The Ethics of Human Rights (74): Rights or Duties?

This is a telling result from Google’s Ngram viewer*:

It seems that once upon a time people believed that duties were more important than rights (or, which we assume is the same thing, people wrote more about duties than about rights). This time ended somewhere in the late 1800s. Some would call this the era of morality. The era that followed it would then be the era of “ME”, of individualism, of people’s nascent and by now “overwhelming” urge to claim things for themselves, and to claim them from others, from society and from the state. There is indeed a venerable school of thought that sees rights as amoral or even immoral and as the favorite tool of modern individualists and egoists.

Somewhat surprisingly, one origin of this idea is Marx. Nowadays, however, it’s associated more with conservatism and with so-called collectivist and harmonious “Asian” societies (with or without a history of communism). Or maybe it’s just associated with the self-appointed representatives of those societies, namely the often authoritarian leaders there. Not surprisingly, those leaders are the first beneficiaries of harmony and of a widespread sense of duty.

None of this should be understood as a rejection of the notion of duty. Far from it. One person’s rights are another person’s duties. (See also here). In a sense it is indeed regrettable that duties are apparently going out of fashion.

* If you don’t know what the Ngram viewer is, go here first.

Human Rights Explained to Extraterrestrials

They forgot to put some information on the Pioneer plaques. In case you don’t remember, the Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft. The plaques feature a pictorial message, thought to be useful in case the vessels are intercepted by extraterrestrial life. They show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. 40 years after take-off, the spacecraft and their plaques are now twice as far from the Sun as Pluto and heading to Taurus.

However, the defining feature of humanity, in my view at least, is missing from the plaques: what are human rights? Hence I’ve made some revisions. If someone wants to send them to ET, feel free. I’m sure he’ll understand. Perhaps some terrestrials could also benefit. I’m looking at you, Assad.

Human Rights Explained to Extraterrestrials

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (53): Sex, Disgust Reduction, and the Authorization of Violence

Rather less serious than the normal posts in this series:

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More about the link between disgust and human rights. More – and more substantial – posts in this series.

What is Democracy? (67): The Form of Government That Offers the Best Protection Against Human Rights Violations

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There is a clear correlation between the presence and quality of democratic government in a country and the level of respect for human rights in that country. That may sound obvious but it’s good to have some measured results. This paper for instance offers some clear evidence:

There is a substantial body of research devoted to understanding the relationship between democracy and government human rights performance. Most research centers on physical integrity rights but does not analyze the broader civil liberties encompassed by the category of “empowerment rights.” The dynamics of the relationship between the degree of democracy in a state and protection of empowerment rights might be different and improvements may take longer to emerge. This study examines the effects of democracy and democratic duration on empowerment rights scores, and it also uncovers time thresholds at which different scores are attained. The results show that regime type is more critical to the protection of empowerment rights than it is to physical integrity rights. Even in the earliest years of democracy there is a positive relationship between democracy and empowerment rights, but empowerment rights strengthen as countries gain democratic experience. …

Thus, countries with more institutionalized democratic regimes, as determined by the quality and longevity of democratic experience, are significantly more likely to respect both fundamental human rights and broader classes of civil liberties. … [A]lthough human rights protection is present in early years, it will usually be even greater after countries have had extended experience with democracy. (source)

Two graphs to back this up:

correlation between democracy and human rights

(source, click image to enlarge)

Here and here are other papers giving some further evidence.

The interesting thing about all this is not that there is a correlation – anyone following the news could have guessed as much. What we should care about are the reasons why there is a correlation. From the studies cited above we can see that the most important causal link is the one going from democracy to respect for human rights. In other words, there is a correlation because democracy causes respect for human rights. Vice versa may also be possible, although the argument is probably weaker. And then there may also be a hidden variable that can partially explain the correlation. For example, it may well be that prosperity and high GDP promote both democracy and human rights.

But then the next question is: how does democracy cause higher levels of respect for human rights? I guess this can happen in several ways:

• Democracies are more likely to be systems based on the rule of law and the rule of law is necessary for the protection of human rights.
• Democratic rulers know that they can’t get away with repression. They’ll be voted out if they try, or, worse, they’ll suffer the consequences of the rule of law, imposed on them by other branches of power in a system of checks and balances and separation of powers.
• Democracies have systems of judicial review which allow courts to void legislation that contradicts basic constitutional rights.
• Democracies have powerful non-violent mechanisms for dispute settlement, such as well-functioning courts. People don’t need to take the law into their own hands. Internal peace and limitations on violent behavior have beneficial effects on a number of human rights.
• Democracy is correlated with high levels of prosperity, and prosperity makes it easier to promote respect for human rights. Rights cost money.
• Democracies need human rights to function adequately (no democracy without free speech, free assembly, free association etc.), so they have an added incentive to respect them.

None of the above is meant to imply the following:

1. That we can delay the implementation of human rights norms in non-democratic states. Remember the remark at the beginning that the causal link probably goes in two opposite directions and that human rights can promote democratic government. After all, if people are allowed to express themselves, they will express themselves about the workings of their government, and that is the first step towards democracy.
2. That rights are never violated in democracies or never respected in non-democracies. It’s merely a matter of probability.
3. That there are no elements other than democracy that promote human rights. Of course there must be. I mentioned prosperity a moment ago. Democracy is not a sufficient condition, although probably a necessary one, at least in the long run, for the full set of human rights and for the equal enjoyment of all rights by all people.
4. That the beneficial effect of democracy on human rights is equal for all human rights or for all types of democracy. Well-developed and long-lasting democracies do better, as mentioned above, but perhaps also deep democracies, meaning democracies that provide a wide range of opportunities for democratic say.

More about the link between democracy and human rights here, here, here and here. More posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (73): The Link Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Reparations for Slavery

Advertising for Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, c1943

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Daimler-Benz … avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. (source)

Can companies violate human rights and should they be held morally and legally responsible if they do? Or are companies just legal fictions that can’t do anything? In the latter case, if a company seems to be engaged in wrongdoing, then it’s really just the employees, the bosses or the shareholders – or all of them – that have done wrong. It’s therefore always the individuals who should be held responsible and not the company as such. This latter view is expressed in the following quote:

[C]orporate action and corporate responsibility is something of a metaphor. Corporations don’t misbehave, speak, think, and so on. People acting on behalf of corporations do. I support applying the First Amendment to the “speech of corporations” because I think the restrictions on such speech end up interfering with the rights of people, both as listeners and as people who associate in order to create an enterprise in which some of the employees speak on the enterprise’s behalf. “Corporations have First Amendment rights” is useful shorthand for conveying that, but we have to recognize that it’s just shorthand.

And because this is just shorthand, I find it hard to fault the Mercedes-Benz of today for the actions of the Mercedes-Benz of the Nazi era. Whatever Mercedes-Benz officers and employees did then is their responsibility — not the responsibility of the very different people who run the company today. And that action during the Nazi era strikes me as not really relevant to Mercedes-Benz’s current actions, or to what should be our attitudes with regard to the company and its products today. (source)

That sounds persuasive, until you start to think about the transtemporal aspect of things. Indeed, current Mercedes employees or bosses are not the same as those of the Nazi era, but the company is. It’s Mercedes now and it was Mercedes then. It’s not absurd to suggest that the company profited from its Nazi era wrongdoing – or from the wrongdoing of its people back then – and that this advantage extends to our current time.

I’ll explain. Suppose that the Nazis liked company X and its people, and that this liking led to the government backed discrimination or even elimination of competitors Y and Z. Y and Z never recovered after the end of the Nazi era, and hence company X continues to this day to profit from the absence of competitors Y and Z. And I could suggest numerous other examples of ongoing advantages resulting from actions taken decades ago (e.g. continuing returns on savings which accumulated while the wrongdoing took place and which resulted from the wrongdoing; continuing returns on expropriated goods, etc.).

(source unknown)

This discussion is similar to the one about reparations for slavery. None of the current white citizens of the US are responsible for the slavery that ended more than a century ago, and yet they do still profit – as a group – from the defunct institution, even those whites who don’t have forefathers directly implicated in slavery or who came to the US after the end of slavery. Of course, those who do have implicated forefathers profit directly from the wealth their forefathers accumulated through slavery and subsequently transferred across generations. But whites in general profit from the fact that slavery has imposed disadvantages on blacks even after its demise (lack of education, lack of certain skills, segregation, forced migration etc.). These disadvantages were and still are benefits to whites. For example, they make it easier for whites on the job market and elsewhere.

However, the guy quoted above may insist that the “group of currently living whites” is a lot like Mercedes: the group is a social fiction in the sense that it can’t act and hence can’t be responsible. Only individual whites can act. And what they do today can’t have effects on the past. Hence they can’t be responsible for what happened in the past. A fortiori, the group of whites can’t be responsible either. I agree that all of this is correct, but it doesn’t follow that the group shouldn’t be forced to pay reparations. Just as Mercedes today, it continues to profit from wrongdoing done in its name in the past, and that is unjust. Hence they should pay compensation for the unjust profit they reap.

More on corporate social responsibility here, here and here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (51): Nature or Nurture?

Album cover of Frank Zappa’s “Them or Us”

Are we born as blank slates, and do we get our violent and malevolent inclinations through upbringing and social contact? Or are we born evil? I can’t possibly answer those questions in a blog post, or anywhere else for that matter. But we can get some clues if we focus on one type of rights violation, namely racism.

The available evidence seems to suggest that people are not naturally racist. I’ve discussed some recent findings here. Human evolution has indeed fostered a strong sense of group solidarity, and the dark side of this solidarity is a natural tendency to define outsiders as enemies. This is problematic from the point of view of human rights because it means that the interests and rights of outsiders are routinely discounted. However, “groupism” isn’t necessarily the same as racism. Outsiders can be virtually anyone: foreigners, heretics, infidels, Manchester United fans etc. Race can but doesn’t have to determine the inside-outside border. In fact, throughout much of early human history, when contact between races was the exception, groups have defined insiders and outsiders on other grounds than race. Racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the words of Robert Wright:

So it’s not as if the human lineage could have plausibly developed, by evolutionary adaptation, an instinctive reaction to members of different races. (source)

It seems we are ourselves responsible for the rights we violate. We can’t accuse nature or evolution.

More on groupism here. More posts in this series here.

Religion and Human Rights (31): Polygamy, Right or Rights Violation?

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In the U.S., 9 states – including Utah, the center of Mormonism – make polygamy a crime, while 49 states have bigamy statutes that can be used to prosecute polygamous families. Polygamy is only legal in North Africa and most of the Muslim world. Does it make sense to promote the right to same-sex, interracial and interreligious marriage, and at the same time oppose polygamy? (By the way, polygamy usually means polygyny: one husband, multiple wives – the opposite, polyandry, is extremely rare).

Marriage is a recognized human right, but does the word “marriage”, as it is used in human rights language, also cover polygamous marriage? From the texts of human rights treaties and declarations, it’s not even clear that it covers same-sex marriage – although it undoubtedly covers interracial and interreligious marriage. The word ”marriage” isn’t clearly defined in the texts. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration merely states the following:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Polygamy or same-sex marriage aren’t specifically mentioned as being forms of marriage that are included in the right to marry, but neither is it the case that sexual orientation or the numbers of partners are stipulated as unwarranted limitations to the right to marry. So the phrasing as it stands neither includes nor excludes polygamy or same-sex marriage as a right. Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights isn’t much clearer.

However, the case for same-sex or interracial marriage can be based on other articles, such as the non-discrimination provisions. Article 2 of the International Covenant states:

Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Sexual orientation is not mentioned but it is accepted that the list given here is a list of examples and not exhaustive. “Without distinction of any kind” is clear enough. Article 3 states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights set forth in the present Covenant.

And Article 26:

All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

It’s not clear whether polygamists can invoke the same non-discrimination provisions. Perhaps the right to privacy can help them. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence… Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Who Will Zuma’s first lady be? Pretoria News headline from April 11, 2009

However, apart from the question whether polygamy can be defended or not on the basis of existing human rights law, there are some good reasons why perhaps there shouldn’t be a right to polygamous marriage, even if it can be established that there is such a right. Wives may be pressured into polygamous marriages or prohibited from exiting them; they may suffer inequality and oppression in their marriage; and young girls may be forced to marry. The same risks exist of course in normal monogamous marriage, but are perhaps more important in polygamous marriage.

Moreover, polygamous marriage poses certain risks that are non-existent in normal marriage: excess boys in polygamous communities are often ostracized and condemned to a life of poverty and homelessness; and there’s a risk that marriage as an institution and as a general right may suffer when polygamy becomes widespread:

Polygamy is bad social policy for exactly the reason gay marriage is good social policy: everyone should have the opportunity to marry. Broad access to marriage is important not only for individual wellbeing but for social stability. And, to oversimplify only a little, when one man gets two wives, some other man gets no wife. There’s no better path to inequality, social unrest, and authoritarian social structures than polygamy. (source)

And yet, if it’s the case that

• polygamy remains a fringe custom
• polygamists are generally exercising their free choice and informed consent
• no children are forced to marry or are sexually abused
• and excess boys are not ostracized

then why would anyone oppose polygamy? Monogamous marriage isn’t illegal because some wives are beaten or because there are some cases of monogamous child marriage. One could oppose polygamy for religious reasons, but those aren’t sufficient in liberal democracies. Polygamy can only be problematic when it’s a practice that regularly and intrinsically leads to rights violations, as it does when child brides are common, when wives are commonly forced into marriage or when widespread polygamy makes it very difficult for men to find brides and marry.

Another thing to consider is gender equality. Even if polygamy is rare enough not to deny men a reasonable chance of marriage, and even if all polygamous wives are adults who freely consent to their marriage and who have equal standing within their marriages, then it’s still the case that the practice itself can signal gender inequality and hence perpetuate it. The reason is that polygyny, by its very nature, signals that men have more rights than women: a man can take several wives, but not vice versa. A legal right to polygamy would of course also entail a right to polyandry, but it’s unlikely that the risks to gender equality created by polygyny would be offset by many cases of polyandry. The more likely result is that polygyny fosters preexisting misogynistic prejudice because polygyny will always be more common that polyandry.

