Universal Human Rights for Everyone, Everywhere

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

By Keith Tidman

Human rights exist only if people believe that they do and act accordingly. To that extent, we are, collectively, architects of our destiny — taking part in an exercise in the powers of human dignity and sovereignty. Might we, therefore, justly consider human rights as universal?

To presume that there are such rights, governments must be fashioned according to the people’s freely subscribed blueprints, in such ways that policymaking and consignment of authority in society represent citizens’ choices and that power is willingly shared. Such individual autonomy is itself a fundamental human right: a norm to be exercised by all, in all corners. Despite scattered conspicuous headwinds. Respect for and attachment to human rights in relations with others is binding, prevailing over the mercurial whimsy of institutional dictates.

For clarity, universal human rights are inalienable norms that apply to everyone, everywhere. No nation ought to self-immunise as an exception. These human rights are not mere privileges. By definition they represent the natural order of things; that is, these rights are naturally, not institutionally, endowed. There’s no place for governmental, legal, or social neglect or misapplication of those norms, heretically violating human dignity. This point about dignity is redolent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notions of civil society, explained in his Social Contract (1762), which provocatively opens with the famous ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’. By which Rousseau was referring to the tradeoff between people’s deference to government authority over moral behaviour in exchange for whatever freedoms civilisation might grant as part of the social contract. The contrary notion, however, asserts that human rights are natural, protected from government caprice in their unassailability — claims secured by the humanitarianism of citizens in all countries, regardless of cultural differences.

The idea that everyone has a claim to immutable rights has the appeal of providing a platform for calling out wrongful behaviour and a moral voice for preventing or remedying harms, in compliance with universal standards. The standards act as moral guarantees and assurance of oversight. The differences among cultures should not translate to the warped misplacement of relativism in calculating otherwise clear-cut universal rights aimed to protect.

International nongovernmental organisations (such as Human Rights Watch) have laboured to protect fundamental liberties around the world, investigating abuses. Several other human rights organisations, such as the United Nations, have sought to codify people's rights, like those spelled out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The many universal human rights listed by the declaration include these:

‘All human beings are born free; everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security; no one shall be subjected to torture; everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; everyone has the right to education; no one shall be held in slavery; all are equal before the law’. 

(Here’s the full UN declaration, for a grasp of its breadth.) 

These aims have been ‘hallowed’ by the several documents spelling out moral canon, in aggregate amounting to an international bill of rights to which countries are to commit and abide by. This has been done without regard to appeals to national sovereignty or cultural differences, which might otherwise prejudice the process, skew policy, undermine moral universalism, lay claim to government dominion, or cater to geopolitical bickering — such things always threatening to pull the legs out from under citizens’ human rights.

These kinds of organisations have set the philosophical framework for determining, spelling out, justifying, and promoting the implementation of human rights on as maximum global scale as possible. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, wrote to this core point, saying: 

‘A rule of justice is natural that has the same validity everywhere, and does not depend on our accepting it’.

That is, natural justice foreruns social, historical, and political institutions shaped to bring about conformance to their arbitrary, self-serving systems of fairness and justice. Aristotle goes on:

‘Some people think that all rules of justice are merely conventional, because whereas a law of nature is immutable and has the same validity everywhere, as fire burns both here and in Persia, rules of justice are seen to vary. That rules of justice vary is not absolutely true, but only with qualifications. Among the gods indeed it is perhaps not true at all; but in our world, although there is such a thing as Natural Justice, all rules of justice are variable. But nevertheless there is such a thing as Natural Justice as well as justice not ordained by nature’.

Natural justice accordingly applies to everyone, everywhere, where moral beliefs are objectively corroborated as universal truths and certified as profound human goods. In this model, it is the individual who shoulders the task of appraising the moral content of institutional decision-making.

