Roger Casement and human rights

The phrase 'human rights' is a bit like the phrase 'social justice': both are overused and ideologically charged.

Adrian McKinty recently (and somewhat anachronistically) referred to Roger Casement (1864-1916) as a 'champion of human rights'.

Although the term 'human rights' was not widely used until relatively recently, I recognize that the general concept has been around for centuries. My understanding is that the modern idea evolved from the medieval tradition of natural law. The notion of a divinely sanctioned moral order lying behind (and somehow justifying) human-made laws and legal systems led to the notion of universal rights which came to prominence in the 18th century. The concept was initially applied to individuals but was broadened during the Romantic period and beyond to encompass the rights of ethnic groups (or nations) to self-determination, etc. Roger Casement's anti-colonialism and (militant) Irish nationalism grew out of this tradition of thought, so McKinty's description is not altogether wrong.

But I do have problems with the term itself, as I don't think most of the people who use it realize what (in my view at any rate) its use is committing them to - that is, what assumptions it depends on to be meaningful.

It seems to me that the term 'human rights' only makes sense a) if you believe in an objectively existing natural law (or immaterial moral realm) where these rights are somehow inscribed; and/or b) if you envisage and advocate some kind of comprehensive institutional arrangement (not necessarily a world government) which would list certain rights as universally enforceable laws. (In the latter case, the rights may be seen as transcending the laws, or, if one rejects the natural law idea, merely as legal rights.)

This is not just about terminology. There are deep issues of belief involved. In my view, it's most unfortunate that humanitarian causes etc. have become linked to this (rather problematic) term. Humanitarian goals can be and have been effectively pursued without using the term or appealing to the concept. One can be motivated simply by a sense of human decency, or fairness, or compassion, or empathy, or by other emotions or convictions which owe little or nothing to the concept of universal human rights.

No theory of rights

The other day I had a discussion over a cup of coffee which helped me clarify my ideas on human rights (and perhaps on philosophy also). I am coming to the view that rights are a way of speaking rather than something one can have a theory about. [I am not talking of legal rights* here, but rather about what might be called moral or natural rights (sometimes seen as the basis or justification for legal rights).]

My interlocutor was particularly interested in whether or not children have rights. We agreed that animals do not, because they could never comprehend the reciprocal notion of obligation. But nor can very young children. I suggested that maybe children could be granted rights on the basis that they would grow in the future to understand reciprocal obligations.

My friend noted that respect for children was built into the moral convention that (women and) children are given priority in the sinking ship scenario, but I suggested that it was not useful to talk about this in terms of rights. He said that adults giving themselves priority over (weaker) children in life-or-death situations - pushing children aside in the rush for the lifeboats - was considered morally despicable. True. But I don't think 'rights' are necessarily involved here - certainly the situation can be fully described without using the word.

When I imagined a pregnant woman with a terminal brain tumor on the sinking ship (to highlight the question of the status of the unborn child in this situation), I began to recognize the absurdity into which these sorts of discussion all too often descend.

All this strengthened my conviction that rights (and similar concepts) cannot be treated scientifically, as it were. They cannot be quantified or dealt with in a scientifically precise way. As with many other issues of semantics and communication, there are prototypical cases, where a concept is fairly clear, and more marginal cases, where there is scope for disagreement.

To take a trivial but instructive case, if I am queueing in a supermarket and somebody tries to push in ahead of me, I can justly tell him that he has no right to do so. (Either he has failed to understand the queueing convention or he is flouting it.)

Too often, though, the concept of rights is used in contexts far removed from these semantically clear cases, and far removed also from any spontaneous and plausible natural language usage. Such tendentious and problematic use of the term only serves to sow confusion.

'Right' and 'rights' are just words, but words which, used sparingly and appropriately, evoke an aspect of the multifaceted moral environment in which we all move.



*Explicit laws (or rules or regulations) can of course unambiguously assign legal (or other formal) rights to individuals or groups.

The social self and the severely mentally disabled

In a comment on my post 'The social self and human rights', it was suggested that seeing selfhood and rights as deriving from social interactions left certain kinds of severely disabled people potentially vulnerable. Commenting on the comment, I agreed that some severely disabled people would on my account not have rights, but nonetheless they should be treated humanely and with due respect.

The reference to 'due respect' was a classic instance of begging the question, I must admit. If they are owed respect then they have a right to that respect - but my account of the social self seems to fail to explain that right.

Could one find within my framework a basis for respecting a child who was incapable of all higher cognitive functions and incapable also of learning even basic skills like self-feeding? I think one needs to take account of the social and emotional context - i.e. the mother, father, other carers, etc. Perhaps one could assign respect to the child on the basis of respect for these people.

What of the advanced Alzheimer's sufferer? His or her social connections with the world have been effectively erased. However, such people can be respected for what they were and for the traces which remain.

In general I think it would be appropriate if procedures for terminating such hopeless lives were available for those families who felt that the dignity of the sufferer would be better enhanced by death than by a continuation of life.

The topic of euthanasia is one which cannot be avoided in any proper discussion of the social self. I have given a preliminary view, and I would welcome comments.

The social self and human rights

All is one. Everything is connected to everything else. For centuries philosophers and mystics have said so. And maybe they were right.

Their convictions were based on feeling (oneness with Nature, etc.) but also on thinking about reality. Recent scientific and social thought based on some seminal 20th century ideas is very much in line with these basic insights.