So, in the end a lot depends on how often polygamy results in rights violations. Is polygamy more like child marriage, which by definition is a rights violation (it involves pedophilia, the denial of education, health problems resulting from pregnancy at an early age etc.)? Or is it more like monogamous or same-sex marriage, which may produce rights violations such as domestic violence, but not intrinsically so? If some practice by definition violates rights, it should obviously be prohibited. If the practice only does so by accident and exceptionally, then it should in general be protected, especially when the practice itself is a human right. I claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with polygamy, as long as it’s not set up in such a way that it violates rights – as long as in most cases the wives consent (in an informed way), children are left alone, boys aren’t ostracized, and the practice isn’t so widespread that men can’t marry or that women feel they are second class citizens.

In this respect, polygamy is similar to hate speech. In the case of hate speech we are also dealing with a presumptive right, but one that can be abrogated when its exercise becomes too widespread with negative consequences for the rights of others. When a small black minority for instance is overwhelmed by hate speech, to such an extent that black people can’t go outside for fear of constant insult, then their right to freedom of movement should trump the speech rights of the haters.

For a more pessimistic view on polygamy, go here. Below a map showing the prevalence of polygamy/polygyny:

What Makes People Care About Human Rights?

Clark Gable in “Gone With the Wind”

Human rights are not like music or love, things people care about for their own sake or for the pleasure or happiness they provide. If people care about human rights they do so because they view those rights as means to achieve some other goals or purpose. I personally see the following reasons why people care about human rights.

Signaling

Human rights function as signaling tools (see also here). People who engage in human rights talk don’t necessarily have as a first priority the goal of improving respect for human rights, but perhaps only want to convey some meaningful information about themselves and use human rights talk to do that. They may of course improve respect for human rights along the way, sometimes unwittingly (for example because their talk contributes to a culture of human rights), but human rights are valuable to them primarily because they allow them to communicate certain things about themselves. For example, it’s possible that some of the people who are very expressive about perceived discrimination of a particular minority group may be primarily motivated by a possible leadership position within that minority group. Their human rights talk signals leadership aspirations. This kind of reason to care about human rights is not by definition useless for the promotion of human rights – it can advance the cause of human rights – but it’s obviously not the best possible reason.

Self-interest

Human rights promote people’s self-interest. That’s obviously true for their own rights, but also for the rights of others. I’ve written here about the ways in which people may view the promotion of the rights of others as a means to protect their own self-interest. This reason to care about human rights is more beneficial to the cause of human rights than the signaling reason, but it’s still not the best possible reason. People’s self-interest does not advance all human rights of all other people.

Values

People may believe that human rights promote some of their cherished values or ideals, such as freedom or equality, for themselves and for humanity in general. Like the previous two reasons for caring about human rights, this reason will only advance the cause of human rights contingently: if freedom is what you care about, you will only promote human rights to the extent that they enhance freedom, and only those rights that enhance freedom.

It’s not true that freedom is served by all human rights all of the time, at least not if you adopt a restrictive definition of freedom. For example, those human rights that guarantee a basic standard of living are not clearly meant to enhance the freedom of poor people – within the bounds of a certain definition of freedom - and they may even limit the freedom of those who have to contribute the means necessary to guarantee a basic standard of living for others. Conversely, if you’re an egalitarian and equality rather than freedom is what you care about, then you may not feel especially attached to the right to property for example.

Humanity

People may cherish rights because they believe human beings are uniquely valuable creatures who should be treated in a certain way. For example, you may believe that people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Or that they deserve to have their autonomy protected. Or that people have been created by God in His image and that this requires a certain treatment. Human rights are then viewed as means to achieve this treatment. Compared to the previous reasons to care about human rights, this reason is potentially more inclusive and wide-ranging and less contingent on facts about personal motivation. However, it depends on a substantive and inherently controversial philosophy about human nature, dignity or religion.

Evil

Conversely, people may cherish human rights, not because of their views about the inherent worth of human beings, but because of the evil inherent in humanity. Human rights are necessary not because they protect the good in people but because they protect people from the evil in others.

Related Articles

• Human Rights and Utopia (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (35): Why Do We Need Democracy?

The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

Democracy is a human right. In the past, I’ve  listed a number of reasons why we should prefer democracy over other forms of government (here and here for example). I’ve now come across another reason, one that may not be convincing or relevant to everyone, but still it’s mildly interesting:

Lisbon, Portugal, during the great earthquake of 1 November 1755. This copper engraving, made that year, shows the city in ruins and in flames. Tsunamis rush upon the shore, destroying the wharfs. The engraving is also noteworthy in showing highly disturbed water in the harbor, which sank many ships. Passengers in the left foreground show signs of panic.

All things — including wealth — being equal, earthquakes kill more people in dictatorships than in democracies, write NYU political scientists Alastair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores. The reason that democratically elected leaders prepare their countries for disaster better is because they fear they’ll be voted out of office if their governments are caught unprepared. (Dictators obviously tend to worry less about election outcomes.) A recent World Bank study backs up this argument, with an added wrinkle: institutionalized autocracies, like China’s, tend to outperform non-institutionalized or corrupt autocracies as well as young democracies when it comes to preventing earthquake deaths. Still, another study finds that politicians in democratic elections benefit even more from doling out disaster relief after a catastrophe than they do from preparing for disasters yet to come. (source)

More on democracy and human rights here, here and here. More on earthquakes and accountability.

What Are Human Rights? (47): A Hostile Symbiosis

clownfish and sea anemone, photo by Natascia Tamburello

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“Hostile symbiosis” is a concept I borrow from Benjamin Wittes. The idea is that the different human rights that are part of the system of human rights are both mutually dependent (or interdependent) and at the same time hostile to each other. For example, the publicity of free speech can’t exist without the privacy offered by privacy rights (no light without darkness), and yet at the same time respect for a person’s privacy may require limitations of someone else’s speech rights. Religious liberty can’t exist without equality of rights (religious liberty is in fact religious equality) and yet it may be necessary to allow religious groups the right to discriminate against candidate members in order to preserve their religious identity. And so on.

The same rights which are in one case interdependent and which can’t exist without each other, are in other cases mutually hostile and need to be balanced against each other and limited for the sake of each other. Hence the concept of hostile symbiosis.

Symbiosis is a term from biology, and is a combination of the Ancient Greek terms for “together” and “living”. It refers to close and long-term interactions between different biological species, the classic example being the clownfish and the sea anemone. A clownfish feeds on small invertebrates that otherwise have potential to harm the sea anemone and it’s territorial instinct protects the anemone from anemone-eating fish. In addition, the fecal matter from the clownfish provides nutrients to the sea anemone. The clownfish is in turn protected from predators by the anemone’s stinging cells, to which the clownfish is immune.

This is not a hostile symbiosis, as in the case of different human rights. Human rights form not just a hostile symbiosis but also an obligate symbiosis, meaning that both symbionts entirely depend on each other for survival. That is, as I understand it, not the case with clownfish and sea anemones, but some types of fungi and tree symbioses for example are obligate in nature. Many varieties of fungus live in close association with trees and other plants, drawing in nutrients from deep underground and providing them to the tree in exchange for a share of the energy (in the form of sugars) produced by the tree’s photosynthesis. The trees need the fungi in order to gain nutrients more efficiently (source).

Some more examples of what I’m talking about are here and here. More posts in this series are here.

Measuring Human Rights (32): Assessing Advocacy and Policy by Way of Counterfactual Thinking

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Human rights measurement is ultimately about levels of respect for human rights, but it can also be useful to try to measure the impact of human rights advocacy and policy on these levels. Both advocacy and policy (the difference being that the former is non-governmental) aim at improving levels of respect for human rights. Obviously, those levels don’t depend solely on advocacy or policy, but it’s reasonably to assume that they are to some extent dependent on those types of action. It’s hard – although not impossible – to imagine that millions of people and dozens of governments and international institutions would engage in pointless activity.

The question is then: to what extent exactly? How much do advocacy and policy help? The problem in answering this question is that we won’t necessarily learn a lot by simply looking at the levels and how they evolve. Not only is there the difficulty of comparing different possible causes; a flat trend line – or even a declining trend line – may cover up how much more awful things would have been without advocacy and policy. Levels of respect may very well stay as they are or even worsen while advocacy and policy are relatively successful because the levels without advocacy and policy would have been even lower.

Of course, it’s very hard to quantify this. If there’s improvement, you can at least try to sort out the relative contribution of different causes. If things don’t improve or even worsen, then the only way to measure the effect of advocacy and policy is the use of counterfactual thinking. And that’s a problem. How bad (or good?) would things have been without advocacy and policy? We can’t redo a part of a country’s history to test what would have happened with other choices. We can speculate about the answer to “what if” questions but since we can’t experiment we’re left with a lot of uncertainty. What if Hitler had won the war? Or had been admitted to art school? Fun questions to try and answer, but the answers won’t tell us much about the real world, unfortunately. If they did, we would know what to do.

More posts in this series are here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (120): The Crime of Carrying Condoms

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The NYPD can arrest you for carrying condoms … Trans and carrying condoms? You must be a prostitute, and condoms are the proof! Wearing a tight t-shirt and carrying condoms? You must be a prostitute, and condoms are the proof! A sex worker who is trying to keep herself safe in her work? You are actually a prostitute, so go to jail, or at the very least get your condoms taken away so your work is more dangerous. The condoms-as-evidence policy serves absolutely no one. (source)

Here’s an excerpt of the supporting deposition:

More absurd human rights violations here.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (34): Which Are the Best Anti-Human-Rights Theories?

Those of us who believe human rights are important have an intellectual duty to engage with the best critics of human rights. “Engage” may be too big a word for this blog post, but what I’ll do here is list some of the best anti-rights theories and link to previous posts where I’ve dealt with them in some more detail.

By “best” I obviously don’t mean “convincing”. If I was convinced by any (or all) of these theories I wouldn’t be writing this blog. None of the theories I list here, or any other anti-rights theories for that matter, are even remotely convincing on close inspection. I won’t provide that close inspection in this post. In most cases I’ve done so before, and I’ll therefore take the luxury of linking back to older posts.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism comes in many shapes, but the most basic form of the theory is evidently opposed to human rights. Human rights limit the things that can be done to maximize aggregate utility, and the efforts to maximize aggregate utility often – in some forms of utilitarianism – justify harm done to individuals if that harm is necessary for greater gains elsewhere in society.

Of course, there is such a thing as rule utilitarianism which claims that respect for rules (e.g. human rights) usually maximizes utility or is the best proxy for utility in the absence of detailed knowledge about consequences of specific actions. Read more here and here about the link between utilitarianism and human rights.

Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism doesn’t reject human rights as such, but only their universal applicability and desirability. According to this theory, different cultures have developed their own moral codes, adapted to their own identity, circumstances and history, and moral diversity is therefore something valuable that needs to be protected. Efforts to universalize human rights will destroy moral diversity and non-western cultural identities, and are in fact exercises in cultural imperialism and cultural genocide.

Read more here, here, here and here about cultural relativism and human rights.

Empire

A related criticism views human rights as a tool in outright power imperialism. Human rights talk only serves to justify violent interventions in so-called “rogue states” or other countries that provide a selfish and imperial benefit to the U.S. (but also Europe). The violent interventions in Kosovo/Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. have all been partially justified by human rights talk but were, according to some, primarily motivated by the strategic interests of the intervening powers. More here.

The economic case against human rights

It’s often argued that economic growth is enhanced by certain policies and actions that imply violations of human rights. The Chinese government in particular is quick to use this argument. And the whole “Asian values” debate – somewhat outdated now – was based on it. Especially developing countries supposedly can’t afford the luxury of human rights. They need discipline and organization in production and consumption, not freedom. Read more here, here and here.

Legal positivism

Legal positivism doesn’t claim that there are no rights, simply that there are no human rights. Rights exist only if they are part of the law. Human rights in the abstract, as something that human beings possess independently of their country’s laws, is simply idle talk. It seems I still have to make the case against legal positivism…

Marxism

According to Marx, human rights are the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community. They are the rights of man as an isolated, inward looking, self-centered creature and they are designed to protect the wealthy from the poor. More here, here and here.

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• Justifying Human Rights (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Hu: ‘A lot’ still needed on human rights in China (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Intentionality Bias Causing the Surge in Human Rights Talk

First, there has indeed been a surge in human rights talk over the past decades and even centuries (see here for some evidence). This is particularly obvious for the period since the end of WWII. Human rights have become the lingua franca among the oppressed, the persecuted and the bleeding hearts worldwide, effectively replacing language based on benevolence, honor etc. (No insult intended, I’m a bleeding heart myself). There’s something about the notion of a human right that captures the strength of demands for freedom and equality like nothing else. It makes a claim sound very strong and difficult to ignore.

Other reasons for the popularity of human rights – or better the fascination with human rights – are their clarity and simplicity, their obvious universality and the fact that they cover most if not all areas of human suffering, depravity and failing, including persecution, violence, lack of freedom, discrimination, poverty, work and the family.

A further, and as yet unexplored reason is the so-called intentionality bias. The intentionality bias is a psychological bias where actions are viewed as intentional even when they’re not.

Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are guided by an ‘‘intentionality bias,” an implicit bias where all actions are judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident (e.g., ‘‘He set the house on fire”) and had to decide which interpretation best characterized the action. To tap people’s initial interpretation, half the participants made their judgments under speeded conditions; this group judged significantly more sentences to be intentional. Study 2 found that when asked for spontaneous descriptions of the ambiguous actions used in Study 1 (and thus not explicitly reminded of the accidental interpretation), participants provided significantly more intentional interpretations, even with prototypically accidental actions (e.g., ‘‘She broke the vase”). Study 3 examined whether more processing is involved in deciding that something is unintentional (and thus overriding an initial intentional interpretation) than in deciding that something is unpleasant (where there is presumably no initial ‘‘pleasant” interpretation). Participants were asked to judge a series of 12 sentences on one of two dimensions: intentional/unintentional (experimental group) or pleasant/unpleasant (control group). People in the experimental group remembered more unintentional sentences than people in the control group. Findings across the three studies suggest that adults have an implicit bias to infer intention in all behavior. This research has important implications both in terms of theory (e.g., dual-process model for intentional reasoning), and practice (e.g., treating aggression, legal judgments). (source)

If there is indeed a tendency to view actions as intentional, then there will also be a tendency to frame problems in terms of human rights. For example, if the intentional actions of an oppressive majority assisted by prejudiced legislators and law enforcers are believed to be the main cause of discrimination of a racial minority, then holding those intentional actors legally and judicially responsible for rights violations makes sense and may be effective. When, on the other hand, a lot of this discrimination is in fact the result of unconscious bias, or when it is statistical discrimination rather than taste-based discrimination, then judicial action based on human rights is much less effective.

