seen from the standpoint of five doctrines or outlooks that are dominant in our time. I don't propose to be fair to these outlooks. Rather,...
...Yet others, gloomier in disposition, say that it is just the avoidance of suffering: for them the "greatest happiness" just means the "least unhappiness...
...Yet Egalitarians must admit that this is not a natural attitude in the world in which we live and that it seems in increasingly many places to be becoming less and less so...
...The division of labor has also withered away: people are no longer identified with the work they do or the functions they fulfill...
...When are freedom of expression and association truly free...
...In this essay I want to focus on the significance of that acceptance by asking: what way of thinking does accepting the principle of defending human rights deny and what way of thinking does it entail...
...Problems for Feminist Politics of Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991...
...Money, according to the prophet Marx, "abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities" and has "deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value," 5 but now the whole "cash nexus" too has withered away...
...and eventually the idea was used to justify militancy against external enemies and purges of enemies within...
...Copyright © 1993 by Basic Books...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...For with communism, as Marx prophesied, we see the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man...
...In Proletaria there is no single dominating obsession or way of living: everyone develops their rich individuality, which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, free of external impediments...
...2, p. 25...
...Traditionally this has meant "the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number" (which is the national motto) but in FALL • 1993 • 427 Human Rights more recent times there have been disputes about what "utility" is...
...Even African Americans or Hispanic or Asian Americans are insisting on seeing themselves in politically correct ways...
...To do so, social and cultural preconditions must exist: thus Kurds in Turkey must not be treated as "Mountain Turks" but have their own institutions, education, and language...
...To defend these human rights is to defend a kind of "egalitarian plateau" upon which such political conflicts and arguments can take place...
...Some intellectuals tried to make a fuss, but they got nowhere...
...so also has that between the private and the public spheres of life...
...As for Proletarians, their rejection of human rights goes back to the Prophet of their Revolution, Karl Marx, who described talk of them as "ideological nonsense" and "obsolete verbal rubbish,"" for two reasons...
...he or she invariably translates it into the question "Which option will produce the greatest sum of utility...
...Now at last, as foretold, "love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc...
...Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol...
...Hence the pressing need for organizations such as Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch...
...In the face of these facts, if all individuals are to be equally respected, they will need public protection from injury and degradation, and from unfairness and arbitrariness in the allocation of basic resources and in the operation of the laws and rules of social life...
...They feel uneasy because they tend to be seen as "not true Communitarians," as disloyal, even as "rootless cosmopolitans...
...Unfortunately, Communitaria's official relativism must allow such practices to continue unmolested...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...2 See D.D...
...and their women are sometimes oppressed, marginalized, and badly abused...
...But they are also made real by Egalitarians' commitment to rendering everyone's conditions of life such that these equal rights are of equal worth to their possessors...
...They very naturally lead those impressed by them to take up anti-egalitarian political positions...
...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript—the mails aren't always reliable...
...What is Equality...
...Yet the plateau is under siege from their armies...
...One place where some people think rights flourish is Libertaria...
...Are human rights in better shape elsewhere...
...Does the latter entail some form of industrial democracy that goes beyond what currently obtains...
...Waves of immigration and movements of people and modern communications have unsettled the old gemutlich ways and created a far more heterogeneous and "pluralistic" society...
...Proletaria has no state: that too has withered away...
...It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species...
...For collective or communal identity always requires, as they say, an "other," every affirmation of belonging includes an explicit or implicit exclusion clause...
...For their public spiritedness is so highly developed that they are ready to sacrifice themselves, and indeed one another, whenever calculations show this to be necessary...
...Libertarians believe that they have an unlimited right to whatever rewards their abilities and efforts can bring in the marketplace and the unlimited right to make voluntary choices that benefit themselves and their families...
...What is Equality...
...And second: what would it be like to take it seriously...
...According to MacIntyre, forms of behavior that presuppose such rights "always have a highly specific and socially local character, and . . . the existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance...
...Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Inc...
...Raphael (ed...
...Recently, a famous writer from one subcommunity wrote a satirical novel that was partly about the life of another subcommunity's holy religious Prophet and Founder...
...the point was to win, not feel sympathy for class enemies...
...No Libertarians ever take a step outside the narrowly self-interested point of view of advancing their own, or at most their family's, interests...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...It turned out that the six were innocent, but "Utilitas populi" prevailed and the six stayed in jail...