Likewise, it was John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, who argued, in his Two Treaties of Government, the case that individuals enjoy natural rights, entirely non-contingent of the nation-state. And that whatever authority the state might lay claim to rested in guarding, promoting, and serving the natural rights of citizens. The natural rights to life, liberty, and property set clear limits to the power of the state. There was no mystery as to Locke’s position: states existed singularly to serve the natural rights of the people.

A century later, Immanuel Kant was in the vanguard in similarly taking a strong moral position on validating the importance of human rights, chiefly the entangled ideals of equality and the moral autonomy and self-determination of rational people.

The combination of the universality and moral heft of human rights clearly imparts greater potency to people’s rights, untethered to legal, institutional force of acknowledgment. As such, human rights are enjoyed equally, by everyone, all the time. It makes sense to conclude that everyone is therefore responsible for guarding the rights of fellow citizens, not just their own. Yet, in practice it is the political regime and perhaps international organisations that bear that load.

And within the ranks of philosophers, human-rights universalism has sometimes clashed with relativists, who reject universal (objective) moral canon. They paint human rights as influenced contingently by social, historical, and cultural factors. The belief is that rights in society are considered apropos only for those countries whose culture allows. Yet, surely, relativism still permits the universality of numerous rights. We instinctively know that not all rights are relative. At the least, societies must parse which rights endure as universal and which endure as relative, and hope the former are favoured.

That optimism notwithstanding, many national governments around the world choose not to uphold, either in part or in whole, fundamental rights in their countries. Perhaps the most transfixing case for universal human rights, as entitlements, is the inhumanity that haunts swaths of the world today, instigated for the most trifling of reasons.

Persuasion v. Manipulation in the Pandemic

Posted by Keith Tidman

Persuasion and manipulation to steer public behaviour are more than just special cases of each other. Manipulation, in particular, risks short-circuiting rational deliberation and free agency. So, where is the line drawn between these two ways of appealing to the public to act in a certain way, to ‘adopt the right behaviour’, especially during the current coronavirus pandemic? And where does the ‘common good’ fit into choices?

 

Consider two related aspects of the current pandemic: mask-wearing and being vaccinated. Based on research, such as that reported on in Nature (‘Face masks: what the data say’, Oct. 2020), mask-wearing is shown to diminish the spread of virus-loaded airborne particles to others, as well as to diminish one’s own exposure to others’ exhaled viruses. 

Many governments, scientists, medical professionals, and public-policy specialists argue that people therefore ought to wear masks, to help mitigate the contagion. A manifestly utilitarian policy position, but one rooted in controversy nonetheless. In the following, I explain why.

 

In some locales, mask-wearing is mandated and backed by sanctions; in other cases, officials seek willing compliance, in the spirit of communitarianism. Implicit in all this is the ethics-based notion of the ‘common good’. That we owe fellow citizens something, in a sense of community-mindedness. And of course, many philosophers have discussed this ‘common good’; indeed, the subject has proven a major thread through Western political and ethical philosophy, dating to ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.

In The Republic, Plato records Socrates as saying that the greatest social good is the ‘cohesion and unity’ that stems from shared feelings of pleasure and pain that result when all members of a society are glad or sorry for the same successes and failures. And Aristotle argues in The Politics, for example, that the concept of community represented by the city-state of his time was ‘established for the sake of some good’, which overarches all other goods.

Two thousand years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that citizens’ voluntary, collective commitment — that is, the ‘general will’ or common good of the community — was superior to each person’s ‘private will’. And prominent among recent thinkers to have explored the ‘common good’ is the political philosopher John Rawls, who has defined the common good as ‘certain general conditions that are . . . equally to everyone’s advantage’ (Theory of Justice, 1971).

 

In line with seeking the ‘common good’, many people conclude that being urged to wear a mask falls under the heading of civic-minded persuasion that’s commonsensical. Other people see an overly heavy hand in such measures, which they argue deprives individuals of the right — constitutional, civil, or otherwise — to freely make decisions and take action, or choose not to act. Free agency itself also being a common good, an intrinsic good. For some concerned citizens, compelled mask-wearing smacks of a dictate, falling under the heading of manipulation. Seen, by them, as the loss of agency and autonomous choice.