And it’s my opinion that a lot of human rights violations are unintentional, unconscious and statistical. That doesn’t mean we should stop framing the underlying problems in human rights terms, but it does mean that our efforts to do something about them should be non-legal and non-judicial. Story telling, making people aware of their unconscious biases against certain groups of people, incentivizing people and other strategies can then be more successful in stopping rights violations.

The intentionality bias can be understood as an example of the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. A simple example, if Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (dispositional). If Alice later tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational).

More on human rights and intentionality is here, here and here. More on biases is here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (119): “Look How Lenient We Are!”

Qatar

(source)

A Qatari poet sentenced to life in prison for inciting the overthrow of the government and insulting Qatar’s rulers has had his jail term cut.

Mohammed al-Ajami’s sentence was reduced to 15 years, his lawyer said.

The case against Mr Ajami is said to be based on a poem he wrote in 2010 which criticised the Emir, Sheikh Hamad al-Thani.

But activists believe the authorities were angered by a 2011 poem he wrote about authoritarian rule in the region.

In the poem Tunisian Jasmine, which he recited and then uploaded to the internet in January 2011, Mr Ajami expressed his support for the uprising in the North African state, saying: “We are all Tunisia in the face of the repressive elite.”

He also denounced “all Arab governments” as “indiscriminate thieves”.

Mr Ajami, also known as Mohammed Ibn al-Dheeb, had previously recited a poem that criticised Qatar’s emir and was posted online in August 2010. (source)

Free speech doesn’t mean anything in many parts of the world. More on Qatar here. More absurd human rights violations here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (49): The Violator’s State of Mind

There are some interesting things to say about the state of mind of the rights violator, and about how this state of mind leads to rights violations and subsequent liability and punishment. There’s malevolence, of course, but that’s just one extreme of a wide spectrum of states of mind that can cause rights violations. We’ll have a look at that spectrum here, and classify states of mind according to the degree of liability and the severity of punishment that should attach to them. (By some accident of the English language, all states have a name that ends in -ence. Makes it easier to remember).

1.  Malevolence

A malevolent violator acts intentionally. She knows the harmful consequences of her actions and acts anyway. In fact, she acts precisely because of those consequences. The notion of mens rea is applicable here. An example of malevolence is premeditated murder.

2. Non-benevolence/negligence

A non-benevolent or negligent violator also acts – or omits an action – intentionally. She also knows the harmful consequences of her actions or omissions and proceeds anyway, not because she wants the consequences but because she doesn’t care enough about them. An example of non-benevolence is the failure to help persons in need (the classic case of the drowning child). An example of negligence is the factory owner failing to install safety measures for her workers. (There may be a problem with the notion of “failure to help persons in need”: given the large number of people in the world that are in some sense “in need”, we may not be able to help them all without radically changing our own lifestyles. All of us who are not now in Africa working to end poverty may then be liable. Perhaps we can avoid this excessive burden by limiting this liability to face-to-face situations such as the drowning child, but it’s not clear that there’s a sound moral basis for this limitation).

3. Unintelligence

An unintelligent violator acts unintentionally. She doesn’t know the harmful consequences of her actions, but she could have known them without much effort. Because she could have known them, she should have known them. And because she should have known them she is liable for them. It’s a form of negligence: the actor is intellectually negligent. She is not negligent in the sense that she does not care about consequences but in the sense that she does not reflect on them or does not care enough to reflect on them. An example of an unintelligent actor is the bar fighter.

4. Coincidence

A coincidental violator also acts unintentionally, and also doesn’t know the harmful consequences of her actions. The difference is that she couldn’t have known them, or couldn’t have been expected to know them, within reason. Because she couldn’t have known them, we can’t demand that she should have known them. And yet, in some cases we may still hold her liable. An example is fraternal incest between brother and sister separated at birth. Another example is the drug company selling a product that has been thoroughly tested but still has some unforeseen and unforeseeable harmful effects. Obviously this is a reduced form of liability.

5. Ascendence

An ascendental violator also acts unintentionally. She may or may not know the harmful consequences of her actions. The nature of this type of state of mind is that she doesn’t know her actions. We’re dealing here with unconscious rights violations. People may violate rights but don’t realize that they do. They may act because of tradition, because certain rules or biases were instilled in them in early childhood etc. In some cases, they can be held responsible for their actions. The word “ascendence” therefore refers to what goes above and comes before. An example is here.

6. Incidence

An incidental violator is just there. We don’t know anything about her state of mind. We don’t know whether she acts intentionally or not, knowingly or not, willingly or not. We don’t know whether she could or should have known or done something. For example, we see patterns of discrimination in society, and someone must be discriminating. We may be able to identify that someone and hold her responsible even when we lack all other knowledge about her. An example would be a company systematically paying female employees lower wages.

Here’s a summary representation of the spectrum of states of minds, according to the degree of liability :

More posts in this series are here.

Related articles

• Accident Liability | eLocal (elocallawyers.com)

Political Graffiti (227): Leisure

by Banksy

(source)

Not really graffiti, but it’s Banksy, so close enough. More on leisure and how it relates to human rights here. Some data here. More graffiti here. More Banksy here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (70): A Human Right to Non-Existence?

Can people have a human right not to exist? This potential right has to be distinguished from the right to die or the right to end your life. In fact, what I’m talking about here is a right not to be born. Can a potential or prospective person have a right that forces her potential parents not to act in such a way that she comes into existence?

It’s common to hear people claim that, in some circumstances, it’s in a person’s interest for her parents to not act in such a way that leads to her conception and birth. And when there’s an interest there’s possibly a right as well. The specific circumstances people often refer to are, for example, the likelihood of genetic defects in the parents that would lead to a life of suffering for the potential child. Indeed, it’s uncontroversial that we can cause harm to a child by bringing about her existence, and when there is harm, there’s often also a right to be protected against such harm.

Less common these days is for people to argue that those who are “burdened” in non-genetic ways – such as the poor – should also not procreate owing to the risk that their children would find themselves leading similarly dismal lives.

So, if prospective parents are in a position to know or to be told that their potential children will lead a life not worth living because of genetic reasons, should they respect the so-called right to non-existence of these potential children? This right – if it exists – imposes a duty on prospective parents not to beget miserable children.

(A short parenthesis: suppose there is such a right not to exist, does that right not imply the existence of the “mirror-right”, namely a right of prospective children to exist when their lives will be very rewarding? In other words, do people have a duty to procreate in some circumstances? Most human rights imply their mirror-right: the right to free association implies the right to leave associations or to not associate at all; the right to free speech implies the right to remain silent; freedom of religion implies freedom from religion etc.

However, the presence of a mirror-right doesn’t always seem to be a necessary corollary of a right. The right to a free trial or the right to be free from discrimination don’t seem to imply any mirror-rights. If we assume, temporarily, that there is a right not to exist, we don’t need to assume that the mirror-right should also exist, if only because there are some serious problems with the possible right to exist, as I’ve argued elsewhere).

Back to the main point of the argument. If you want to defend the right to non-existence you have to distinguish between two cases:

1. a right to non-existence belonging to a possible future child, and
2. a right to non-existence belonging to a future child.

Case 1 is a right of potential children before conception, and this right would – if we agree that it exists – justify (forced) sterilization and such. Which is already one indication that such a right does not or should not exist. Case 2 is a right of a fetus not to be born, and is a right that would justify some types of abortion.

If we accept the right to non-existence in case 1, we won’t impose harm on children – because they never leave the stage of potential being – but we may impose harm on parents’ procreation rights, privacy rights, physical integrity rights etc. If we accept the right in case 2, we will impose harm on parents if we have to force them to have an abortion in order to protect the fetus’ right to non-existence.

In either case, however, we are dealing with “people” who can’t possibly claim their right to non-existence for themselves, either because they don’t (yet) exist, or because they exist in a form in which they can claim rights. Hence, when we act to realize the right to non-existence, we always act on behalf of the wellbeing of others, potential others even. Given the many problems linked to paternalism, the burden of proof must be very high before we engage in such actions. For instance, it should be abundantly clear that “a life of unbearable suffering” will indeed be unbearable: a life of poverty and illiteracy would still be valuable enough and would not trigger the right to non-existence of the potential children of the poor and illiterate. Hence it would also fail to trigger paternalistic actions such as forced sterilization or forced abortion. On the other hand, a life of constant physical pain brought about by genetic facts could perhaps be of sufficiently low value to trigger the right and the corresponding paternalistic actions, although I personally find it repugnant to consider forced abortion or forced sterilization.

Also, the fact that the bearers of the right in question can’t possibly claim it themselves – either because they’re still a fetus or because they are as yet potential human beings (some, by the way, would claim that a fetus is also no more than a potential human being) – could indicate that it’s impossible to talk about a right in this case. However, some children and comatose patients also can’t claim their rights, but that’s no reason to state that they don’t have any. Maybe it would be better to frame the issue, not in terms of rights, but in terms of the duties that parents have when considering a decision to procreate. And yes, there can be duties without corresponding rights: if I have a duty to respect my promises given to you, you don’t have a corresponding human right to have these promises respected.

Related Articles

• Brazilian Woman Forced to Carry Fetus Without a Brain (womensrights.change.org)
• shall we end humanity right here, right now? (3quarksdaily.com)
• Should This Be the Last Generation? (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Hundreds of Uzbek Women Report Forced Sterilization (womensrights.change.org)
• Finnis and Singer debate moral status of embryo at Princeton (exlaodicea.wordpress.com)

Measuring Human Rights (31): Which Changes in the Spatial Pattern of Human Rights Are Most Likely?

One result of human rights measurement is a spatial pattern of human rights, a pattern that of course changes over time: countries with lower or higher levels of respect for human rights show up on a world map and this world map shows a certain spatial pattern.

The current spatial pattern of human rights is, somewhat simplistically, like this: wealthy and developed “Western” countries, although by no means free from human rights violations, show on average higher levels of respect for human rights than most developing nations. This is no reason to distribute praise or blame: developed countries share responsibility for human rights violations in developing countries, and high levels of respect for certain human rights in developed countries may be partly a matter of luck or perhaps even the direct consequence of the exploitation of developing regions. It’s also the case that rights cost money, hence wealthier countries can be expected to show higher levels of respect for rights.

Just take it as a fact rather than a judgment, admittedly a stylized fact (one can argue that human rights are better protected in Italy than in the US even though the latter is much wealthier; the same is true if you compare Botswana en China). Here’s an example of one human rights index that confirms this spatial pattern:

(source)

Given this current spatial pattern, what’s our best guess about the future? The dynamics of human rights are poorly understood: unfortunately, we don’t really know which actions or events are most likely to change levels of respect for human rights, at least not in the positive sense. We know that war, genocide, authoritarian rule and poverty bring levels down, but we don’t know quite as well how to bring levels up. We assume that different types of forces may play a role:

• bottom-up forces such as popular revolts, changes in cultural practice etc.;
• top-down forces such as coups d’états, government policies, national legislation, international law, international institutions etc.;
• horizontal forces such as peer pressure among states, conditional bilateral development aid, pay-offs, military intervention, naming-and-shaming etc.

Incentives also play a role, and maybe even forces beyond human control such as climate, geography etc. However, the exact result and impact of these forces is unclear and controversial, so we don’t really know what to do and kinda grope in the dark hoping something is successful.

Given the fact that many people and many institutions actually try to do something in order to raise levels of respect for human rights, it’s indeed likely that some actions will be somewhat effective. Hence the spatial pattern of human rights may change in the future. Here are my guesses as to how it may change:

1. Those areas of the world where respect for rights is already relatively high are most likely to see additional improvements. I agree that low hanging fruit is easiest to pick, and that is why we may see spectacular progress in some countries where respect is currently low: the removal of an oppressive regime can, in theory, bring rapid and large improvements in levels of respect, but in practice there are very few cases (often the overthrow of an oppressive regime is followed by civil war or a successor regime that is only slightly better or even worse). Conversely, sometimes high hanging fruit is, paradoxically, easier to pick. Countries with a reasonably high level of respect often have a history of struggle for rights as well as a culture of rights resulting from that struggle. Rights are part of the ethos of the common man. Remaining rights violations will therefore be more jarring, and existing institutions necessary to tackle them are in place. Another reason to believe that improvements in human rights will first take place in those countries that are already relatively good is the dynamic of bilateral aid: aid donors are likely to give more to countries that already have a certain level of respect, not just because donors like aid conditionality but also because of things such as the “bottomless pit syndrome”. Badly governed countries just take the aid and spend it for the rulers’ personal profit. Donors understandably don’t like this and therefore tend to give to countries that are better governed.
2. Those areas of the world adjacent to areas where respect for rights is already relatively high are likely to see additional improvements. Countries tend to see rights violations in neighboring countries as more urgent than rights violations far away. The former violations can have spillover effects: a civil war in the country next door can cause refugee flows into your own country or other types of spillovers, hence you have an incentive to do something about the war. The same is true for other types of rights violations. Rights violations in a country far away don’t create the same incentives to act. Additionally, the EU and other regional organizations insist that candidate member countries – almost always adjacent countries – first respect human rights before they can become members. These candidate countries therefore have a powerful incentive to raise levels of respect, since membership is often profitable. And there are also other, non-spatial types of proximity among adjacent countries: they may share a language – or their languages may belong to the same family – or a religion. This kind of cultural proximity makes bilateral intervention more likely and more acceptable. If one of two adjacent countries has a high level of respect for human rights, it may find it easier to intervene in the other country in order to foster human rights. It may offer effective institutional assistance for instance, assistance that is more effective – because more acceptable and easier – than assistance from a country far away, “far away” both spatially and culturally. Another reason to believe that proximity plays a role: a country that exists in the proximity of other countries that perform better in the field of human rights is in direct competition with those other countries; competition for workers, international investment etc. Both workers and companies will prefer to invest in countries that are free. Hence the underperformers in a certain region will have the incentive to do better.

If these two claims are correct, then we’ll see increasing polarization among two groups of countries. Not the optimal outcome, but perhaps the most likely one. Time will tell.