...2 Sometimes the appeal to human rights, or the language in which it is couched, is said to be unhelpful or even counterproductive in particular campaigns or struggles—in advancing the condition and position of women, 3 say, or in promoting third-world development...
...MacMillan, 1967...
...Everyone remembers the famous case at the turn of the last century of an army captain from a despised minority group who was tried on a charge of treason and found guilty of passing documents to an Enemy Power...
...There is no public education, no public health system, no 432 • DISSENT Haman Rights public support for the arts or recreation, no public libraries, no public transport, roads, parks or beaches...
...New Communitarians believe in "multiculturalism" and practice what they call the "politics of recognition," recognizing each subcommunity's identity with scrupulous fairness in the country's institutions...
...Both point to severe limitations on the capacity of human beings to achieve that abstraction or impartial regard that could lead them to view all lives as equally valuable...
...The only problem with Proletarian life is that there are no problems...
...Egalitaria is a one-status society in the sense that all Egalitarians are treated as being of equal worth: one person's well-being and freedom are regarded as just as valuable as any other's...
...The least unpromising, perhaps, are polyethnic societies composed mainly of various immigrant groups who demand the right freely to express their particularity within the economic and political institutions of the dominant culture...
...They cannot fairly allocate public goods, or foster social accountability in the use of resources or democracy at the workplace, or meet social and individual needs that cannot be expressed in the form of purchasing power, or balance the needs of present and future generations...
...1, pp...
...The homeless sleeping under bridges and the unemployed are, however, consoled by the thought that they have the same rights as every other Libertarian...
...The jury system...
...185-246, 283-345...
...Limited rationality puts you in danger from the well-meaning no less than from the malevolent and the selfish...
...No one is a "such-andsuch": as the prophet Gramsci put it, no one is even "an intellectual," because everyone is (among all the other things he or she is...
...All agree that progressive taxation and extensive welfare provision should ensure a decent minimum standard of life for all...
...Some practice female circumcision...
...13 And second, Marx regarded human rights as anachronistic because they had been necessary only in that prehistorical era when individuals needed protection from injuries and dangers generated out of an imperfect, conflictual, class-ridden world...
...as a discovery procedure through which restless individuals, in pursuit of entrepreneurial profit, seek new ways of satisfying needs...
...After the Fall, The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991...
...2° See Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1991...
...Egalitarians are (or should be) extremely concerned to achieve maximal economic growth...
...But there is also within Egalitarian culture a momentum toward raising that minimum through policies that gradually eliminate involuntary disadvantage...
...18 See the entry on "Fraternitd" (by Mona Ozouf) in Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds...
...The Proletariat in its struggle sometimes used to appeal to them for tactical reasons, but they are no longer needed in Proletaria's "truly human" communist society...
...Or should there be a basic income for all, and, if so, should that include those who could but don't work, or don't accept work that is on offer...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...q Notes I See "La Conception occidentale des droits de l'homme reforce le malentendu avec l'Islam': interview with Mohamed Arkoun, Le Monde 15 March 1989, p. 2; and the essays in Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab (eds...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Does the former have implications for the distribution and forms of ownership of mass media and the modes and principles of their public regulation...
...Would it be just, they ask, to deprive him of these freely given rewards in order to benefit others...
...THE EDITORS 0 FALL • 1993 • 437...
...Human rights are unknown in all the three places we have visited, but for different reasons...
...The right to challenge jurors without cause...
...What must be equal for opportunities to be equal...
...Communitarians are much more friendly people, at least to one another, than are the Utilitarians, but they are like them in their very high degree of public spiritedness and collective purpose...
...Do Proletarians suffer inner turmoil...
...For them "equality" is not to be traded off against "efficiency...
...Equal representation of minorities on juries...
...Sometimes the historic lists are said to be too short, and so further human rights are proposed, from the second unto the third and fourth generation...
...1-54...
...Hotheads from the latter subcommunity became wildly incensed at what they took to be an insult to their faith and publicly burned the book in question, while their fanatical and fiery leader, in the home community from which they came, ordered the famous writer to be killed...
...Kymlicka makes an interesting distinction between two kinds of cultural pluralism: one associated with multination states, the other with polyethnic immigrant societies...
...Other writers from other subcommunities all over the world signed petitions and manifestoes in the famous writer's defense...
...4 But virtually no one actually rejects the principle of defending human rights...
...Some cross or refuse to acknowledge the identifying boundaries, and some even reject the very idea of such boundaries...
