Human Rights vs. Human Dignity Part One

In the process of workshopping some comp's questions -- any input is appreciated.

A typical answer to the supposition that there is value in shifting discussion from ‘human rights’ to ‘human dignity,’ is that when people talk about human rights, the implicit assumption is that they are identical terms, or that when we talk about human rights, we are already talking about human dignity. While I will agree that colloquially these two terms might function interchangeably, I argue that there are important distinctions between the two concepts which shows that they function differently when elevated into the public sphere. Prior to engaging in a sustained analysis regarding the pitfalls of rights-discourse, it is first necessary to parse out my understanding of rights. I would define a right as something which an authoritative body grants to an individual, such that this individual is either free-from some form of intrusions or free-to act in a particular way. This definition is indebted to Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which he argues that we are granted both positive (free-to) rights and negative (free-from) rights what allow us to have a robust sense of how rights actually function. It is important to take both senses of what a right might be, such that my critique of rights-discourse does not only indict one particular way of thinking about rights.

What is implicit in Berlin’s definition of what constitutes a right is that there must be some authoritative body who is able to determine which of these rights the individual might have. In domestic situations this poses no particular difficulty. To use the United States as an example, the federal government acts as the author and executor of our rights, some of which have been enumerated in the Bill of Rights. While there is certainly an aura of contingency with regard to a particular right which points to the potential suspension of some rights (e.g. the suspension of the right of habeus corpus during the Second World War for Japanese-Americans held in internment camps), there is no debate on who is sovereign with regard to determining if these rights are applicable at a particular time. I cannot, for example, authorize myself as sovereign of Pittsburgh and eminent domain my neighborhood. There is separation of powers, both between branches of government, as well as the federalist system which governs who is authorized to enforce particular rights in a particular place.

Thing get much muddier, though, when we attempt to talk about the universalization of rights, or in other words, human rights. Unlike in the domestic space where there is not credible question of “who is the sovereign,” the international arena (following international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer and others) is fundamentally anarchical. There might be some supranational bodies and treaties (WTO, UN, Geneva Convention) which attempt to govern this space, but at best it is a patchwork of differing institutions, many of whom have different goals and capacities to enforce their decisions. This does not mean that any attempt to internationalize a rights-agenda will always fail or counterproductive. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, enumerates a short set of rights which all individual ought to have. Most important for this particular essay, is the first Article, which holds that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. This seems to lend credence to those who believe that there is no essential difference when talking about the human rights and human dignity.

There are a pair of anecdotes which I would like to contrast with one another which informs my understanding of the distinction between human rights and human dignity when it comes to their elevation to the international level. The first of these is the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouveture. Prior to the Haitian Revolution, then slave Toussaint made a decidedly Enlightenment plea based on those rhetorical moves which were emanating from France at that time. He believed that if the French revolutionaries opposing the Ancien Regime proclaimed the universal human rights to liberty, equality, and fraternity, then the slaves of Saint Domingue should also be covered under their umbrella. In a letters Toussaint sent to the French military and governmental leader push the rhetoric of the French revolutionary agenda to its logical conclusion (and subsequentially, reveal its hypocrisy). However, unlike in France where the Declaration of the Rights of Man remain abstracted from everyday experience, in the Haitian example, Toussaint insists on their full translation into practice. Nick Nesbitt, in his book Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment, argues that in the Haitian revolution was the first state who is able to implement human rights universally and unconditionally, unlike in the American and French revolution who still predicated citizenship in the class ‘man’ upon conditions like gender, sexuality, race, and class. In this instance, framing calls for liberty, equality, and fraternity in the frame of ‘human rights’ does not diminish its potency. The work by Toussaint and others in the Haitian revolution were accomplished precisely by their overidentification with the rhetoric of a universal human right. While this can be hailed as an instance where universalization does not necessarily remain problematic, the careful observer will notice that in the Haitian case, there is still a sovereign body who is willing to instantiate and protect that thing which is being flagged as a universal right.

The second anecdote, which I believe complicates the Haitian case, is from the work of Hannah Arendt in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this text, she examines the plight of the stateless person during the intrawar periods in Europe. She observes that despite the call for universal human rights to protect the stateless person, these individuals more or less wandered Europe without any legal protections. From a historical perspective, the Declaration of the Rights of Man argued that rights were “inalienable,” and that “Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal” (Arendt 291). What is notable about the 19^th century definition of human rights is that it grounds its source in the sovereignty of the individual, and not the sovereignty of some governing institution, however, it only seemed natural that the “inalienable” rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government. Thus, the individual who sought to become emancipated and carried his dignity only within himself disappeared into ‘the people’. The question of universal human rights was then quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; and only the emancipated sovereignty of the people would have the force to protect their new-found rights.

However, what World War One makes clear is that when civil rights were blended with human rights in those places where the abstract nature of the law was made tangible, the universality of human rights got lost. With the emergence of refugees during this era, who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state, no one was able to define with any assurances what these general human rights, as distinct from the rights of citizens actually were (293). The loss of the government for these refugees was not just the protection of citizen rights in their own country, but instead that these people were being denied the basic political status of being a person; that is, if they lack the basic right to have rights. International treaties and agreements are predicated on the assumption that you take your legal status with you when you travel abroad. If however, there is no longer a legal status which grounds the individual (for example, citizens of the Austria-Hungarian Empire), then there is no legal standing which would allow deterministic judgments to be made. Assuming that a refugee commits a crime in one’s own country – to what nation should this person be deported? Rather than respecting or granting that these now-stateless people were bearers of human rights, they too often got caught in the problems of political organization who framed these issues in terms of economic strains of mass asylum, resettlement problems and threats to the nation. This plight gestures towards the perplexity of human rights: no matter how they are defined, the real situation of those whom the 20^th century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that these are the rights of citizens. Their plight is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and happiness, or of equality before the law, but that they no longer belong to a community who is able to grant these rights in the first place. As Arendt puts it, it is “not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them” (296). The reason why Arendt’s analysis of the stateless person is so interesting is that she points out the ontological problem at the heart of rights-discourse. Regardless of how one decides to define the content of universal human rights, there is an implicit ‘right to have rights’ which is never enumerated yet acts as the foundation for the entire system of rights. Without this right, as the stateless person shows, people have no standing before any law, and are susceptible to violence without any hope of political recourse.