More posts in this series are here.

What Are Human Rights? (46): Equal Rights, Ctd.

infamous hate preacher Abu Qatada

(source unknown)

The idea that human rights are equal rights is trivial at first sight. However, it becomes problematic after some reflection, and only regains its persuasiveness after even further reflection. When you think about it, equal rights for everyone is a strange idea. Why should all people have the same rights? Why should a preacher of violence and hate have the same right to speak freely as the world’s best poet? Why should a religion that oppresses women have the same right to exist as a religion that loves peace and equality? Why should people who haven’t finished primary school have the same right to vote as experts in government matters?

Agreed, they are all human beings and human rights are the rights of human beings, but that’s a tautology, not an argument. A somewhat more promising foundation for the notion of equal rights goes like this: one can argue that people need human rights in order to realize certain of their most fundamental and commonly shared values. If that is true, then rights should be equal rights.

Most people value the ability to express themselves, to belong to groups, to share a common identity (e.g. a religious one), to govern their own affairs, to enjoy peace and prosperity etc. And we know that they need human rights to realize these (and other) values. Agreed, some of us may not want any of this, but then they can waive their rights. And only THEY can. People should decide for themselves whether they need rights and need them equally; others shouldn’t decide for them. That is probably the only morally sound way to treat people.

We can also justify equality of rights on the following grounds: we don’t want rights just for ourselves and for the things we value for ourselves; we also want other people to have rights and to have them equally – or at least we should want this if we are to reason coherently. This is not a requirement of morality or altruism – although it can be, obviously – but simply one of logic and coherence. The right to express myself, to belong, to live in peace and prosperity, to vote etc. makes no sense if I’m the only one to have those rights. Even if others use their expression or their votes or whatever in a stupid way, they should have the right to do so – as long as this use doesn’t imply rights violations of course. Hence, equality of rights is a logical requirement in the system of rights.

More posts in this series are here.

The Environment and Human Rights (7): The Effects of Climate Change on Crime Rates

(source)

The relationship between environmental problems and human rights is underexamined. This is deplorable, because the most important environmental problem, namely climate change, is likely to have an adverse effect on human rights in lots of different ways.

For example, there is some data supporting the hypothesis that higher temperatures lead to an increase in crime, probably in part because high temperatures cause higher levels of aggression:

[H]igher temperatures lead to more assault and … the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. …

Note that all crime increases as temperatures rise from 0 F to about 50 F. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that a lot of this pattern comes from “logistical constraints”, eg. it’s hard to steal a car when it’s covered in snow. But above 60 F, only the violent crimes continue to go up: murder, rape, and assault. The comparison between murder and manslaughter is elegantly telling, as manslaughter should be less motivated by malicious intent. …

Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 30,000 murders, 200,000 cases of rape, 1.4 million aggravated assaults, 2.2 million simple assaults, 400,000 robberies, 3.2 million burglaries, 3.0 million cases of larceny, and 1.3 million cases of vehicle theft in the United States. (source)

More on human rights and the environment here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (47): Globalization

(source)

Human history is often viewed as a widening circle of moral concern. In the olden days, the claim goes, people cared only about their siblings and tribe. Then they started to care about their class, their nation, their religious community, their civilization, and ultimately their shared humanity. Cosmopolitanism, or the equal respect for all human beings whatever their affiliation or location, is then the end-state of morality (although some want to go further and include animals or even inanimate objects in the circle of moral concern). This end-state dovetails with human rights concerns because human rights are also the rights of all humans, whatever country, class or culture they belong to.

The widening of moral concern – if it indeed occurred as described – went in tandem with other and more familiar globalization processes, such as increased international trade, integration of different economies, the development of international law, increased communication through the internet, easier transportation, intercultural dialogue, migration etc. And all these different processes interact: communication and transportation foster trade, trade fosters communication, communication widens the circle of moral concern etc.

This story implies that globalization – of any kind – is always or unequivocally beneficial from the point of view of human rights. However, that may not be true. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of different types of globalization.

Pros

• Increased migration is almost without exception beneficial to the prosperity and freedom of all parties involved, although the migrants obviously benefit most.
• Intercultural dialogue promotes tolerance and agreement on human rights, and this dialogue is not only fostered by new technologies but also by international trade. Better communication as well makes people care more about what happens in the world and makes it more difficult for oppressive regimes to hide their oppression. In this sense, communication and trade drive the widening circle of moral concern.
• Economic interdependence between countries creates a self-interested incentive for governments to promote rights and democracy elsewhere in the world and makes it more likely that international law can impose itself over concerns about national sovereignty. Global economic collaboration requires international regulation, and economic regulation can open the door for other types of regulation, including rights regulation. Countries that depend economically on an international institutional and regulatory system, will have a much harder time invoking their sovereignty when faced with accusations of rights violations, since they already lost a huge chunk of their sovereignty due to economic integration.
• The increasing importance of multinational companies makes it easier for consumers in one part of the world to lobby for corporate responsibility elsewhere in the world.

a somewhat far-fetched representation of the widening circles of concern

(source)

Cons

• Outsourcing, a commonly cited aspect of globalization, can result in people losing their jobs, and the threat of outsourcing can force people to accept lower wages or inferior labor conditions. And work is a human right.
• The threat of cheap foreign labor and cheap foreign products can lead to protectionism and immigration restrictions, two major causes of poverty in developing countries.
• Globalization may erode the welfare state because a large part of the tax base – corporations, financial intermediaries and skilled workers – become internationally mobile and can thereby avoid to pay the taxes that governments need to finance their welfare systems. The tax base can also decrease because governments cut taxes in an effort to maintain the competitiveness of local businesses.
• The previous three phenomena – outsourcing, labor and product competition and pressure on the welfare state – may not only lead to restrictions on international trade and migration, but can also counteract the widening circle of moral concern: politicians and local businesses can and often do use these threats to stir up xenophobia. A xenophobic public is more likely to vote in favor of trade and immigrations restrictions. On the other hand, there’s some evidence that people’s circle of moral concern is wider in countries that are more affected by globalization.
• Globalization implies a certain degree of power deflation: states lose power vis-à-vis the market, multinationals, international institutions and each other. This in turn means that decisions affecting the well-being of people are taken by outside forces. Democratic self-government – which is a human right – is then threatened.
• The interconnectedness of international financial markets increases the likelihood that a local financial or economic crisis spreads to the rest of the world.
• A higher number of increasingly globalized multinational companies also means a higher risk that some of those threaten indigenous cultures, exploite poor workers etc.

On balance, however, I believe that globalization is good for human rights, even though I can’t quantify the pros and cons.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (116): Gendered Bicycle Policy in North Korea

North Koreans ride bicycles past a propaganda poster in Kaesong, North Korea Friday, Sept. 21, 2012. Kaesong, which sits just north of the Demilitarized Zone separating North Korea and South Korea, was the ancient capital of the Koryo Dynasty for 500 years until 1392. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

(source)

It’s now illegal (again) for women to ride bicycles in North Korea. The country’s leader Kim Jung Un reinstated his father’s absurd law, but only after he lifted the ban last year.

The late Kim Jong Il decreed in the mid-90s no woman should ride a bike after the daughter of a top general, the vice-chair of the National Defense Commission, was killed riding a bike in Pyongyang. (source)

Hardly the worst North Korean rights violation, but absurd enough. And part of a mindset. Transportation restrictions have always been popular in totalitarian regimes. They prevent people from socializing, forming groups and realizing that they’re not the only ones living in misery. They also help to impoverish people, focusing their attention on their own individual survival and away from politics.

More about the Koreas. More absurd human rights violations.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (33): A Full Human Life

a choice of lives

(source)

Again, I feel the need to rewrite an older post. Not a good sign. Still, here we go.

One way to look for an answer to the question in the title of this post is to focus on the kind of life we can achieve with the help of human rights. Ideally, most of us want a life that isn’t just mere existence or survival. Not even decent survival or a successful struggle for life is enough. We want a full human life. However, a full human life has a different meaning for different people. It’s a controversial notion, and we probably will never agree on the definition of a full human life.

Human rights won’t be able to help achieve all visions of the good life, and rightly so because some visions are destructive and harmful. However, they do give us the freedom and capabilities to try to achieve a very wide range of visions of the good life. Perhaps part of the good life is precisely this ability to make a free choice between a wide set of visions of the good life, to pursue that choice, to have the capabilities to do so and to have a reasonable chance of success whatever our choice. It’s now widely accepted that “a full human life” should be left to individual choice and can’t logically mean something that would be imposed on people.

Human rights give us the choice of a good life, the capabilities to pursue it, and a good chance to do it successfully. But how exactly do they do that? In order to pursue our self-chosen vision of the good life, we need some degree of freedom so that our life plans aren’t dominated, controlled or imposed by others, by governments, religious leaders, etc. For example, we need to be able to decide freely which kind of religion we want to practice, where to live, what job to do etc. Also, if we are to be able to plan our life freely, our choice of plan must be a real choice. Hence, we need a minimum of education, information and physical resources and capabilities (e.g. good health) in order to make an informed choice from a wide range of options, and in order to try to realize our choice. All these resources and capabilities are protected by human rights.

However, this thin and at the same time all-encompassing vision of a full human life may already be too specific and controversial. Some cultures or individuals may not want to give their female members the choice of deciding to shape their own vision of the good life. So how do we reply to that concern?

(source)

Perhaps we may get somewhere if we rephrase the question in the title of this post so that it states “why do I need human rights?” instead of “why do we need human rights?”. People usually are more willing to accept reasons for the importance of their own human rights than they are to accept reasons for the importance of the rights of others. More specifically, when the possibility to shape your own life is the reason for accepting human rights, there will be few people rejecting this reason as long as it’s about their own lives.

Once we can convince people of such a reason for the importance of their own human rights, we can then try to take the next step and try to convince them of the importance of the rights of others. At that moment, we may use elements outside of the system of human rights. Perhaps we can’t convince them of the importance of the rights of others when we focus on those rights, but maybe we’ll be more successful using other, non-rights based moral imperatives. These imperatives then apply the value people see in their own rights as a means to persuade them of the value of the rights of others.

For instance, the old maxim called the Golden Rule – “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” – does have some power of persuasion, but in this context it requires that we first convince people that human rights are necessary for themselves as human beings and that they view other human beings as human beings. Since we’re dealing with people who deny the rights of others, we may run the risk of including the conclusion in the premise. In other words, people who believe in the Golden Rule probably don’t need to be convinced of the general importance of human rights, and those who need to be convinced may not be swayed by the Golden Rule.

Similarly, we could try to persuade people of the importance of the rights of others by appealing to Kant’s categorical imperative: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. But again, this may fail, since it’s very unlikely to find a Kantian who isn’t already convinced by the general importance of human rights, or to find an opponent of the rights of others who can be convinced by Kantian arguments.

Still, you don’t know if you don’t try, so let’s leave aside these worries for the moment and go back to the first step in this strategy: how can we convince people that human rights are important for themselves? I still think a description of the ways in which these rights can help them to achieve a self-chosen vision of a full human life is promising, even if the definition of this full human life has to remain very abstract and vague and can’t include anything more specific than the capacity to choose your own path through life and your own final goals and perspectives.

This kind of justification of human rights, because it builds on a vision of a full human life that is very vague and that only includes the free choice of what it means to have a full human life, holds across a wide range of different individuals, ideologies and cultures. A vision of a full human life that is paradoxically “thin” can justify human rights, at least as long as we limit the ambition to egocentric justification, i.e. a justification of people’s own rights. Justifying rights as something that people need to respect in each other is then the next and more difficult step. Also paradoxically, this thin version of a full human life doesn’t justify a thin set of human rights but rather a set that contains many rights that are still controversial, even among those who generally view human rights in a positive way.

More on justifications of human rights here.

Related Articles

• Justifying Human Rights (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

What Are Human Rights? (45): Negative or Positive Rights? Ctd.

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I realize now that this previous post wasn’t any good. I need to do a lot more to clarify the difference between negative and positive rights, and to argue that there are indeed two types. Most people assume that there’s only one type and that human rights are always and only negative rights:

• the right to free speech is a right not to be silenced, not a right to be given the ability to speak (e.g. to have my vocal cords healed)
• my right not to suffer arbitrary arrest is not a right to be rescued from a cave (in the words of Jonathan Bennett)
• my freedom of movement is a right not to be hindered, not a right to roads
• etc.

These examples are meant to make two points, both of which I want to contest:

1. many so-called rights violations are really not rights violations because there is no violator
2. rights require only the removal of constraints, more specifically of human imposed constraints.

It does seem to be the case that there can only be a right when someone can violate it (see here), and in the examples above there is no one violating a right: my vocal cords gave up without anyone’s help, and I got stuck in the cave because of my own stupidity or because of a natural calamity. And indeed, the conventional wisdom is that there are numerous types of inabilities which render rights meaningless but which are nonetheless not rights violations because there is no one who caused the violation. In other words, not all inabilities or harms are rights violations, not even if they render rights meaningless.

However, this conventional wisdom is wrong for several reasons. Often there is a violator lurking in the shadows and his or her presence is not clear at first sight. For example, many believe that poverty isn’t a rights violation because no one causes poverty; poverty is just the unfortunate outcome of economic circumstances, like my falling into a cave is the unfortunate outcome of my own stupidity. But that’s not necessarily true: poverty is often the direct result of purposeful and conscious actions by dictators, by the designers of international trade or migration policy etc. So one should be careful when arguing that something is not a right or not a rights violation because there’s no violator. Often there is one but you just fail to notice it.

The second claim implicit in the examples above is that rights require the removal of constraints, not the provision of abilities: free speech requires the removal of censorship, not the provision of the ability to speak; freedom of movement requires the absence of government imposed restrictions on movement, not the provision by the state of roads (even if the absence of roads makes freedom of movement meaningless); etc. However, even the removal of censorship requires the provision of judicial systems, of a police force etc. Hence, it requires the provision of abilities: the ability to sue censors, to send the police to them etc. I see no reason why these abilities should be limited to the ability to remove constraints, and why they should exclude abilities such as education. If rights are important, then people should have the abilities to make their rights real; sometimes this means removing constraints, but often it means providing abilities. Why should it be a big thing when someone is censored, but not when someone is denied the education necessary to make speech possible and meaningful in the first place?

