Politicizing Human Rights

Introduction

Human rights have been popularized as the fundamental and inalienable moral standards in the West. However, how and why did such a seemingly vague and simple principle become increasingly specified and what is the role history plays in understanding the moral obligation of human rights? In this essay, I will draw on Hopgood, Moyn, and others and argue that the modern concept and rhetoric of human rights owes its popularization, to a large degree, to the United States’ foreign policy, therefore significantly privileges the United States and its partners despite a lack of moral groundings. This essay will have three main parts: (1) the historical development of human rights after the 1970s; (2) the deficiency in the moral justification of human rights as a moral principle as a result of its historical development; (3) the potential areas of improvement for human rights as a moral guideline.

The History of Americanizing Human Rights

The concept of human rights (or the rights of man, natural rights) dated back to early 18th century France (Hunt, 2008). However, as both Moyn (2012) and Hopgood (2015) observed, despite continuing adaptations of human rights by important entities such as the UN, the development and popularization of human rights have not been a linear progression. As Moyn claimed, no one could barely imagine in the 1960s that the future global politics would be governed by human rights: “the drama of human rights is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere” (2015, p. 3). He noted that human rights were initially adopted by anti-colonialists in the “third world” after World War II, but it was captured by the Carter administration, which “started to invoke human rights as the guiding rationale of the foreign policy of states” (p. 4). Moyn also noted the efforts of American legal scholars to “Americanize” human rights. Henkin, a theorist and pioneer of “the international human rights (law) movement,” proclaimed “[i]t has made our ideology the international norm” (quoted in p. 206). The legal discussion was not separated from the political reality. For example, Henkin signed on the position that “Jewish rights are human rights” amidst criticism of the Israeli occupation (p. 202). Even if Henkin genuinely believed that the promotion of human rights law has tremendous benefits for all, as Moyn recognized, the movement was supported and utilized by the American foreign policy makers when it was “reclaimed from anticolonialism, and made a central part for the first time of the foreign policy of American liberalism” (p. 209). The politics of human rights injected morality into foreign policy, which the Reagan administration carried on and “brought about a disturbing assimilation of human rights to the independently developed program of ‘democracy promotion’” (p. 217). The intention was obvious—to label the Communist world as unhuman (despite the irony of American support for anti-communist dictatorships).

Nonetheless, the human rights movement did not only has international influence. Moyn keenly noted the paradox of simultaneously declining social and economic rights and flourishing human rights. Since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, social and economic equality has widespread recognition even in Europe and the United States given the dominant ideology of embedded liberalism characterized by high government spending on social policies. However, the neoliberal turn coincided with a shift from the domestic concerns for social, economic, and (the socio-economic component of) civil rights to the foreign relevance of human rights. For Moyn, the reason was that the fall of the Soviet Union dismantled the imagined socialist alternative and activists in the West lowered their expectation from grand utopian social design to an “anti-catastrophe” minimal ethical criterion (p. 226). However, I believe that the human rights rhetoric could also be a deliberate and reactionary effort by the big corporations and neoconservative politicians considering that those hawkish governments (Reagon, George Bush, and George W. Bush) that justified American foreign interventions by human rights rhetoric (Long, 2017; Fukuyama, 2006) happened to be those that supported retrenchment of social welfare and tax reduction. I will further examine this issue in the next section.

Hopgood’s account of human rights as a foreign policy tool of the Americans was nearly identical to Moyn’s. Hopgood also noted that the human rights movement has a foreign focus from its start. He argued that after the failure of the Vietnam War, Carter responded to the moral “malaise” by utilizing human rights as a top-down venue to put moral purpose back into the realist American foreign policy and “mak[e] the country feel better about itself” (p. 99). According to Hopgood, the American public was “a paying audience rather than a membership constituency for global rights”—they “rarely if ever sought international protection for domestic ‘human rights’ abuses, and this deeply nationalist conception of the civil/human rights distinction persists” (p. 97). In short, human rights were an embodiment of American exceptionalism—a “foreign policy for non-Americans” (p. 97). Such complacency is not limited to neo-conservatives, even liberals thought that “If the United States failed to honor its liberal commitments, then either an inhospitable international environment or the incumbents of state office (Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan) were at fault, not the United States itself… The ‘Idea of America’ is a sacred national alibi used by liberals to rationalize political failure” (p. 101).

Where Hopgood went beyond Moyn’s arguments is his connection between neoliberal globalization and the growth of donation-oriented human rights organizations. Compared to the traditional “local and solidarity-based rights activism an individual benefits in principle from collective success and builds up a store of goodwill for future interactions,” the new human rights NGOs were based on a global digital attention economy (p. 107). Westerners saw donations as a cheap and easy way to show their support for the generalized and abstract human rights rather than a specific person, incident, or policy. It approximated a form of entertainment: “[p]eople buy the product to assuage guilt or to feel good, and others do the work” (p. 104). The underlying logic is an equation of a tiny amount of money and time with ostensible moral progress, which buries the reasoning of human rights as a moral substance.

