Anti-Climacus

Norm Geras discusses some objections to the human rights project raised by John Gray. In a fine display of restraint, Norm delays his first comment until after Gray's fourth point. I have no such restraint. Point one:

1. The ideal of human rights is a recent one historically.

That's certainly the argument of Samuel Moyn, whose book Gray is reviewing. Moyn (in my secondhand understanding) claims that the development of a coherent theory of human rights is a late development--the term doesn't exist in English until the 1940s, and gains no widespread currency (on his account) until the late 60s.

So far as that argument goes, it's fine. But Gray seems to be making an intellectual mistake. His claim appears to be that there can be no conception of human rights until there exists a term--such as 'human rights'--around which such a conception can cohere. If you can accept the idea that there might be such a thing as human rights theory even before the term 'human rights' was coined,* then there's no problem here.

The point I want to make, though, is slightly different. Were I so inclined, I would suggest that the universalist impulse behind human rights--that all people might be entitled to certain protections and freedoms strictly in virtue of being human--is significantly older, probably as old as universalist moral systems.

For the sake of argument, though, assume Gray's stipulation. Where does one find the nearest roots for the emergence of the term 'human rights?' Hersch Lauterpacht, among others, was making the argument that individual human beings might be subjects under international law, who possessed rights against their governments, as far back as the 1930s. The most cautious accounting, in other words, makes human rights a concept of 80 years' standing. Even granting Gray a reasonable conservative impulse,** as a feature of legal and political thought approaches a century of influence, we should begin to appreciate that it may be a fixed part of our ethical world, and deservedly so.


*An obvious rejoinder: 'genocide' is a term of more recent provenance than 'human rights.' Does this make the idea of preventing genocide a recent innovation? Even if it does, is that a relevant ethical consideration?

**T.S. Eliot somewhere writes that it takes about 100 years to judge literary works of truly enduring influence, and I take Eliot to be a fair representative of conservative thought on cultural and intellectual matters.