Human rights in history and contemporary practice: Source materials for philosophy

Abstract

This chapter begins with two recent, contrasting historical accounts of when human rights were invented. In Inventing Human Rights (2007), Lynn Hunt tells the story of how the psychological foundations for human rights were laid with the rise of the humanitarian sentiment in the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. In The Last Utopia (2010), on the other hand, Samuel Moyn goes against the grain of most recent scholarship by focusing on a crisis of political utopianism in the 1970s as the locus for the roots of the contemporary resonance of human rights. Both historians draw our attention, though in different ways, to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These competing stories about the origins of human rights raise two important issues for philosophers of human rights: (1) whether and how to try to connect earlier and later episodes in the history of human rights, and (2) how to understand the complex relationship between the politics of humanitarianism and human rights. Drawing on recent work by discourse theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, I argue that focusing on social and political struggles for human rights as motivated by violations of human dignity provides a way of connecting a theory of human rights with their meaning in both past and present practice. In this way, human dignity is used not as a philosophical concept for deriving the content of human rights, but as part of a framework for understanding the moral dynamic of human rights in practice. I also argue for the need to distinguish the logic of humanitarianism (viewing others as objects of suffering) from the logic of human rights (viewing others as subjects of rights). Rather than proposing that we try to purify human rights practice of humanitarian motifs, I maintain that we simply keep in mind the potential underside of the latter. The ultimate aim of human rights in practice must be to go beyond viewing others as merely objects of concern to viewing them as subjects of rights.