...Non-, ex-, trans-, and antiidentifiers are not the happiest people in Communitaria...
...9 A no less eloquent New Communitarian, Alasdair Maclntyre broadens the attack: "natural or human rights," he says, "are fictions—just as is utility...
...428 • DISSENT Haman MOW Communitarians were attached to the soil, they cultivated their roots and they felt a truly organic connection with one another...
...The captain was innocent of the charge but the judges and the generals all agreed that the doctrine of "Utilitas populi" must prevail...
...14 See Samuel Bowles, "What markets can—and cannot — do," Challenge, The Magazine of Economic Affairs, July—August 1991, pp...
...And recently, six people were found guilty of exploding a bomb at a time of troubles for Utilitaria caused by fanatical terrorists from a neighboring island...
...Since then Communitaria has undergone great changes...
...Thus the right to free expression and communication protects artistic expression and the communication of information...
...Most work that needs to be done, and, in particular, entrepreneurial functions, must draw on motives that derive from individuals' pursuit of material advantage for themselves and for their families...
...To adapt a phrase of Anatole France, those who sleep under the bridges have the same rights as those who don't...
...I fear that there are good reasons for all these doubts...
...They differ about how to do this but one currently influential view is that a basic economic and political structure can be created that can make everyone better off while giving priority to FALL • 1993 • 433 Human Rights bettering the condition of the worst off: on this view no inequality is justified unless it results in making the worst off better off than they would otherwise be...
...I think it follows that the list of human rights should be kept both reasonably short and reasonably abstract...
...9, Sept...
...It seems that belonging to certain kinds of "encompassing groups" with cultures of self-recognition, and identifying and being identified as so belonging, is increasingly essential to many people's well-being...
...Now we can see the sense in which human rights are individualistic and the sense in which they are not...
...Egalitarians these days are (or should be) keen students of Libertarian economics...
...Their selves are, as they say, "embedded" or "situated...
...And finally there is the "deviant problem...
...First, let us imagine a society called Utilitaria...
...And how is a basic minimum level of material well-being to be conceived and measured—in terms of welfare, or income, or resources, or "level of living," or "basic capabilities," or in some other way...
...Fortunately, however, they are few and unorganized...
...Where is the principle of defending them more securely defended...
...Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1979), esp...
...There is equal opportunity in the sense that active discrimination against individuals and groups is prohibited, but there is an unequal start to the race for jobs and rewards...
...If the cost of more equality is lesser prospects of prosperity for everyone or most people, their hopes of attaining, let alone maintaining, Egalitaria, at least under conditions of freedom, are correspondingly dimmed...
...The prized possession of every Utilitarian is a pocket calculator...
...Political Theory and the Rights of Man (London...
...Public defenders...
...20 Both are sufficiently powerful and persuasive to convince reasonable people to reject egalitarian politics...
...All have the right to vote, the rule of law prevails, there is freedom of expression (in media controlled by the rich) and of association (though trade unions cannot have closed shops or call strikes, since that would violate others' rights...
...Sometimes the universality of human rights has been challenged: those historically proclaimed are said to be Eurocentric and to be inappropriate, or only partly appropriate, to other cultures and circumstances.' So alternative, or partly alternative, lists are proposed...
...and London, Harvard University Press, 1985...
...Some say that, even if feasible, it is not viable...
...11-16...
...Some doubt that it is feasible...
...But how many situations in the present world are favorable to such an outcome...
...1° Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp...
...The worst off (and everyone else) under a more equal system should, they hope, be at least as well off as the worst off (and everyone else) under a less equal system...
...I would like to invite you to join me in a series of thought experiments...
...The principle that human rights must be defended has become one of the commonplaces of our age...
...9 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, reproduced in Waldron, op...
...If so, how low...
...Four essays by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey and George Novack...
...Is the issue one of nondiscrimination against an existing background of economic, social and cultural inequalities or is that background itself the field within which opportunities can be made more equal...
...6)Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...4 Reginald Herbold Green, Human Rights, Human Conditions and Law—Some Explorations Towards Interaction (Brighton: IDS, 1989), Discussion Paper no...
...Indeed, it is not a particular country, but embraces the entire world...
...Compulsory redistribution is prohibited, since it would violate people's unlimited rights to whatever they can earn...
...cit., pp...
...They also know that no economy can function on altruism and moral incentives alone, and that material incentives, and notably the profit motive, are indispensable to a well-functioning economy...