The Moral Hollowness

As Hunt pointed out, the 1948 framers of the UN Declaration of Human Rights admitted that “we agree about the rights but on condition no one asks us why” (quoted in 2008, p.20). If human rights are so self-evident, why is it so hard to propose a universally agreed-upon moral justification? Take the UN Declaration of Human Rights for example, it consists of 30 numerated Articles of action guides in the same fashion as the Ten Commandments—both are deontological ethics that regulates certain behaviours as in itself morally good or bad. However, the Ten Commandments based their moral legitimacy on the Christian belief that loses its attraction once people start asking why. Then how can the 30 human rights establish their moral grounds? Only 32.05% of philosophers accept or lean toward deontological ethics (Bourget & Chalmers, 2020). Even if one adopts the Kantian ethics that introduces reason to deontology, it is notoriously difficult, demanding, and counter-intuitive. Why should people abide by a moral rule that they do not understand, let alone accept? Why must elementary education be compulsory (a human right) rather than optional? How can it be proven that elementary education is always better than homeschooling or working in all situations? In addition, what should one do when two human rights contradict—say the religious freedom of not letting girls receive education and the equal right to education? By the way, the United States and some other NGOs’ principle is, controversially, democracy first, exemplified by Human Rights Watch’s support for the elected Muslim Brotherhood governments despite their discrimination against women and sexual minorities (Hopgood, p. 102). Moreover, when and how should a right be considered a human right? Why aren’t there 29 or 31 human rights but exactly 30? Why does Canada still criminalize consensual sex between adult siblings even though sexual autonomy is widely seen as a human right and Germany’s national ethics council had already announced incest between siblings as a fundamental human right (Dearden, 2014)? Such answers are frequently unanswered or unanswerable without an objective normative ethical framework. For more nuances, one can see On Human Rights by James Griffin (2009), who claims the current human rights are “nearly criterionless” (14), and “Human Rights and Politicized Human Rights: A Utilitarian Critique” by Habibi (2007). Most crucially, deontological ethics treats certain actions as ends in themselves—a position that often stifles reflections. A company wants its employees to see generating revenue for the company as an end in itself; a government wants its citizens to see being patriotic as an end in itself. By sticking to dogmatism, the powerful actors misguide others to put something else before their real personal wellbeing. As mentioned above, the United States justified its invasion and the resulted deaths and suffering with the deontological and absolutist “democratic triumphalism.”

The Americanized deontological human rights do not treat every country equally, thus undermining the claim of universality. Other than their deontological position, human rights (or the selective utilization of them in the international arena) have been primarily negative rights—the rights to not be interfered with—rather than positive rights—the entitlements to certain resources. As Sagall (2013) argued, negative rights stemmed from the capitalist and individual culture. It emphasizes the state’s intrusion into private lives but justifies or ignores issues of inadequacy like poverty or homelessness. For now, the Western states share a similar liberal democratic political structure that seems perfect from the perspective of negative rights. However, developing countries, which accounted for over 80% of the world’s population, often fail to meet the negative rights criteria due to their diverse political structures—many of them have been seen as human rights infringers and “enemies to their own people” right from the beginning regardless their performance and impact on human welfare. The negative rights seem to always triumph over the right to development. For example, when China lockdown cities during the pandemic, it is regarded as a human rights abuse despite potentially saving millions of lives. However, when the United States failed to react adequately to the pandemic, which resulted in a million Covid deaths, it is seldomly called a human rights abuser despite the agony it caused by inaction. It seems that from a negative right perspective, people have the right from the government’s lockdown but not the right to one’s life. An originally scientific and economic calculation of effective public policies became an ideological game with predetermined winners and losers due to the politicized and limited interpretation of (negative) human rights. In addition, Birchall (2019) has argued that the negative deontological human rights also privilege the multinational corporations and fail to capture the harm of their tax evasion and contribution to climate change.

Future Improvements

Is the politicization of human rights inevitable in a Foucaultian way? As Louis Hartz claimed: “law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy” (quoted in Hopgood, p. 97). Perhaps human rights are and can only be a legal and political concept that inevitably lacks moral justification. Carl Schmitt for example had long argued that human rights or even morality are merely political tools intended to delegitimize and vilify the enemies: “There are crimes against humanity and crimes for humanity. Crimes against humanity are committed by the Germans. Crimes for humanity are perpetrated on the Germans” (quoted in Habermas, 1998, p. 195). I reject this stance because it denies any objective morality, moral progress, and substantive value of discussion of morality. I agree with May’s position that “law’s effectiveness is dependent on the moral legitimacy of the law” (2004, p. 65) and argue there are a few ways to salvage human rights from the politicized human rights.

Firstly, we should adopt a consequentialist and teleological moral framework and determine what precisely are we looking for, which for me is certainly human happiness. By clarifying any lower rules as instrumental and not fundamental, we avoid being human rights absolutists who ignore the consequences of our actions. For example, the concept of human rights impact can be a good angle of analysis (Birchall, 2019). At least we should stand by a moderate deontological or rule utilitarian principle.  With this objective basis, we can meaningfully evaluate and discuss laws and policies in their moral desirability and be more sensitive in discerning political agendas. Secondly, learning from Habermas’ discourse theory, we should include and initiate more discussions on human rights (especially their criterion, applicability, and consequences) rather than just taking the human rights defined by the UN or other NGOs as a given and unnegotiable a priori. Lastly, we should not abstract and alienate human rights issues from our communities and see them as exclusive foreign issues. There is room for improvements in (at least positive) human rights in every country and by incorporating human rights theories with actions and experience of development and policies, we are better equipped to analyze human rights issues elsewhere and in future and proposed alternatives.

Conclusion

In this essay, I argued that the modern popularization of human rights was a product of the United States’ foreign policy that advantages itself, its allies, and multinational corporations and that such politicization vanquishes its moral legitimacy. I also provide suggestions to revive and safeguard human rights’ moral basis from politicized absolutism.

—-Atlas, 2022.6.23

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