The conventional wisdom – quoted above – that not all inabilities or harms are rights violations, not even if they render rights meaningless, is only partly true. Not all inabilities or harms are rights violations: my broken heart is not a rights violation. But there are many inabilities and harms – even some for which we can’t identify a human agent causing the inability or harm – which are still rights violations because they render rights meaningless. Rights violations don’t always require the presence of a violator and require more than the removal of constraints.

More posts in this series here.

Most Urgent Human Rights Policies

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If you’re a political leader, a church leader or anyone else with the ability and willingness to change some people’s behavior and promote respect for human rights – to some extent that includes all of us – what should be your policy priorities? On which human rights violations should you focus? Ideally, you would like to be told something more specific than “reduce suffering and violence and enhance liberty and equality”. So here’s my attempt at something specific.

I’ll list a few domains that require urgent action. Not all of these domains are equally amenable to action, because there may be strong resistance in some quarters. Nevertheless, I consider all these domains to be equally important. I’ll list them first (and include links to older posts arguing why action is important) and afterwards distinguish between those domains where immediate progress is realistic and where it’s not. Of course, it’s not because progress isn’t realistic that we should remain passive.

1. Promote free trade. Standard arguments for protectionism sound a lot like the Count complaining that there are beggars at the door. Protectionism may even harm citizens of the protecting country. It certainly harms producers in poorer countries. More here.
2. Abolish capital punishment and reduce incarceration rates. Capital punishment doesn’t deliver on its promises, and even if it did it wouldn’t be acceptable. “Tough on crime” policies go beyond what is required for public safety and the rights of victims.
3. One way to reduce incarceration rates is to end the war on drugs. Ending the war on drugs will also reduce racial discrimination because it leads to strong imbalances in incarceration rates by race, impoverishing and even destroying many black families.
4. Abolish existing laws and practices that lead to discrimination of all types. Some laws, however, may be necessary to combat discrimination.
5. Guarantee social safety nets through a fair and efficient system of benefits and progressive taxation - perhaps including a basic income guarantee - but also encourage private charity. Design the taxation system in such a way that it reduces income inequality.
6. Help the poor by way of Conditional Cash Transfers.
7. Rethink development aid. More here and here.
8. Combat malnourishment and hunger and improve the water supply. More here and here.
9. Reduce immigration restrictions. The supposed negative consequences of increased immigration are largely fictitious, and the benefits for migrants are huge. Also relax asylum rules for refugees.
10. Improve education and healthcare.
11. Enhance the scope of humanitarian intervention in order to avoid Rwanda style atrocities.
12. Promote democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, federalism, and the separation of church and state, and improve those institutions where they already exist. Human rights are typically safer in democracies and obviously require the rule of law.
13. Declare victory in the war on terror, but continue the capture terrorist and subject them to fair criminal trials. Abandon torture, targeted killings if alternatives are available, and extrajudicial incarceration, and limit invasions of privacy to those strictly necessary to capture terrorists.
14. Abolish freedom-restricting laws such as those prohibiting assisted suicide and euthanasia. Relax abortion laws where necessary.
15. Guarantee the freedom of the internet.

Now, which of these actions are realistic in the short term, and which are not? The latter part of the list, namely actions 9 to 15, seems to be the most difficult. Substantial progress is already under way for 1, 2, 4 (take the case of same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT), 6, 7 and 8. Also, 3 may be heading in the right direction. 5 depends to some extent on the general economic climate.

It’s obviously a long list of often very difficult policies, even when we limit ourselves to those areas where progress is relatively easy. Also, in some countries, progress may be easier in some areas than in others. That’s why this list is still too general and different actors may have to choose a subset.

More on progress in the field of human rights here.

Related Articles

• UN chief criticized as soft on human rights (foxnews.com)
• Rights group says democracies ignore abuses (ctv.ca)

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (45): Distance

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Whereas it’s obvious that distance can be a protection against human rights violations – privacy needs distance, and physical integrity requires a safety zone – it’s equally true that it often harms human rights.

We care more about our friends and family than about strangers, especially distant strangers, about whom we know very little, if anything. Maybe we don’t know their predicament and hence the idea of our possible duty to help them and safeguard their rights doesn’t even arise. Or maybe we know about their predicament but we’re ignorant about the causes. Hence, they could have themselves to blame, in which case we tend to think that we’re not obliged to help. Or if they don’t have themselves to blame, our ignorance about the causes of their predicament inhibits our effective assistance. Maybe we also assume that the causes are local, and hence not our fault.

It’s safe to say that such feelings of detachment increase proportionally with distance, because the further away the less we know and the more we assume that we are not responsible. To some extent at least: the effect of distance flattens out; we’re not more detached from people five thousand miles away than from people four thousand miles away.

The effect of distance, although it decreases after a while, does start very quickly. A few meters can be enough to reduce empathy:

Drawing on motivational approaches to emotion, the authors propose that the perceived change in spatial distance to pictures that arouse negative emotions exerts an influence on the significance of these pictures. Two experiments induced the illusion that affective pictures approach toward the observer, recede from the observer, or remain static. To determine the motivational significance of the pictures, emotional valence and arousal ratings as well as startle responses were assessed. Approaching unpleasant pictures were found to exert an influence on both the valence and the arousal elicited by the pictures. Furthermore, movement of pleasant or neutral pictures did not influence startle responses, while the second experiment showed that approaching unpleasant pictures elicited enhanced startle responses compared to receding unpleasant pictures. These findings support the view that a change of spatial distance influences motivational significance and thereby shapes emotional responses. (source)

In other words: perceiving the approach of negative emotion-eliciting scenes intensifies the associated felt emotion, while perceiving receding emotion-eliciting scenes weakens the associated felt emotion.

There’s a less abstract illustration of this point in an experiment conducted by Dan Ariely:

Jacques Callot: Beggar, 1622

[W]hat causes people to stop for beggars and what causes them to walk on by[?] To look into this question, I called on … an acting student at Boston University. I asked [him] to try a few different approaches to begging and to keep track of the approaches that made him more or less money. He made more money when he was standing and when he looked people in the eyes. It seemed that the most lucrative strategy was to put in more effort, to get people to notice him, and to look them in the eyes so that they could not pretend to not see him. (source)

So a reduction of both the physical distance (standing) and emotional distance (eye contact) resulted in more giving and less poverty.

At some point, something very interesting happened. There was another beggar on the street – a professional beggar – who … said, “Look kid, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me teach you.” And so he did. This beggar took our concept of effort and human contact to the next level, walking right up to people and offering his hand up for them to shake. With this dramatic gesture, people had a very hard time refusing him or pretending that they did not see him. Apparently, the social forces of a handshake are simply too strong and too deeply engrained to resist – and many people gave in and shook his hand. Of course, once they shook his hand, they would also look him in the eyes; the beggar succeeded at breaking the social barrier and was able to get many people to give him money. (source)

You could argue that this whole distance thing is a red herring. If everyone takes care of those who are close, then distance won’t be a problem. Still, it will be a problem in many cases because not everyone has friends and family who can help. The beggars in the quote above probably only know other beggars and hence have to rely on efforts to reduce distance.

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Indeed, one way of solving the distance problem is to try to reduce distance. The beggars’ strategy isn’t the only example. NGO campaigns almost always feature close-ups of the faces of people in distress, as well as personal stories about their predicament and about how the global system has made it worse (implicating better off people far away). These faces and stories reduce distance in a way that is similar to the beggars’ eye contact. Alternatively, instead of trying to reduce distance, one can attempt to discredit the idea of distance altogether and foster a more cosmopolitan approach to caring.

There’s also another way in which distance can cause human rights violations, although you would have a hard time finding a lot of examples at this point in history (perhaps only in failed states such as Afghanistan or Somalia where a violent and extremist rebel movement tries to assert its authority):

Margaret Anderson explains that the best way to understand the dastardly public torture of criminals in early modern Europe is to consider the need of authority to establish itself over great distance, in an era before cell-phones and a legitimate judicial systems. (source)

More here. Other posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (66): Human Rights and “Spontaneous Order”

Friedrich von Hayek

Hayek has famously argued that market economies create a spontaneous order, a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any intentional design or planning could achieve. This spontaneous order is superior to any order the human mind can design due to the specifics of the information requirements. Planners will never have enough information to carry out the allocation of resources reliably. Only individual economic actors can create an efficient and productive economy by engaging in free exchanges and by using as their information source the spontaneously developing price system. They can do so because they act on the basis of information with greater detail and accuracy – namely the price system – than the information available to any centralized authority.

Whatever the general merits of such invisible hand theories for the whole of society (I think those merits are real but often vastly overstated), it’s useful to ask if they also apply in the field of human rights. To what extent and in which circumstances can there be an equivalent of “spontaneous order” for human rights? Can it happen that people’s unintended and selfish actions promote respect for human rights? Or do human rights always require intentional and (centrally) planned policy?

First, this question has to be distinguished from a similar one: it’s true that people do have selfish reasons to promote human rights and often act on those reasons, as I’ve argued here. But in that case their human rights efforts are quite intentional. What I’m asking here is whether there are equally selfish but unintentional processes that promote human rights. And I think there are. Before listing some of them, however, let me make clear that those processes, although they are obviously beneficial and to be encouraged, will not make a huge difference, and that they certainly won’t be sufficient to bring about human rights utopia.

After some superficial thinking about this, I came up with three examples:

• Trickle down economics is by now thoroughly discredited, especially when it’s used to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. Not all boats have risen on the rising tide, and the tide itself has recently come crashing down on all of us, the rich included. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s never any trickling down in an economy. When the government’s tax system allows the wealthy to retain a reasonable part of their wealth (let’s assume we know what “reasonable” means here), then some of their wealth does indeed flow down to those with lower incomes. That’s because the rich are more likely to spend the additional income, through either consumption or investment, thereby creating more economic activity, which in turn generates jobs and higher income for the less well-off. If that’s the case, then the right to a certain standard of living is promoted through the selfish and unintentional actions of the wealthy. Of course, this will never be enough to secure that right for everyone all of the time.
• As Becker has argued, free competition between firms reduces discrimination. A racially biased firm will want to hire whites, even if they are more expensive and less qualified than some non-whites. But a firm will only do so if it’s not under pressure from competitors. In a competitive market, other firms can and will produce the same goods at cheaper prices by hiring the cheaper/better black person. The biased firm will then be forced to do the same. It may remain biased – opinions on such matters are notoriously hard to change – but it no longer has the luxury of acting on its bias.
• There’s a strong tendency towards urbanization in developing countries. Large cities offer more economic opportunities, and jobs in factories, shops or trade offer some advantages compared to agriculture (e.g. weather independence, stable income etc.). When women move to cities and work in factories, they usually have less children – they don’t need children to work the land – and they become more independent of traditional patriarchal structures that are more common in the countryside. This does not only improve the wellbeing of women. Having less children means that the remaining children are more likely to attend school, because school is expensive. Female children in particular benefit from this education. Hence, rights such as education and non-discrimination are automatically advanced by urbanization. More here.

More posts in this series are here.

What Are Human Rights? (44): External Constraints on Politics, Means of Politics, or Objects of Politics?

inside/outside by Ronen Berka

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People describe and define human rights in lots of ways, but perhaps the most common definition is this: human rights are external constraints on politics. They determine the boundaries that political action – action by both authoritarian rulers and democratic majorities – should not cross. I want to use the metaphor of the ring to clarify this, because that will help us later on in this post. Political action – including legislation – is constrained by a ring of rights:

This definition – let’s call it definition 1 - places human rights squarely outside of and even prior to politics. This is why oppressive actions by authoritarian rulers who have not enacted human rights law can still be condemned by human rights talk. If rights were just a part of politics, this wouldn’t be possible because they would be on the same level as authoritarian politics and they would therefore lack constraining power. (Of course, it is a fact that human rights often fail to constrain, but I’m dealing here with the moral and not factual status of human rights).

The same logic applies to democratic governments that have enacted human rights law: their actions as well should, ideally, stay within a realm defined by a ring of rights. The difference with authoritarian governments is that democracies have more efficient extra-political means to keep their governments within the ring, at least some of the time (for example judicial review; in the case of authoritarian governments there are also means – such as foreign intervention, rebellion etc., but those are normally a lot less effective).

So that’s definition 1, and it’s good as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t quite capture the essence of human rights in a democracy. Rights are not just or not merely outside of politics in a democracy – they are intrinsic to it. Democratic politics can’t function without human rights; rather than external constraints on politics, rights in a democracy are essential means of politics. They are the foundation on which democratic politics can function. That may be obvious in the case of some rights – no democratic politics without free speech, assembly or association rights and the right to vote – but it’s true for all rights (for example, I argued here that violations of the right not to be tortured can undo democracy).

So let’s call this definition 2 and represent it like this:

The ring has become the foundation. Now, it may look as if these two definitions are contradictory and incompatible: something is either an external constraint or a means, but never both. However, rights should be both: we need rights as foundations and means of democratic politics, but at the same time we want rights to be able to constrain democratic politics when necessary (for example when the majority wants to violate rights). I think we can have both.

Things get more complicated when we consider a third definition: rights as objects of politics. The two previous definitions assume that rights are uncontroversial, but that is untrue. Human rights are objects of frequent and reasonable disagreements. They are not self-evident, God-given or axiomatic. They need justifications and arguments, and different people will have different justifications and hence different definitions of rights. The only way to deal with these disagreements is through politics: discuss them in public, and let the majority vote. (E.g. should work be a right, should unemployment insurance be, should incitement be protected as free speech? etc.) As a result, the width and strength of the ring of rights changes over time:

One could argue that it’s not up to politics to decide these disagreements, and that instead a constitutional court should deal with them. However, we know from experience that this doesn’t work: politics will continue to interfere, either directly through legislation or indirectly by way of interference with the workings of the court.

And there’s an even more fundamental problem. Definition 3 looks like it’s incompatible with definitions 1 and 2. If rights are supposed to function as constraints on politics, then we shouldn’t place rights within the political process which they should constrain. When we allow rights to become objects of politics then majorities can easily destroy the  constraints that bind them. Similarly, when majorities are allowed to vote on the fundamental means of politics they may well decide to destroy those means.