...It matters urgently to some Czechoslovaks that they are Slovaks and to some Canadians that they are Quebecois...
...There are two political parties that vie for power—the Act party and the Rule party...
...4)Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...The most basic and prized of all their rights is the right to property, beginning with each Libertarian's ownership of himself or herself and extending (as Libertarians like to say) to whatever they "mix their labor with...
...Only sometimes does it occur to such extraterrestrial visitors that they may have lost their way and landed somewhere else than Earth and that these are not human beings after all...
...What, then, does our thought experiment so far suggest we are accepting when we accept the principle of defending human rights...
...But its virtually universal acceptance, even when hypocritical, is very important, for this is what gives such organizations such political leverage as they have in otherwise unpromising situations...
...But often the values of others will not be your own: you will need protection to live your own life from the inside, pursuing your own conception of what is valuable, rather than a life imposed upon you...
...influence can only be through stimulation and encouragement...
...quotas ensure that all are fairly represented in representative institutions and in the professions...
...But different subcommunities have incompatible beliefs and some engage in very nasty practices, mistreating, degrading, and persecuting groups and individuals, including their own members...
...The new Communitarians feel "at home" in their subcommunities but further take pride in being Communitarians who recognize one another's subcommunitarian identities...
...The distinction between work and leisure has withered away...
...They cannot imagine themselves "unencumbered" and apart from them...
...Aren't there personal conflicts, between fathers and sons, say, or lovers...
...Utilitarians are public-spirited people who display a strong sense of collective purpose: their single and exclusive goal, overriding all others, is to maximize the overall utility of all of them...
...and no one has to endure a one-sided, crippled development, to fit into a given job-description or role or an exclusive sphere of activity from which one cannot escape...
...not all Libertarians are treated as equally human...
...It has already destroyed Mostar and many other places, and is currently threatening Kosovo and Macedonia...
...Now I propose to take you to another place which is called Proletaria, so called, nostalgically, after the social class that brought it into being but that has long since withered away, along with all other social classes...
...For to defend human rights is not merely to protect individuals...
...5)We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...8 Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies, reproduced in Jeremy Waldron (ed...
...No sign of any such problems is visible: Proletarians seem able to combine their rich individuality, developing their gifts in all directions, with fully communal social relations...
...But there are problems...
...There is no longer any contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another...
...What is the basic minimum...
...soon it came to mean patriotism...
...Fourth edition, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1969...
...cit., p. 155...
...17 See Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," an essay by Charles Taylor, with commentary by Amy Gutmann (editor), Steven C. Rockerfeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...16 See Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, "National Self-determination," Journal of Philosophy (87...
...Let us imagine a series of places in which the principle in question is unknown—places that are neither utopian nor dystopian but rather places that are in other respects as attractive as you like, yet which simply lack this particular feature, whose distinctiveness we may thereby hope to understand better...
...Technocrats, bureaucrats, and judges are the most powerful people in Utilitaria and are much admired...
...Could it be attained from anywhere in the present world...
...Exactly what does the rule of law require...
...Communitaria used to be a very gemiitlich place, much given to agricultural metaphors...
...All can enter the race, but losers fall by the wayside: the successful are fond of quoting the national motto: "The Devil take the hindmost...
...Bottomore (ed...
...And is it viable...
...Some say that it might be viable, if it were feasible, but it is not...
...Then there is the "relativism problem...
...Ile t us now visit a very different kind of country called Communitaria...
...Could there be such a place as Egalitaria...
...14 sqq...
...Part 2: Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs (10: 3-4, 1981), pp...
...Proletarians lead extremely varied and fulfilling lives...
...Life in Utilitaria has its hazards...
...To approach this question, let me propose a further thought experiment...
...The basic liberties, the rule of law, toleration, equality of opportunity are all constitutionally guaranteed...
...Send three copies...
...The least promising, and most explosive, seems to be that of formerly communist federal states containing peoples with historical enmities at different levels of economic development...
...15 See Diane Elson, "The Economics of a Socialized Market" in Robin Blackburn (ed...
...First, then, let us ask: what would a world without the principle of human rights look like...
...Part 3: the Place of Liberty," Iowa Law Review (73: 1, 1987), pp...
...What divides them is that the Act party (the "Actors") encourages everyone to use their calculators on all possible occasions, while the Rule party (the "Rulers") discourages ordinary people from using them in everyday life...
