I've made a similar argument with Alan. Saying that rights aren't merely the product of a social contract, but that there was and is a Right to Speech that has been to greater or lesser extents infringed upon by various political arrangements. So, why do I object to international human rights?
I think it comes back to positive versus negative rights. The Right to Speech can exist in the absence of any government. The Right to Healthcare or Employment or any other similar things that are proposed as Human Rights lately presuppose a government to provide them. When you add in the supposed universal and international nature of these ever expanding and amorphous rights, it's just too much for me to stomach.
It appears to me FLG is conflating three different sets of principles here, and the conflation is doing some of the work in confusing him.
For example, the distinction between positive and negative rights. It is commonly argued that one cannot maintain the positive/negative right distinction because negative rights usually have a positive component. For example, the right to physical integrity of the person cannot simply be the right to not have other people beat me up when I walk down the street. If that right were purely negative, I could have no certain enjoyment of it; enjoyment requires the positive action of (forming) a police force. This, of course, presupposes a government that will provide goods of some kind, but that's hardly a radical assumption given the world as it is.
This leads into the second issue, which is a pretty standard confusion about who holds rights and who holds duties under a human rights scheme. I've found it easier to think of human rights in terms of threats to liberty. Some threats emerge from government, and require limitations on what governments can do (classic negative rights). However, some threats emerge from coordinated individual action, where the protection of rights is best done by government (laws against discrimination). And some threats to human liberty emerge spontaneously, creating a problem for which there needs to be some sort of social, but not necessarily governmental, solution (health care and education). I believe rights created by all three types of threats to liberty can be defensibly described as 'human rights,' but I think it's important to recognize that they are separable problems which require different types of solutions, a conclusion just as easily forgotten by the liberal rights crusader and the conservative rights skeptic.*
Now, a word on what it means for rights to be 'universal.' It's a generally accepted point of human rights theory that the relevant treaties, covenants, etc. are silent on two of the most important questions--institutionalization and weighting--and that these silences are quite intentional. Human beings may have a right to education, but what that means will depend on institutional capacities, resources, and the decisions individual societies want to make about how to educate their own people. Further, any right that has an economic dimension will have to be weighted against all other similar rights. A modern state could, if it chose, easily devote its entire GDP to the provision of health care; but if there is in fact a human right to health care, it certainly can't be a right of the kind that immediately trumps all other possible claims. So it's important, I think, to read 'universal' as an indication that states and peoples may not neglect the matter, but, to return to point about institutionalization, the form it takes is left undetermined.
*Hayek, a rather astute observer on this point, advocates for a guaranteed negative income in Law, Legislation and Liberty: the enjoyment of purely negative rights will mean very little if you starve to death.
No comments:
Post a Comment