The solution is not the removal of rights from politics – that’s both illusory and undesirable – but rather the creation of a distinction within politics: normal political decisions should be absolutely constrained by human rights and should respect rights as the fundamental means of politics; and then there is constitutional politics, which is a periodical – and not a day-to-day – form of politics that tackles society’s basic rules, including human rights. Normal majoritarian procedures don’t apply here. Special majorities are required as well as other safeguards against the destruction of rights.

More posts in this series are here.

Discrimination (13): Is Disability Just a Case of Bad Luck or Is It Discrimination?

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When people think about disability they usually don’t see it as a moral issue. A disabled person supposedly suffers from bad luck, and the problems she encounters while living her life with a disability don’t result from the decisions or actions of her fellow citizens. They are instead caused by ill health or by biological and anatomical inadequacies, things for which no one is to blame. Brute misfortune, that is all.

Of course, a disability can be caused by someone else’s misconduct, for example industrial pollution or paralyssis following an accident caused by someone else. However, let’s focus on blameless disability, the kind that is not anyone’s fault.

There’s a problem with the view that this kind of disability is no more than misfortune. The threshold level of normal human functioning that determines the difference between disability and non-disability isn’t just determined by biological facts, but also by social practices and the artificial social environment. For example, imagine a society that has developed technologically up to a point where people don’t have to use their hands anymore. No more computer keyboards, steering wheels in cars, remote controls etc. Let’s assume that everything that needs to be done can be done by programming and brain power (not a far-fetched assumption). A person who loses her hands in an accident will not be considered “disabled” in such a society. This accident will not push her below the threshold level of normal human functioning. In fact, most likely it won’t even be viewed as an accident, but rather a small nuisance, depending on the level of pain involved. Much like we in our existing societies react to a bee sting. It’s usually not disabling.

Now, when we take the same example of a person losing her hands, but situate her in a country such as the U.S. today, then we would say that she is disabled and that she has fallen below the threshold level of normal human functioning. But the reason we say this isn’t simply a biological or anatomical one, otherwise she would also have to be disabled in the imaginary society described a moment ago. The reason we say that she is disabled depends on the social circumstances and the social system in which she finds herself after losing her hands. Because U.S. society has been designed in such a way that people need to use their hands a lot of the time, we say that someone without hands is disabled. The decision to count someone as disabled has less to do with biology and anatomy than with the social practices and the artificial social environment we live in. The level of functioning a person can achieve depends less on her biological or anatomical abilities than on the artificial social environment in which she finds herself.

Hence, disability isn’t just something that happens to people; it’s something that we as a society have decided should happen to people. There’s nothing about our society that necessarily relegates people without hands to the category of the disabled. On the contrary, we have willingly designed our society in such a way that people without hands are disabled. We could just as well design our society in another way. Technology permitting, of course, but technology is also – up to a point – a choice: we just simply decided to develop technologies and the wider social environment in such a way that they don’t really take into account the needs of people without hands.

The fact that we designed our society in the way we did seems to indicate that we don’t care a lot about the disabled, at least not enough to do something for them. And such an absence of care can be viewed as a type of discrimination. After all, until some decades ago, men didn’t much care about the education of women, even though society was quite able to give women the same kind of education as men. The relative lack of education of women wasn’t a necessary fact of life but a choice. And that choice was a symptom of discrimination.

Of course, the analogy is shaky because gender discrimination was and is often a conscious choice, whereas the disabled are only rarely consciously disadvantaged. However, as I’ve stated before, the fact that discrimination is unconscious doesn’t automatically excuse it.

More on luck. More posts in this series.

Related Articles

• Wishful thinking won’t bring equality for disabled people | Zoe Williams (guardian.co.uk)
• More disabled workers file discrimination claims in 2009 (usatoday.com)
• Disability Discrimination – Part I (specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com)

Human Rights Cartoon (74): Kill One Man and You’re a Murderer…

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Brings to mind this famous quote by Jean Rostand: “Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.” And also the broken window fallacy.

More cartoons here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (44): Corruption

Corruption, or “the misuse of public office for private gain”, is immoral and bad in numerous ways, but it’s not a human rights violation. At least not as such. To my knowledge, human rights law doesn’t contain an explicit right not to suffer the consequences of corruption. However, it is the case that corruption causes various rights violations. For example, it can often be viewed as a form of theft and hence a violation of the right to private property. And in the case of corruption in the justice system, the right to a fair trial is violated.

Moreover, corruption has a negative impact on GDP (see here) – mainly because it’s a tax on investment – and hence also on poverty reduction (given the correlation between GDP and poverty reduction, see here, here and here). And there is a right not to suffer poverty. Corruption also has an impact on poverty on the level of individuals rather than countries. It’s obvious that individuals – especially those who are poor or near the poverty line – can make better use of the funds that they have to spend on bribes.

Furthermore, corruption eats away at the rule of law. Even in the most corrupt countries, corruption is usually illegal. If illegal activity becomes normal practice, the rule of law is obviously undermined, with possible consequences for judicial protection in general, including protection of human rights. The rule of law is also harmed directly by corruption, namely by corruption inside the judiciary and the police force, and this has an immediate impact on human rights. Even more seriously, corruption is associated with political instability since it tends to reduce citizens’ trust and faith in institutions. It can therefore destroy democracy, and democracy is both a human right and a means to protect human rights in general.

So, if we can agree that corruption is a cause of various human rights violations, then the question is: who is responsible for corruption and hence for the rights violations occurring because of it? I would say that it’s the government officials taking bribes (and possibly the banks safeguarding the proceeds) rather than the private persons or companies paying the bribes, at least in general. The latter would presumably prefer not to pay bribes and often find themselves in situations in which they have no choice.

Now, you could say that some corrupt officials, especially those at the lower levels of government, don’t have a choice either: without the proceeds of corruption they may well end up in poverty. Demanding bribes is then the alternative for a failed economy and a failed state. However, I think it’s fair to claim that they still have, in general, a wider set of options than many of those having to pay bribes. If you’re stopped by the police and they ask you for a bribe, it seems that your options are more constrained than the options of the police asking for the bribe. It seems easier for the police to find additional non-corrupt sources of income than it is for you to escape the demands of the police. Of course, this isn’t the case in all types of corruption. For example, a large multinational company may find it relatively easy to pay a bribe, and may have more options than the official who’s asking the bribe (and it may very well solicit the payment of the bribe in the first place as a way to outsmart competitor companies).

cartoon by Michael Kountouris

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Next question: what to do about it? Everyone agrees that corruption is bad, and many believe that it’s bad for human rights, but almost no one seems to know how to stop it. And it is, indeed, a problem that is as old as history. One thing we could do is spell out the issue of corruption more clearly in terms of human rights. However, human rights claims by the victims of corruption are probably not very effective, since one consequence of corruption is the weakening or destruction of the judicial institutions necessary for the enforcement of human rights. In that sense, linking corruption and human rights may seem futile or at least of limited practical use.

However, human rights claims aren’t just legal claims that depend on functioning and non-corrupt institutions to be enforced. They are also moral claims and they can have some effect as such. They can be used to denounce widespread systems of corruption and thereby help to change a culture and a mentality, especially over the long run. But moral claims will not destroy endemic corruption by themselves. Countries that suffer high degrees of corruption probably need external help in institution building. Also, economic development will probably reduce corruption, given the correlation cited above between low levels of GDP and high levels of corruption. Helping countries to develop will then also help them to fight corruption.

This is an interesting talk about ways to fight corruption (the relevant part starts around the 5th minute):

More on governance and corruption. More posts in this series.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Watch: Police Corruption in Nigeria (huffingtonpost.com)
• Report: Bribes fuel corruption in Nigeria police (sfgate.com)

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (43): Disgust

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Disgust can be good or bad for human rights. It’s probably true that no amount of rational argument against torture, incest, cannibalism etc. is as strong as the feelings of disgust produced by such actions. Some, such as Leon Kass, have therefore conceptualized disgust as a kind of moral wisdom: wisdom which can’t necessarily articulate itself or reason about itself, but which nevertheless guides our actions in a morally sound direction and guides them better and more effectively than rational argument. Disgust or nausea often makes us shudder, literally, at the immorality of others or ourselves. As a result, it helps to bring about a better world, and it does so more effectively than reasoning or persuasion (in this sense, disgust is similar to other emotions such as sympathy and shame).

Disgust is not an argument, but that’s a strength rather than a weakness if you believe the likes of Kass. It grips us, whereas arguments can be boring or unconvincing. (This can also explain why many of us have a love-hate relationship with disgust: we’re disgusted by some things, but at the same time we relish this disgust). Because of its gripping force, disgust is the human psyche policing itself and other psyches, keeping desire and passion in check and in the process making life in society a lot easier.

That is why some view disgust as the evolutionary origin of morality and law. Initially a protection mechanism against putting bad, rotten or infected stuff into our mouths, disgust quickly evolved from an emotion focused on physical health to one including morality. Moral disgust came about as one of society’s self-preserving forces, and human evolution favored the emotion because it produces social benefits such as taboos, rules and order. Human evolution favored this extension of the feeling of disgust into the realm of morality because it made social life easier, more orderly and more peaceful. These supposed evolutionary origins of moral disgust give it an added advantage compared to more rational approaches to morality: the latter can be unconvincing but most people in the world will even fail to hear them, whereas the evolutionary origins of moral disgust means that it drives all people, even those who will never hear a moral argument in their entire lives. Moral disgust therefore delivers immediate, reflexive and almost universal moral judgments.  

Complicating this simple evolutionary theory is the fact that disgust doesn’t seem to be innate, at least not in all cases: children are notoriously lacking this emotion and don’t develop it until they are three years old or something. This diminishes the strength of the evolutionary part of the argument. However, a more important problem with the argument is the fact that the objects of disgust are not the same throughout history and across societies. What was disgusting centuries ago isn’t anymore – or vice versa – and different societies find different things disgusting. Agreed, the range is somewhat limited: disgust is mostly about things related to the human body (e.g. torture), and more specifically to metabolism (eating and excreting disgusting things with our disgusting intestines), sex (doing disgusting things with each other with our disgusting organs) and mortality (being a disgusting corpse). But within this range many different things can be viewed as disgusting, and it’s not obvious that all the things we would label immoral from a reasoned point of view are always and everywhere disgusting, or that everything that is seen as disgusting by some is also immoral upon reflection.

For all these reasons, we have to conclude that disgust isn’t a very reliable moral faculty. It can make mistakes, and often has. Not so long ago, the supposed body odor of blacks, their curly hair and facial features routinely provoked disgust among whites (still today but less commonly so). And I’m convinced that this disgust was a major cause of the subjugation of blacks. The same is true for some, now less pervasive beliefs about the disgusting nature of homosexual activity.

So it’s clear that disgust can be either beneficial or detrimental for human rights. Lack of disgust where disgust would be appropriate can lead someone to violate someone else’s rights, but inappropriate disgust can have the same result. One would therefore be wrong to label disgust as a kind of moral wisdom, superior to rational thinking about morality. 

photo by Andreas Kuehn/Getty

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The problem is then how to distinguish good disgust from bad disgust. For example, why is disgust directed at pedophilia appropriate, whereas disgust about interracial sex is not? Whatever the answer, we won’t get there without reasoning. Hence, reasoning reclaims its position at the top of moral faculties. Disgust, rather than a type of moral wisdom, seems to be a socially transmitted and culturally specific substitute for the absence of reasons.

This is why many argue against the use of disgust as a tool for human rights protection. In theory, it could work, just as the incitement of shame and sympathy can work. But it’s dangerous:

maybe we should try portraying racism and racists as disgusting. The powerful influence of this emotion might help push racism to the edge of society or eliminate it altogether, but my response is that we still shouldn’t do it. It’s not ethically appropriate to deliberately depict any group of people as disgusting because disgust makes it very easy to dehumanize, and that would do the very thing we seek to undo. (source)

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Facts (73): Slavery in Mauritania

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It’s hard to believe, but at this very moment an estimated 10% to 20% of the population of Mauritania – 340,000 to 680,000 people – still live in slavery. This is despite the fact that in 2007, the country became the last in the world to outlaw the practice. Anti-slavery activists are arrested and the government acts as if there is no problem. Only one slave owner has been successfully prosecuted.

It’s the nuances of a person’s skin color and family history that determine whether he or she will be free or enslaved. Most slave families in Mauritania consist of dark-skinned people whose ancestors were captured by lighter-skinned Arab Berbers centuries ago. Slaves typically are not bought and sold — only given as gifts, and bound for life. Their offspring automatically become slaves, too.

The source of this story is here. More on slavery here.

What Are Human Rights? (42): Individual, Not Individualistic Rights

Lisbeth Salander, arch-individualist

Opponents of human rights often define them as expressions of the individualism and antagonism that is typical of the West. Human rights are viewed as claims against society made by individuals who want to be left alone and who need rights in order to live their peculiar kind of lives free from the intolerance and interference of the larger community. As such, human rights are believed to be incompatible with, detrimental to or at least utterly useless in non-Western societies that are more collectivist, more communitarian, more focused on harmony and less interested in protecting and fostering peculiar lifestyles.

I don’t want to argue for or against these characterizations of Western and non-Western societies, although I do believe that they are wrong and simplistic. I’m also not expressing myself about the relative moral value of individualism and antagonism as opposed to community. What I want to do here is object to the portrayal of human rights as individualistic rights or as rights that promote individualism. Although human rights are the rights of individuals and not the rights of groups, there’s nothing in human rights that makes societies necessarily more individualistic or antagonistic. Many human rights are designed to protect communities, bind them together, and allow them to co-exist with other communities. That’s the case for the right to religious freedom and the assembly and association rights, but also, perhaps less obviously, for freedom of speech. A major function of speech is persuasion. People speak in order to persuade and bring outsiders into a group that holds certain beliefs. This is even more evident in the case of the right to political participation. I don’t understand how anyone can fail to see the importance of community in the system of human rights.

Human rights even have a collectivist side to them. Collectivism is

any philosophic, political, religious, economic, or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human being. (source)

Indeed, everyone’s rights are dependent on everyone else’s rights. Few if any of my rights make sense if I’m the only one having them or the only one being able to exercise them. If I can speak but nobody else can, then what is the point of me speaking? I will just be talking to walls. If I have freedom of religion but nobody else has, then with whom will I worship and congregate? If I have a right to a fair trial but everyone else is forced to give false testimony or no testimony at all, then I won’t have a fair trial. Etc. The effectiveness of my rights depends on everyone else having equally effective rights. Individualistic rights are therefore nonsensical.