...For only these have a prospect of securing agreement across the broad spectrum of contemporary political life, even though disagreement breaks out again once you ask how these abstract rights are to be made concrete: how the formal is to become real...
...Least of all are they likely to form another subcommunity...
...the right to a fair trial protects a well-functioning legal system...
...Utilitarians have no use for them because those who believe in them are, by definition, disposed to question that Utilitarian calculations should be used in all circumstances...
...First, they tended to soften hearts in the heat of the class struggle...
...How, they wonder, can the planning of production run so smoothly without markets to provide information through prices about demand...
...they call such a nightmarish vision "atomism" and recoil with horror from it...
...Don't differing styles of living get in each other's way...
...They identify with one another and identify themselves as so identifying...
...Unlike "liberty" and "equality," which are conditions to be achieved, who your brothers are is determined by the past...
...Only then can we resume the journey to Egalitaria, which, if it can indeed be reached at all, can only be reached from the plateau of human rights...
...Why are there no conflicts over allocating resources...
...One is the "inclusionexclusion problem": how to decide which subcommunities are included in the overall framework and which are not...
...8 The Communitarians, by contrast, have always rejected such rights because of their abstractness from real, living, concrete, local ways of life...
...On the one hand, they know when and how markets can fail...
...The problem is that no one can ever know for sure what sacrifices he or she may be called on to make for the greater benefit of all...
...It is obligatory in Communitaria to treat the beliefs and practices of all recognized subcommunities as equally valid, or rather, none is to be treated as more or less valid than any other...
...Egalitarians hope that they can view anyone, including themselves, impartially, seeing everyone's life as of equal worth and everyone's well-being and freedom as equally valuable...
...Though all Libertarians have the right to vote, the worst off, the marginalized and the excluded, do not have equal power to organize and influence political decisions, or equal access to legal processes, or an equal chance to articulate and communicate their points of view, or an equal representation in Libertarian public and institutional life, or an equal chance in the race for qualifications, positions, and rewards...
...The problem is to attain a general acceptance of multiple identities that do not conflict...
...731-740...
...11 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, 2 Vols...
...That momentum is fueled by a sense of injustice that perpetually tracks further instances of illegitimate inequality or involuntary disadvantage—whether these result from religion or class or ethnicity or gender, and so on, and seeks policies that will render Egalitarians more equal in their conditions of life...
...13 V.I...
...The poor, the ill, the handicapped, the unlucky, and the untalented are given some sympathy and a measure of charity, but Libertarians do not regard their worsening plight as any kind of injustice, since they do not result from anyone's rights being infringed...
...Indeed, you could say that the Communitarians' national obsession is identity...
...Some require their womenfolk to conceal their identities in hooded black shrouds...
...They are particularly adept at calculating, using state-of-the-art computers of ever-increasing power...
...They own their talents and abilities and, in developing and deploying these, Libertarians claim the right to whatever rewards the market will bring...
...they can produce destabilizing crises of confidence with ramifying effects...
...21 On the plateau, human rights are taken seriously on all sides, though there are wide and deep disagreements about what defending and protecting them involves...
...It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution...
...they can generate external diseconomies, such as pollution, which they cannot deal with...
...The Egalitarians' problem is to render such exclusions harmless...
...It is also to protect the activities and relations that make their lives more valuable, activities and relations that cannot be conceived reductively as merely individual goods...
...First, that they are restraints upon the pursuit of what is held to be "advantageous to society," however enlightened or benevolent that pursuit may be...
...16 But, to the extent that this is so, the "politics of equal dignity" that would treat individuals equally, irrespective of their group affiliations, is put in jeopardy...
...Relations between the sexes are fully reciprocal, and prostitution is unknown...
...Yet visitors to Proletaria (from other planets) are sometimes disbelieving of what they behold, for they find it hard to credit that such perfection could be attained and, moreover, 430 • DISSENT Human adds maintained without friction...
...Recently, for example, a province of Communitaria in which one subcommunity forms a majority passed a law prohibiting both members of their subcommunity and all immigrants from attending schools that teach in the language that prevails in the rest of Communitaria and in which most of its business and trade are conducted...
...Second, that they invoke a certain kind of abstraction from "specific and socially local" practices: they involve seeing persons behind their identifying (even their selfidentifying) labels and securing them a protected space within which to live their lives from the inside, whether this be in conformity with or in deviation from the life their community requires of or seeks to impose on them...