 

The readying of coronavirus vaccines, including early rollout, has led to its own controversies around choice. Health officials advising the public to roll up their sleeves for the vaccine has run into its own buzzsaw from some quarters. Pragmatic concerns persist: how fast the vaccines were developed and tested, their longer-term efficacy and safety, prioritisation of recipients, assessment of risk across diverse demographics and communities, cloudy public-messaging narratives, cracks in the supply chain, and the perceived politicising of regulatory oversight.

As a result of these concerns, nontrivial numbers of people remain leery, distrusting authority and harbouring qualms. As recent Pew, Gallup, and other polling on these matters unsurprisingly shows, some people might assiduously refuse ever to be vaccinated, or at least resist until greater clarity is shed on what they view as confusing noise or until early results roll in that might reassure. The trend lines will be watched.

 

All the while, officials point to vaccines as key to reaching a high enough level of population immunity to reduce the virus’s threat. Resulting in less contagion and fewer deaths, while allowing besieged economies to reopen with the business, social, and health benefits that entails. For all sorts of reasons — cultural, political, personal — some citizens see officials’ urgings regarding vaccinations as benign, well-intentioned persuasion, while others see it as guileful manipulation. One might consider where the Rawlsian common good fits in, and how the concept sways local, national, and international policy decision-making bearing on vaccine uptake.

 

People are surely entitled to persuade, even intensely. Perhaps on the basis of ethics or social norms or simple honesty: matters of integrity. But they may not be entitled to resort to deception or coercion, even to correct purportedly ‘wrongful’ decisions and behaviours. The worry being that whereas persuasion innocuously induces human behaviour broadly for the common good, coercive manipulation invalidates consent, corrupting the baseline morality of the very process itself. To that point, corrupt means taint ends.

 

Influence and persuasion do not themselves rise to the moral censure of coercive or deceptive manipulation. The word ‘manipulation’, which took on pejorative baggage in the eighteen hundreds, has special usages. Often unscrupulous in purpose, such as to gain unjust advantage. Meantime, persuasion may allow for abridged assumptions, facts, and intentions, to align with community expectations and with hoped-for behavioural outcomes to uphold the common good. A calculation that considers the veracity, sufficiency, and integrity of narratives designed to influence public choices, informed by the behavioural science behind effective public health communications. A subtler way, perhaps, to look at the two-dimensional axes of persuasion versus manipulation.

 

The seed bedding of these issues is that people live in social relationships, not as fragmented, isolated, socially disinterested individuals. They live in the completeness of what it means to be citizens. They live within relationships that define the Rawlsian common good. A concept that helps us parse persuasion and manipulation in the framework of inducing societal behaviour: like the real-world cases of mask-wearing and vaccinations, as the global community counterattacks this lethal pandemic.

 

PP #40 The Noble Savage

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) -- a painter whose legacy is not only disputed today, but increasingly disputed.  An interesting feature of Gauguin's paintings in his 'Pacific phase' was their great beauty on the surface of it, while in the background lurked death, suffering, and cruelty.

In seminary, they taught us like this: Gauguin travelled to Tahiti, hoping to find untrammelled freedom in the ideal of the 'noble savage', but instead he discovered death, suffering, and cruelty.  Therefore it was a false ideal.

The photo reminds me of the art of Paul Gauguin.  I am the boy on the left -- in my own 'Pacific phase' in childhood.  On the surface of it, the photo shows healthy, happy people.  But as in the art of Gauguin, a deformed man crouches in their midst.  I was fearful of him then.

Yet he was in the photo because he was included.  He was loved.  He was cared for.  Is this what Gauguin saw?  Did his fascination with the 'dark side' originate, not in his disillusionment with the ideal, but in the strange goodness of the 'noble savage'?