A remark that’s probably superfluous: I’m in no way defending collectivist politics or disparaging the value of individualism. My point is limited to the proper definition of human rights. Calling them individualistic rights or tools for the promotion of individualism at the expense of community, harmony and belonging is just plain wrong and betrays a lack of understanding of their true nature. On the other hand, pointing to the collectivist strand in the system of human rights doesn’t imply a value judgment about collectivism vis-à-vis individualism. It’s just one strand among many, and one that should be mentioned in order to counter some common mischaracterizations of human rights.

(By the way, Marx as well was guilty of these mischaracterizations).

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (39): North Korea Goes For World Record in Chutzpah

A North Korean child suffering from malnutrition lays in a bed in a hospital in Haeju, the capital of the area damaged by summer floods and typhoons in South Hwanghae province. Photo by Reuters/Damir Sagolj

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North Korea’s U.N. delegation declared on Friday that it was proud of Pyongyang’s social system and human rights record and rejected as baseless a U.N. monitor’s report that described appalling human rights abuses in the reclusive country. …

“We have nothing to hide,” [North Korean delegate Kim Song] said. “We have nothing to be afraid of. On the contrary, we are proud of our superior system of promoting and protecting human rights in our country, including free medical care and free education system.”

“We will further develop and strengthen our social system that guarantees promotion and protection of human rights,” he added. (source)

The real North Korean human rights record is, of course, this, this and this.

More human rights nonsense from North Korea is here. And more human rights nonsense in general is here.

What Are Human Rights? (41): No Right Without a Remedy

strip search

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Ubi jus ibi remedium: where there is a right, there must be a remedy in case of violation of the right. It’s an old but somewhat misguided principle. If you focus too much on it, you’ll miss the essence of human rights. It has some superficial appeal: when nothing can be done about a rights violation, you might just as well not have a right at all. Conversely, the presence of remedies may deter future wrongdoers.

However, if you dig deeper, you’ll notice some problems. First, the principle is often used to disparage economic human rights: what’s the use of promulgating a right to work, when the presence of work depends on economic circumstances rather than on decisions by judges or on government policy? Compare this to the right to free speech: when a government shuts down a newspaper, a judge can – ideally – order the government to step back. Or compare it to the right to property: when someone steals your stuff, a judge can order to thief to give it back or compensate you financially. If we want to hold on to economic rights – and I think we should – we have to soften the remedy principle.

But there are problems even if we don’t care about economic rights. A remedy is often inadequate or even unavailable. Judges are ineffective or complicit in dictatorships. Do we say that the citizens of those dictatorships do not have rights simply because they don’t have remedies? I don’t think so.

Even if we focus on states with a well-functioning rule of law, there are many rights without remedies. Suppose the police harrasses you repeatedly for no good reason. They regularly invade your house and strip search you. As a result, your sense of security and privacy is gone. You live in constant fear and humiliation. You appeal to a judge who manages to stop the police and who awards you financial damages. And yet, you’ll probably be traumatized for the rest of your life. In short, you have no real remedy. The same is even more obvious in the case of a violation of the right to life. There’s obviously no remedy, but that doesn’t make the right to life useless. It’s still a strong moral claim that often has beneficial effects.

Even when real remedies are possible, they may require more than a few words spoken by a judge. Take for instance racial segregation in the U.S. Courts have repeatedly ruled it unconstitutional in the 1950s and 60s, but it took decades of complex laws and policies to diminish its effect. Again, the difference with economic rights tends to disappear. For instance, a healthy environment for job creation in the private economy also requires good and complex government policies maintained over many years.

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (42): First is Best

Psychological tests have shown that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged. The order in which people experience things affects how they evaluate them: they tend to think the first option is the best.

Here’s an experiment showing how people decide that a criminal presented first is more worthy of parole:

Two criminals’ photographs, from the Florida Department of Corrections website … were used. Photos depicted 29 year-old males known to have committed the same violent crimes. Criminals were wearing identical correctional facility outfits; photos were pre-tested to be equally attractive and both expressing neutral facial expressions. …

Thirty-one participants … were asked to evaluate [the] two criminals and to determine who should “stay in jail” versus “be released on parole.” … [P]articipants automatically associated the first criminal with being more worthy of parole (rather than prison) compared to the second criminal. Regardless of which photo was presented first, it was the one presented first who was judged to be more worthy of parole. (source)

This is a form of order effect: people’s choices are often sensitive to differences in the order in which the options appear. (“First is best” is only one form of order effect; in some other cases, order effects show that the last options are privileged). As is clear from the example above, order effects can have consequences for human rights: if people are given parole on the basis of the psychological biases of those who decide rather than on the merits of the case, then equality before the law is done with.

It wouldn’t be very difficult to imagine and test other cases.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Ads (84): It’s Work We Want

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Work is indeed a human right, but it’s not true that free trade is a major cause of violations of this right. When trade barriers are removed, some jobs will indeed be outsourced overseas, notably to countries where the relative labor cost is lower. But the people overseas who benefit from this outsourcing arguably need the jobs more than citizens of wealthy western welfare states. Also, it’s not because some jobs disappear that others aren’t created. Furthermore, lower production costs often translate into lower retail prices for many consumer goods, something which may compensate for job losses or for shifts in labor markets.

The alternative to free trade is protectionism, and protectionism is a major cause of poverty in developing countries. Absence of poverty is also a human right. We have therefore two human rights that need to be balanced against each other. In this case, I think the right not to suffer poverty should take precedence, for the following reason: on the one hand, protectionism aggravates poverty mainly in developing countries and those countries often don’t have robust social security systems; on the other hand, to the extent that free trade and outsourcing do produce job losses they do so mainly in developed countries that offer social security. The harm caused by protectionism is therefore greater than the harm caused by free trade. Also, let’s not forget the numerous positive effects of free trade:

• more specialization
• more use of comparative advantage
• better access to technology and knowledge
• better and cheaper intermediate goods (raw products etc.) and capital goods (machines etc.)
• benefits of scale
• and increased competition.

It’s very difficult if not impossible to cite a similar number of positive effects of protectionism.

Here’s another advert making the same mistake:

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More human rights ads.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (41): Path Dependence

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The theory of path dependence refers to the way in which our current sets of possible decisions are limited by the decisions we have made in the past. The classic example is the QWERTY layout of typewriters and computer keyboards. QWERTY was originally designed to avoid the “hammers” of typewriters interlocking when people type very fast. There’s no reason why computers should still use QWERTY keyboards rather than other layouts that permit easier and more ergonomic typing with less finger movement and less long term health effects, and yet they do. When typewriter users started to get used to QWERTY, switching costs and the cost of learning other systems went up. Consequently, the keyboard became more common, and the more common it became the more useful it became to learn to use it. When more people learned and used it, it became more profitable to sell this keyboard instead of competitors. Office managers worked with people trained in QWERTY and were therefore encouraged to buy QWERTY machines. And so on.

What does this have to do with human rights? Well, it seems to be the case that path dependence is the cause of a number of human rights violations. In an older post, I mentioned a study arguing that present-day poverty can be explained in part by the lingering effects of the slave trade (slavery fostered ethnic fractionalization in Africa and undermined the development of effective government institutions).

Acemoglu and Robinson make a similar claim about colonialism:

[T]he organization of colonial states, though it typically built on absolutist structures, often intensified these structures. … [T]he “Gate-Keeper” state … was designed for extraction and order but not for development or the provision of public goods. All of these ideas rest on some form of path dependence linking the institutional and political strategies of colonialism with those of post-colonial states. Second, the arbitrary way in which the European colonial powers put together very different ethnic groups into the same polities created countries which would be difficult to govern and very conflict prone after independence. Colonialism itself probably intensified notions of ethnicity and made them more rigid. (source)

The path dependence in this case is evident from the reluctance of post-colonial rulers to modify colonial borders even when those borders defy ethnic realities. It’s also evident from the way in which an authoritarian style of government was maintained after independence.

In fact, once you start thinking about it, you see path dependence everywhere. Take for example my native country, Belgium. It’s hardly the worst place in the world for human rights, but it is systematically governed in a bad way, making a mockery of political rights. Demographic minorities and minority interest groups weigh heavily on policies and legislation. The levels of taxation are much higher than justifiable, with negative effects on property rights and incentives. Linguistic minorities are not oppressed but they are often harassed. And I could go on. Add to that the dismal climate and the general ugliness of the country, and you can be forgiven for asking why people still live there. After all, within the European Union, it’s very easy to move to a nicer country. The answer, of course, is path dependence: people know the language, and switching to another language is difficult for many; people’s ancestors are buried there; they have friends and family, and often a good job. That’s alright as far as it goes, but we need to be more vigilant in those areas where path dependence causes significant harm. Of course, the word “dependence” means that it’s often difficult to do something about this harm. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

More posts in this series are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (99): Evicted

Children evicted from their home on E. 121st Street, New York, by Irving Haberman, date unknown

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More on homelessness, the right to shelter and foreclosure. More iconic images of human rights violations.

Human Rights and International Law (23): The Dilemma of Treaty Ratification Rates

1899, US Senate Ratifies Treaty of Paris

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In the case of human rights treaties, we face a tough choice: should we aim at universal/near-universal acceptance and ratification, or should we instead limit ourselves to the goal of “real” or meaningful acceptance and ratification? The problem with human rights treaties is that ratification is almost costless. A country can ratify them even if it has no intention of respecting their provisions, because it knows that lack of respect will not result in any serious harm. The same is not true for other types of treaties: a country ratifying a military collaboration treaty, a fishery treaty etc. knows that non-respect of the treaty provisions can lead to harmful retaliation by other treaty signatories or fines imposed by some international institution.

The relative costlessness of human rights treaties means that most if not all countries will readily accept them. They can only gain: signaling support for human rights by way of treaty ratification can even reduce outside pressure for better rights protection. After all, a country that signals willingness to respect human rights should have more leeway than a country that openly and willingly violates those rights.

Hence, near-universal ratification rates are a natural outcome in the case of human rights treaties. Some argue that instead of pursuing the commonly accepted goal of near-universal ratification of human rights treaties, we should instead aim for “real” and meaningful acceptance; in other words, acceptance only by states that do intend to implement the treaties’ provisions. States that would sign the treaties simply to signal a positive attitude towards human rights and to relieve outside pressure should therefore be excluded from ratification.

Exclusion means raising the cost of ratification – for example by way of preconditions for acceptance incorporated into the treaties or by way of effective sanctions in case of non-respect. This in turn means that treaty ratification rates will be brought down.

All of this sounds reasonable at first sight, but it does create a dilemma. Treaty ratification, even if it is at first mere signaling by an authoritarian state that doesn’t have any intention of respecting the treaty, can have beneficial effects over time. By making “fake” or “shallow” ratification more difficult we would also destroy those beneficial effects. What kind of effects am I talking about? Well, for instance, a treaty can promote a human rights culture. When a state accepts a treaty, even if only for the purpose of international signaling, it also signals, inadvertently, to its own population: it signals that human rights are becoming universal moral norms. The state therefore can’t help but increasing the legitimacy and salience of human rights, and its oppressed population can use this fact: it can wield the language of human rights in a more effective way than before, both against the state and in order to rally support.

Hence, we may see an effect of treaty ratification going in two opposite directions: shallow ratification my reduce outside pressure against the ratifying state, but may also increase inside pressure.

So it’s not obvious what we should do. Should we aim at near-universal ratification, or at meaningful ratification? Both strategies have pros and cons. Near-universal ratification may reduce the meaning of human rights – if even the worst dictator can ratify a human rights treaty without any significant cost, then human rights will lose their appeal. We may even increase the number and severity of human rights violations because states that signal adherence to human rights will see a reduction of international pressure. On the other hand, making ratification more costly will reduce the number of ratifications, which in turn will reduce the moral stature of human rights and will make it more difficult to argue that human rights are universal.

I’m not ashamed to say that I can’t see an easy way out.

More posts on this series are here. Some data on treaty ratification rates are here. More dilemmas are here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (112): The Tagging of Prisoners With HIV

Jew in Paris, wearing the star

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You can’t tell by looking at someone whether he or she is living with HIV. That is, unless you catch a glimpse of a man who’s living with HIV in the state of Alabama’s prison system.

There are over 200 male prisoners living with HIV in Alabama. The Alabama Department of Corrections requires each of them to wear a white armband at all times, making their health status obvious to other inmates, prison staff, and visitors. The practice is a huge affront to prisoners’ privacy and confidentiality. (source)

Let’s list some of the other things that are wrong with this:

• Why on earth would anyone want to protect prison rapists? Or is it true that the modern day prison system is merely a sanitized front for the perpetuation of medieval punishment?
• Measures such as these nourish the stigma of HIV patients.
• They promote false beliefs about HIV transmission.
• Etc.

More absurd human rights violations.

Human Rights Nonsense (36): Wasting Water is Bad, Isn’t It?

Water shortages are a human rights issue. If you don’t believe me read this, this and this, and then come back here. [Pause] Ok, now that this is cleared up, take a look at the following nonsensical and self-defeating advert promoting water conservation:

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I outsource my commentary to Copyranter:

This was a World Water Day mailer from 2009, via Belgium. To read the message, you had to run it under water. The translated line: “Without water, knowledge cannot flow.” Just a reminder that the main message of World Water Day is conserving water. I’m pretty sure you could still read it if you pissed on it.

More human rights nonsense here.

What Are Human Rights? (40): Properties & Characteristics of Human Rights

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I imagine readers are faced with a “haystack” problem when searching this blog for an overview of properties of human rights. I did write about this many times before, but usually one property at a time, and the respective posts are probably buried underneath a load of other posts (there are literally thousands here). So I thought to myself, why not give a summary, and link to some of those older posts. Here goes.