...No one is tortured in Libertaria...
...Egalitarians hope that people can, at least when considering public and political issues, achieve a certain kind of abstraction from their own point of view and circumstances...
...Others, of a more mystical cast of mind, see it as a kind of inner glow, an indefinable subjective state that everyone aims at...
...I believe that the principle of defending human rights requires an end to our complicity and appeasement: that we raise the siege of Sarajevo and defeat them by force...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...The Rule party's rules of thumb are some protection, since they tend to restrain people from doing one another in, but they can, of course, always be overridden if a technocrat or a bureaucrat or a judge makes a calculation that overrides them...
...others have tried to capture it in other ways...
...It is located somewhere in Eastern Europe or maybe in China in the near future...
...As the Utilitarian State's founder Jeremy Bentham famously remarked, the very idea of such rights is not only nonsense but "nonsense on stilts," for "there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to society, should not be abolished...
...They are like "witches and unicorns" for "every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed...
...Nonsense on Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 53...
...I turn now to the second stage of my inquiry...
...Lenin, "Speech at Third Komsomol Congress, 2 October 1920," in V.I...
...105-6...
...1-30...
...They hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner...
...Calculating is the national obsession...
...Others say that it is neither feasible nor viable...
...Who are the possessors of civil and political rights...
...They are impervious to the thought that others might have more urgent claims on resources, or that some of their and their family's advantages are gained at the expense of others' disadvantage, or that the structure of Libertarian life is a structure of injustice...
...6 An arcadian abundance exists in which all produce what they are able to and get what they need...
...and all relations to man and to nature express one's "real individual life...
...Yet the possessors of these rights are not equally respected...
...Others say that it is just the satisfaction of whatever desires anyone happens to have...
...Refugees...
...Egalitarians know that command economies can only fail in comparison with market economies, and they know that, even if the market can in various ways be socialized, "market socialism" is, at best, an as yet ill-defined hope...
...Markets reproduce existing inequalities of endowments, resources, and power...
...This is found, above all, in the economic sphere...
...441-461...
...Positive discrimination is used to encourage those that are disadvantaged or in danger of extinction...
...They organize their factories like orchestras and watch over automated machinery, they organize production as associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, human nature, and they elect representatives to Communes on an annual basis...
...But despite all these differences, all Utilitarians seem to be agreed on one principle: that what counts is what can be counted...
...Even if the values of those others are your own, they can do you in in countless ways, by sheer miscalculation or mistake or misjudgment...
...But there too, wherever that right is interpreted as a collective right to equal recognition, a threat to egalitarian outcomes is raised: that of treating individuals only or mainly as the bearers of their collective identities19 and thus of building not Egalitaria but Communitaria...
...1990), pp...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...There is a very low level of regressive taxation, which is used only to maintain Libertaria's system of free exchange—the infrastructure of the economy, the army and the police, and the justice system to enforce free contracts...
...New Communitaria is a true "Community of Communities" —a patchwork quilt of subcommunities, each claiming recognition for the peculiar value of its own specific way of life...
...The barbarians are within the gates...
...Utilitarians are distinctly philistine people, who are disinclined to see utility in High Culture and never tire of citing the proverb that "pushpin is as good as poetry," though there is a minority tradition of trying to enrich the idea of "utility" to include the more imaginative sides of life...
...Nationals...
...Inequalities are great and growing, based on social class, as well as on differential talents and efforts...
...291, 294...
...The immigrants in particular are none too pleased...
...More precisely, is Egalitaria feasible...
...According to the Rule Utilitarians, people should live by conventions or rules of thumb that are devised and interpreted by the technocrats, bureaucrats, and judges according to their superior methods of calculation...
...One of those armies flies a communitarian flag and practices "ethnic cleansing...
...For one thing, they know what markets can and cannot do...
...3 See Elizabeth Kingdom, What's Wrong with Rights...
...Libertarian life runs exclusively and entirely on market principles...
...You and they form a collectivity in contradistinction to the rest of humankind, and in particular to that portion of it that you and they see as sources of danger or objects of envy or resentment...
...Let us now imagine worlds with human rights, where they are widely recognized and systematically put into practice...
...where, though much more in some places than in others...
...They particularly despised the Utilitarians' calculative way of life, relying instead on "shared understandings" and living according to slowly evolving traditions and customs with which they would identify and by which they would be identified...
...So, in some sense, it is accepted virtually everywhere...