Mutual information is the formal term used to describe the situation when two or more things or events share information with one another. Two things have mutual information if by looking at just one of them you can infer something about the properties of the other. This notion has applications in physics (quantum entanglement is a super-correlation of particles which may be separated by great distances, and a dramatic illustration of mutual information), but it also has applications in the social sciences. Mutual information has recently been used to help explain the origin of societal structures. (See, for example, Vlatko Vedral's Decoding reality (OUP 2010), pp. 93-108.)

In the middle years of the 20th century, structuralist thought developed in linguistics and other social sciences which encouraged this general line of thinking. In language, for example, it is not the actual speech sounds which matter so much as the relationship between the sounds. More radically, people could be seen not as atomistic individuals but as nodes in a network. In other words, we exist only to the extent to which we relate to others, and we are defined by the sum of those relations. Solitary confinement, then, could be seen as eating away at a person's very core.

But a prisoner in solitary confinement has already been formed by countless social interactions. Think of a new-born baby. What happens if the baby is isolated from all social contact (but continues to be fed and exercised etc.)? This is an experiment which would be unlikely to get ethics committee approval. The sad and fragmentary accounts of children raised by wolves or other wild animals suggest that they never adapt to human society. But at least these children raised in the wild had a society of sorts, albeit not human. A laboratory-raised child without social contact would arguably not be a person at all. Those who believe in the religious notion of the soul might beg to differ, but even religious people would accept that an infant raised without social and linguistic input could not function as a person.

This notion of personhood being essentially derived from the culture and community may be seen to pose problems for liberal (and classical liberal) ideals of human rights and individual freedom. If rights are seen to be somehow innate or objectively real (whether God-given or not), they may form the basis of a political or social philosophy.

But if the very existence of the person is not only dependent on, but in a profound sense derives from, the broader community, then any notion of individual rights will be contingent and circumscribed. What society gives, society can take away.

The view that I am putting seems to necessitate a drastic revision of the current notion of human rights. A strong case could be made that many supposed rights are mere fictions and others are inappropriately applied. Issues such as euthanasia may also have to be reconsidered.

Historically, liberal principles and notions of imprescriptible rights developed when virtually everyone believed in a spirit or soul which not only animated the body but encapsulated the individual's essence. How can they be reconciled with a purely secular view of the social self?

In addition to these problems of metaphysical baggage, the proliferation of human rights (or rights inflation) is further eroding the credibility of the concept. Behind this tendency to invent and assign new rights is the antagonism many on the left feel towards the idea of charity: if what the underprivileged receive is their 'right', they are (supposedly) not beholden to the generosity of others.

Despite these problems and confusions, I think it is still possible to be committed to classical liberal ideals (like individual freedom). What is valuable in this tradition of thought can still be defended - but on pragmatic rather than on religious or metaphysical grounds.

The rights which survive will not be static and innate but rather dynamic and, for the most part, contingent, arising out of a person's interactions and relations with others. Those who cannot - or who choose not to - embrace reciprocal responsibilities will not be accorded the freedoms enjoyed by those who can and do, but they too should be treated with justice and humanity.

For, arguably, not all rights are contingent. Justice (or due process) is fundamental to the view I am putting. Whereas most (all?) other rights are contingent on acceptable behavior, justice should apply equally to all.

Impartiality or 'equality before the law' is a centrally important idea, and it is only undermined by attempts by the left to implement other - more problematic - forms of equality.

The 'internal self' is a fiction. So what?

What might be the practical implications of the view of the self put forward in some of my recent posts, notably "Nietzsche on the 'self'"? Here are a few thoughts.

If one realizes that one has been treating as something real the internal 'self' or 'I' which is in fact a fiction, then one's view of who one is will change in subtle - but possibly significant - ways.

It may provide a way of dealing with death. The body dies, but arguably it is the 'internal self' we are more concerned with. And if it is only an illusion, what is there to mourn (apart from the loss of the body)?

There will be implications also for the moral sense, as the old idea of the freely willing agent - the traditional notion of the conscience - might be called into question. This is too large an issue to address here, but, briefly, my view is that we certainly have a sense of being able to choose from a large array of imagined possible actions - and in a sense we do freely choose. The problem that philosophers have addressed is to define precisely how free choice is to be understood so that it does not depend on an 'internal', immaterial self. I suspect, however, that, as the notion of the internal self is superseded in everyday thinking, the philosophical problem of human freedom will no longer seem to be a problem.

One other implication of the new view of the self is that the atomistic individualism which lies behind much political thinking comes to seem quite unrealistic and false. For there is no spiritual core to define the individual. Rather the individual is a product of society. Language is social and is a key element in an individual's identity; likewise other cultural elements and social relations of all kinds. A new-born baby only gradually becomes a human individual as it interacts with and internalizes elements of its social, cultural and linguistic environment.

It is a truism that we are social beings - but the Christian-Platonic notion of the soul and then its secular equivalent led Europeans for hundreds of years to underplay the social dimension. And current notions of political freedom, human rights and equality could be seen to derive from this discredited tradition.

Believing in a social self does not entail a collectivist social ideal, however, and certainly not an egalitarian one. Collectivism is not incompatible with the view that the 'internal self' does not exist, but then nor is the traditional conservative ideal of an organic society based on multiple institutions and complex hierarchical relationships.