Human rights are moral claims (and hence part of morality, but only part of), that

• have a very high if not an absolute priority compared to other moral or non-moral claims (such as claims based on honor, disgust, utility etc.)
• require mandatory (as opposed to discretionary) compliance (more here)
• are therefore more than mere aspirations (more here)
• are necessary for the protection and realization of certain fundamental, basic and universal human values and interests (more here)
• are therefore instrumental principles in the sense that we don’t want them for their own sake; in other words, they are means and not goals (more here and here)
• are universal: all human beings have certain rights, for no other reason than their humanity and the values attached to humanity; this means that human rights precede and trump considerations of national sovereignty and that national sovereignty therefore does not provide a means to escape human rights obligations (more here and here)
• are pre-political: they are a moral order that has a legitimacy and existence preceding contingent social, legal, political, cultural and historical conditions and that can be used to assess and question those conditions (more here)
• are independent from legal/social/cultural/religious recognition: human beings have human rights even if the laws and customs of their country/group do not recognize or perhaps even violate these rights – although people’s rights are obviously much more secure when they are translated into law and custom (more here and here)
• are unconditional: people have rights without conditions; respect for rights is not conditional upon fulfillment of duties, status, legal recognition of rights or persons etc. (more here)
• are inalienable: since rights are owned by human beings because of their humanity, these rights aren’t given and hence can’t be taken away; people still have rights when those rights are violated (more here and here)
• are not forfeitable: people can’t give their rights away for the same reason that these rights can’t be taken away; however, people can decide that they don’t want their rights enforced (more here)
• are equal rights: rights are equal in two meanings of the word; they are equal between people (because all people are equally human) and they are equal to other human rights (there are no “basic” and “less urgent/important” human rights) (more here and here)
• are interdependent: different rights need each other, violations of one right most likely lead to violations of other rights (which is one reason why there can’t be a core of “basic” rights) (more here)
• are limited: rights have to be balanced against each other because respect for one right can imply a violation of another right; balancing means imposing limitations on some rights for the benefit of other rights (or of the rights of others); the fact that there are no basic rights makes this balancing a lot more difficult but not impossible – conflicting rights then have to be balanced taking into account the way in which the two conflicting rights realize the values they are supposed to realize (more here)
• are not politically neutral: not all forms of government can equally respect human rights; there’s a close link between human rights and democracy (more here)
• are multidimensional: human rights aren’t just a matter between citizens and the state; they are addressed at everyone and impose duties on everyone (which means that they are also transnational and transgenerational) (more here)
• are simultaneously positive and negative: they always and everywhere require both forbearance and active intervention (although in different degrees according to the circumstances) (more here, here and here).

And I’ll put in an “etc.”, just to be sure. Related posts are here, here and here.

Human Rights Ads (83): Unemployee of the Year

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More on the right to work. More ads.

What Are Human Rights? (39): Human Rights and Human Duties

For some people, there’s too much talk about human rights. They see human rights as a symptom of a typically modern type of moral decay, of a culture of self-importance and egoism, and of an exaggerated sense of entitlement. We want more and more of society and the state, and at the same time we are less willing to contribute. Instead of rights talk, they say, we should promote a sense of duty. Instead of rights declarations and rights in constitutions and treaties, we should have lists of duties and responsibilities, and have the state enforce those duties rather than rights.

You often hear this duty talk when the topic is crime (defendants have “too many rights”) or anti-social behavior (whatever that means), but it seems to be focused mainly on economic human rights. Rather than a right to unemployment benefits people have a duty to work and to support themselves. Rather than a right to very expensive healthcare for everyone, people have a duty to live a healthy life. And so on.

My point here is not to deny the importance of the duties mentioned above, or of a lot of other duties. And neither do I want to claim that human rights talk can’t be frivolous (I have a whole ongoing blog series about “human rights nonsense“). I merely want to mention a couple of risks that come with duty talk. First of all, there’s the danger of rights becoming dependent on duties. If duties are given too much importance, people will be tempted to claim that your rights can only come after you have proven to be a responsible person. That would be wrong. Rights are unconditional. People have rights, end of story. They don’t have rights because they are responsible citizens respecting their social duties. Even irresponsible citizens, and even criminals have rights.

In addition, duty talk is somewhat superfluous. Duties are inherent in rights. Someone’s rights are everyone else’s duties. (It’s wrong to view respect for rights as the duty of the state only). I don’t have a right to violate your right; I have a duty to respect it. Rights would be meaningless words without such duties. So what’s the added value of emphasizing duties?

More posts in this series are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (93): Life and Death in Aleppo, Syria

An amazing series of 7 photos taken in rapid succession, capturing a few seconds separating life and death for a small group of fighters in Aleppo, Syria (make sure to view the photos in order, from #1 to #7):

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The photographer, Tracey Shelton, explains what went on:

Earlier this week (in September 2012), I was filming a feature on life on the frontlines of Aleppo, Syria. I was camping out with the men of Noor Den al-Zenke batallion, who man a two-block stretch of back streets that now forms the final line between government troops and opposition forces.

This narrow street had become a makeshift home for the men. Lounge chairs salvaged from abandoned homes formed an area for chatting and drinking tea. Meals were prepared on a grass mat in the middle of the street. We slept in a room on the lower floor in case of air raids. Lookouts were posted at each street corner to both watch and listen for new sniper positions and approaching troops and tanks.

On this morning, the men were relaxed and joking around as they cleaned their area from a tank attack the day before. That time, they had been prepared and the tank had fired too short. This time, the assault came with little warning.

As the cloud of smoke engulfed the street we ran back and frantically waited for the others to escape through the dust and debris. But no one came. In that split second, three men were reduced to broken, bleeding masses.

After a few minutes of disorientation, a vehicle arrived to transport the bodies. The survivors washed away the blood and flesh in a heartbreaking clean up.

New fighters came to take their posts. And the battle continued. (source)

More on Syria here. More iconic images are here.

The War on Terror is 11 Years Old Today, With No End in Sight

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The War on Terror, started by the U.S. government as a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and later joined by other governments, is 11 years old today, with no end in sight. It has had and continues to have grave consequences for the human rights of people worldwide. Osama is dead, and the war in Iraq is over, and yet people are still stuck in Guantanamo, drone strikes are more numerous than ever before and the internal security forces of Western states are increasingly powerful. It’s a high price for an uncertain gain.

However, before I discuss the consequences for human rights, I would like to make it clear that I believe, as any rational human being, that terrorism is evil, that it has to be stopped and that democracies have a right to defend themselves against violent, anti-democratic fanatics (see this post for example).

I also believe that democratic governments should be especially vigilant because the freedoms that they are elected to protect, offer opportunities for those who hate freedom, opportunities that do not exist in other political systems. Potential terrorists find it relatively easy to enter a democracy and operate in it. A democracy is a very vulnerable form of government because of the freedom it gives to everyone, even those who don’t mean well.

The freedoms of a democracy can be and are abused, but this, it seems, has frightened democratic governments to such an extent that they have decided to limit these freedoms up to the point that they are in danger of abandoning them altogether, and hence doing the work of the terrorists for them. It can be acceptable to limit certain rights for the protection of other rights (see also this post), but the right to security seems to have taken on an absolute priority, at the expense of many other rights. There is no reasonable balance anymore.

1. Civil liberties

Governments try to defend their countries against terrorist attacks by limiting civil liberties in their territories.

• The right to privacy has been limited: CCTV has become ubiquitous, DNA databases have been created, eavesdropping and wiretapping have been legalized etc.
• “No-fly-lists” have come into force, limiting the freedom of movement of even those who have written critically of the government or attended peace-protests.
• Hate speech laws have been voted to silence jihadist hate preachers, silencing others at the same time.
• “Racial profiling” by the police has turned innocent people into possible suspects, often inverting the burden of proof.
• Habeas corpus has been limited, periods of detention without charge extended, sometimes indefinitely (for “enemy combatants”).

However, in spite of all this, the constraints on a government’s actions within its territory are sometimes still considered to be inhibiting:

• “Extraordinary rendition” has been covertly practiced, allowing suspects to be tortured outside of the territory by professional torturers in other countries.
• Extra-territorial prisons have been created, in Guantanamo, but probably elsewhere as well, where suspects can be tortured or held indefinitely and where the Geneva Conventions supposedly don’t apply.

2. Mentalities

The war on terror has also changed people’s minds and attitudes.

• The media have started to censor themselves. Solidarity with the government at war and the commander-in-chief, or the fear of being perceived as unpatriotic, appeasers, “useful idiots” or even open allies of the enemy have turned many in the media into uncritical supporters of the war.
• Citizens have turned on Islam and Muslims. Xenophobia and more specifically islamophobia have undermined the ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism, and have in certain cases even led to hate crimes against Muslims.
• A ”culture of fear” has been created by the terrorist but also nurtured by irresponsible western politicians. This fear has damaged democracy. Not only have the media relinquished their traditional role as watchdogs. Politicians as well, and especially incumbents, have abused the fear of terrorism to harness support. Alert levels seem to go up just before elections.

3. Preemptive war

The US government has elaborated and implemented the strategy of preemptive war, a war

waged in an attempt to repel or defeat a perceived inevitable offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (allegedly unavoidable) war. (source)

The Iraq war was deemed a preemptive war because Iraq was allegedly about to attack the US with weapons of mass destruction, or supply these weapons to terrorists. Whatever the merits of the case against Iraq – and with the passing of time these seem to become weaker and weaker – the war has been framed, correctly or not, as a necessary stage in the ongoing war on terror. It has, however, resulted in massive numbers of casualties on both sides. The human rights violations caused by the war stand in no relation to the violations caused by terrorism or the violations that could have been caused by Saddam.

In any case, you can’t solve the problem of terrorism by violent means only. Terrorism has causes, and there will be terrorism as long as these causes exist. (Mind you, I don’t want to excuse or justify terrorism).

4. Counter-productive

It is now widely believed, even in US government circles, that the war on terror is counter-productive. Especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture in Abu Ghraib and the detentions in Guantanamo have produced a backlash and have increased rather than reduced the terror threat. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate issued the following among its “key judgments”:

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. (source)

The war on terror has created and exacerbated resentment, hatred of the West and anti-americanism. And with anti-americanism often comes hatred of democracy and freedom, as wellas Islamic radicalization. Apart from the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, there is no evidence that any of the strategies in the war on terror has done any good (source). Any even this tiny success seems to be far from certain.

5. Misnomer

There is something fishy about the concept of a “war on terrorism”. This “war” is in fact no such thing. There is no well-defined enemy. Anyone can at any time become an enemy. For this reason, there is no conceivable end to the war. And if you claim to wage a war on terrorism, you might as well claim to wage a war on carpet bombing. Both are tactics or strategies, not something you wage war against.

If you insist on calling anti-terrorist actions a war, then you give too much credit to the riffraff you’re opposing. Rather than deranged criminals they can call themselves soldiers. And soldiers defend something. You legitimize them. You turn a crime into a two-sided struggle in which each side defends its positions. This in turn leads to the view that the war on terror is a war of the West against the rest, bringing back images of colonialism, imperialism and the crusades, again legitimizing the terrorists, helping to consolidate their often internally opposed forces, and making them honorable in the eyes of some ordinary citizens.

I can understand that the concept of a “war on terrorism” is useful for some Western governments, because an executive that is at war has more powers, less oversight, more popular support and less criticism, but it’s a meaningless and dangerous concept. Let’s give it up, or let us at least declare victory in the one we’re now fighting for 11 years.

(This post is hoisted from the archives and slightly revised. The original was published on August 6th, 2008 and is unfortunately still relevant today).

Hate (8): Tolerance and Hate Speech

1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith is murdered in an Illinois prison by a lynch mob; soon after, many of his followers migrate to Utah

(source, source)

Jeremy Waldron claims that tolerance is more than merely the absence of violent assault on people who have adopted beliefs and practices we don’t like, and more than simply abstaining from persecution and legal sanction. He says that tolerance also implies the absence of hate speech and a legal prohibition of hate speech. Members of minority groups whose beliefs and practices are strongly disapproved of by the rest of society, have a right to go about their lives without the threat of constant hatred, vilification, insult and humiliation. They have a right to visit the shops and restaurants they want to visit, and to generally interact with others without being treated as pariahs.

And, indeed, that sounds quite reasonable. People undoubtedly have and should have such rights. But others have rights as well: hate mongers have a right to free speech, and racist shop keepers and restaurant owners have a right to ban whoever they want from their private property, under certain circumstances.

When the rights of the haters and the rights of despised minorities come into conflict, the different rights have to be balanced. I argued before that the right of private property of racists, or the freedom of association of prejudiced groups wanting to exclude homosexuals for example, should no longer be protected when these racists and bigots have become so numerous and authoritative that the objects of their racism or bigotry no longer have any alternative options and risk having their own rights violated. In the Jim Crow era, for example, it was very difficult for blacks to move around, find decent housing etc. because there were so many transport companies and landowners discriminating against them that their options were seriously diminished. Hence their rights were violated, and violated to such a degree that limitations on the rights of their tormentors were justified.

Similarly, in our current example, hate speech should only be banned and the right to free speech of hate mongers should only be limited when there’s an impact on the rights of their targets. Claiming, as Waldron seems to do, that a tolerant society generally requires such bans and limits will not do. That’s just not enough as a justification. For example, writing blood libel on an obscure blog that nobody reads should probably not be prohibited. On the other hand, burning crosses in the front yards of black people and forcing them to move elsewhere is a violation of their right to freely choose their residence. The same is true if people dare not walk the streets because of the risk of being constantly cursed at. These two cases of expressions of hate speech can and should be banned because they result in rights violations. Other expressions of hate speech should be protected. A general claim that tolerance requires not just constraints on coercion and violent persecution but also a general respect for people’s dignity and a social atmosphere free of hatred, insult and defamation, goes too far. It would be nice if the world was free of hate and if respect for dignity was the normal attitude, but there’s no right to such a world. Nor should there be.

If we were to adopt such a right, we’d run the risk of terminating debate altogether. If tolerance includes a general ban on hate speech it’s likely that it will also imply banning vehement discussion of other people’s supposed errors. You don’t need to engage in hate speech in order to have a vehement and lively discussion and criticism of others, but a lot of such criticism can be readily understood and perceived by its targets as an expression of hate and an insult to dignity. These targets can then use the power of law to shut down the debate, and that’s not something we want. Ideally, specific instances of speech should not be judged as inadmissible instances of hate speech and proper objects of legal sanction simply on the basis of the feelings or perceptions of the targets, but only on the basis of the objective consequences for the rights of the targets. Tolerance that includes a ban on all hate speech is a tolerance that in the end may silence us all.

More on tolerance, hate speech, defamation and insults. More posts in this series are here.