...There is no alternative to them, as a signaling device for transmitting in a decentralized process information about tastes, productive techniques, resources and so on...
...Some say that it is the same as "welfare," as measured by objective indicators such as income, access to medical facilities, housing, and so on...
...Part 4: Political Equality," University of San Francisco Law Review (22: 1, 1988), pp...
...To a communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters...
...A related problem is the "vested interests problem": once on the official list, subcommunities want to stay there for ever and keep others out...
...As the prophet Engels foretold, the government of persons has been replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production...
...First, as I said, the basic civil rights are respected there—there is no torture, there is universal franchise, the rule of law, freedom of expression and association and formal equality of opportunity...
...John Rawls has modeled such a standpoint in his image of an "Original Position" where individuals reason behind a "veil of ignorance...
...On the other hand, they are indispensable and cannot be simulated...
...Water, gas, electricity, nuclear power, garbage disposal, postal and telecommunications are all in private hands, as are the prisons...
...This is to be found, primarily, in the cultural sphere...
...Excerpted from On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, edited by Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley...
...What would it be like to take human rights, thus understood, seriously...
...All who are residents within a given territory...
...Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols...
...they can encourage greed, consumerism, commercialism, opportunism, political passivity, indifference and anonymity, a world of alienated strangers...
...Some groups get very angry at being included in subcommunities that recognize them but that they don't recognize...
...And third, that they presuppose a set of permanent existential facts about the human condition: that human beings will always face the malevolence and cruelty of others, that FALL • 1993 • 431 Human Rights there will always be scarcity of resources, that human beings will always give priority to the interests of themselves and those close to them, that there will always be imperfect rationality in the pursuit of individual and collective aims, and that there will never be an unforced convergence in ways of life and conceptions of what makes it valuable...
...The revolutionary slogan la fraternite ou la mort thus acquired a new and ominous meaning, promising violence first against non-brothers and then against false brothers...
...See also the discussion in Will Kymlica, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990...
...Their mutual bonds constitute their very being...
...Former Yugoslays turn almost overnight into Serbs and Croats...
...others get angry because they recognize themselves as a subcommunity but are not recognized by others...
...Not all Communitarians fit well into the subcommunitarian categories...
...is Egalitaria such a place...
...Another national proverb is "Utilitas populi suprema lex est...
...Actually, "friendliness" is too superficial a word to describe the way they relate to one another...
...I want to proceed in two stages: first by asking: what would it be like not to accept the principle...
...Should it be set low to avoid negative incentive effects...
...cit., pp...
...the socially privileged have a considerable advantage stemming from their social backgrounds...
...They also attach great importance to the right of engaging in voluntary transfers of what they rightly own—transactions of giving, receiving, and exchanging, which they use to the advantage of their families, through private education and the inheritance of wealth...
...they can, when unchecked, lead to oligopolies and monopolies...
...The first reason for thinking that Egalitaria may, after all, be a mirage is what we may call the libertarian constraint...
...Once that world was transformed and a new world born, emancipated human beings would flourish free from the need for rights, in abundance, communal relations, and real freedom to develop their manifold human powers...
...Does it involve equalizing access to legal advice and representation...
...Typically, the definers of subcommunitarian identities are men...
...Human and other rights existed in prehistoric times, but these too have withered away...
...Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution française (Paris, Flammarion, 1988), pp...
...See his "What is Equality...
...To defend them is to protect individuals from utilitarian sacrifices, communitarian impositions, and from injury, degradation and arbitrariness, but doing so cannot be viewed independently of economic, legal, political, and cultural conditions, and may well involve the protection and even fostering of collective goods, such as the Kurdish language and culture...
...436 • DISSENT Munn Rights 6 Karl Marx, "Money," translated in Bottomore, op...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...Right now it is laying siege to Sarajevo, slaughtering and starving men, women, and children, and raping women, only because they have the wrong collective identity...
...18 It began with a promise of universal brotherhood...
...Moreover, to get on the list, you have to be, or claim to be, an indigenous people or the victims of colonialism, and preferably both...
...It was, as Trotsky used to say, a matter of "our morals" versus "theirs," 2 and Lenin observed that "our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle...
...Are human rights taken seriously enough in Libertaria...
...and A Matter of Principle, Cambridge, Mass...
...They love to tell the story of Wilt Chamberlain, the famous basketball player whom thousands are willing to pay to watch...
...Where, in other words, are all human beings more securely treated as equally human...
...Karl Marx: Early Writings (London: Watts, 1963), p. 37...
...they can ravage the environment, through deforestation and in other ways...
...Here, then, are two major reasons for doubting that Egalitaria can be realized anywhere in this world (let alone across it as a whole...
...21 The idea of the egalitarian plateau is Ronald Dworkin's...
...People identify with one another not, as among the Communitarians, because they belong to this or that community or subcommunity, but rather because they are equally and fully human...
...Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), vol...
...Communitaria's government dealt with this tricky situation in a suitably relativistic way, declaring that the practice of writing satirical novels was no more but also no less valid than the practice of protecting one's faith against insults...
...everything of value has a price and is subject to Libertarians' national obsession: cost-benefit analysis...
...3)Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...You will not be able to rely on others' altruism or benevolence or paternalism...
...2)Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...These hazards might seem troubling to an outsider, but Utilitarians put up with them...
...The second reason for thinking that Libertaria fails to take human rights seriously enough relates to the distinctively Libertarian rights...
...FALL • 1993 • 435 Human Mine How, in the light of this last fact, should we view human rights...
...We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all the fables about morality...
...5 Karl Marx, "Bruno Bauer, Die Fahigkeit der Heutigen Juden and Christen, frei zu werden," translated in T.B...
...Consider the idea of "fraternity...
...I shall suggest two major reasons for doubting the attainability and the maintainability of Egalitaria and conclude by suggesting what they imply about how we should view the principle of defending human rights...
...31, pp...
...they develop an enormous range of skills...
...193-94...
...Guest workers...
...As that eloquent Old Communitarian speechifier Edmund Burke put it, their "abstract perfection" is their "practical defect," for "the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, that cannot be settled upon any abstract rule...
...The schools and colleges teach curricula that exactly reflect the exactly equal value of those communities' cultures and none (and certainly not the old gemildich one) is allowed to predominate...
...Part 1: Equality of Welfare...
...Recalcitrant individuals have been known to reject the FALL • 1993 • 429 Hyman Rights category by which they are identified or to pretend that they don't belong to it...
...There are powerful reasons against abandoning it for any of the first four countries we have visited...
...Indeed, they constitute the two main sources of right-wing thinking today—libertarian and communitarian...
...Could it be maintained stably over time...
...They know, in short, that any feasible and viable economy must be based on market processes and material incentives, however 434 • DISSENT Human Rights controlled and supplemented in order to render them socially accountable, 15 thereby creating and reinforcing the very inequalities they earnestly seek to reduce...
...19 See Stephen L. Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and Will Kymlicka, "Liberalism and the Politization of Ethnicity," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence (4:2, July 1991...
...Citizens...
...Rather, they seek most efficiently to achieve an economy that will attain the highest level of equality of condition at the highest feasible economic level...
...Use WordPerfect 5.1 if possible...
...I believe the answer is no, for two reasons...
...The second major reason for skepticism that Egalitaria can be attained and, if so, maintained we may call the communitarian constraint...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...When faced with the question "What is to be done...
...12 Leon Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," The New International, June 1938, reproduced in Their Morals and Ours: Marxist versus Liberal Views on Morality...
...the right to free association protects democratic trade unions, social movements and political demonstrations, and so on...
...We are complicitly allowing this to go on, within the very walls of modem, civilized Europe...
...7 Karl Marx, "Private Property and Communism," translated in Bottomore, op...
...The history of "fraternity" during the course of the French Revolution is instructive...
...Everything there can be bought and sold...
...Rather, I shall treat them in the form of Weberian "ideal types" or caricatures—a caricature being an exaggerated and simplified representation which, when it succeeds, captures the essentials of what is represented...
...and even, as the Prophet Marx himself acknowledged, as an arena of freedom and choice...
...Where are they protected against Utilitarian sacrifices for the advantage of society and against Communitarian imposition of a particular way of life, against the Communist illusion that a world beyond rights can be attained and against the Libertarian illusion that a world run entirely on market principles is a world that recognizes them fully...
...It is also violated virtually every"Five Fables about Human Rights," by Steven Lukes...
...65-67...
...Others say that it is the satisfaction of the desires people ought to have or of those they would have if they were fully informed and sensible...
...239-256...
...It should include the basic civil and political rights, the rule of law, freedom of expression and association, equality of opportunity, and the right to some basic level of material well-being, but probably no more...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
