Revisiting Our Basic Rights
Tibor R. Machan
It
would have been only prudent for Dr. Hunt to have seen the matter along
such lines. As it is, she is aiding and abetting those who want to
support regimes wherein human rights are violated, left and right since
they are deemed to be invented, not discovered. If they are a mere
invention, what could be wrong with setting them aside and inviting
something else, such as the rule of leaders or committees?
Tibor R. Machan
Professor Lynn Hunt’s recently published book on rights, titled Inventing Human Rights,
is filled with a great deal of very useful important information about
the emergence of the idea of basic human, individual rights, but it also
perpetuates, perhaps entirely unconsciously, a very serious and
hazardous error.
Moral
and political ideas are not all that different from ones in the various
sciences. Based on better and better information about the world,
various new concepts need to be formed. Electrons, for example, hadn’t
been identified until after atoms were. The prefrontal lobe wasn’t
known until instruments were created that helped to search the brain
thoroughly enough to take a comprehensive inventory of its innumerable
parts. Initially all that was known is that there is a brain and only
gradually did its busy life and large number of attributes and
properties come into focus.
In
morality something similar happens. From early times it has been clear
enough that some kinds of conduct are morally wrong and that some are
right. Broadly speaking, whatever promotes the human life of an
individual is right, whatever thwarts it wrong. But the details were
slow to come to light. Politically, too, the concept of justice was in
place quite early in human history — an institution or policy is just if
it secures what is deserved among human beings. But this isn’t enough
to take account of the many details of the idea of justice. In time —
starting quite a long time ago, actually — it gradually became clear
that human beings have certain rights, based on their nature, which then
provided a fuller understanding of justice.
But,
of course, there is a problem with all this. Unlike in the physical
sciences, in normative spheres there is a great deal of disagreement,
some if not most of it stemming from the input from those who want to
undermine the very notion of basic norms of human life. So even if at
some point human rights had been discovered — not invented — there were
many who didn’t welcome this fact and mounted all sorts of ways to
obscure it. A little of this can also been detected in even the hardest
science, such as physics, chemistry or astronomy. But in the area of
morality and politics it is far more prevalent since the basis of these
areas of focus are more complicated and very widely and frequently
disputed.
One
way to undermine a moral concept, of course, is to maintain that it is
merely an invention, a fabrication that serves not to help us understand
how to lead a human life but merely to further some special interest.
Accordingly, for example, Karl Marx and his followers argued that the
human right to private property was invented so as to aid the ruling
bourgeois classes to obtain and hold control of other people. Others
claim that moral notions are conventional, something people come up with
or invent, not anything discovered.
Judging
by her book it is doubtful that Professor Hunt had this same agenda in
mind. Yet the claim that human rights are an invention plays into the
hands of those who would just as soon dismiss these rights as being
without any basis in facts of reality but simply a concocted myth — or,
as Jeremy Bentham characterized them, “nonsense upon stilts.”
In
the case of Dr. Hunt, a historian at UCLA, there is another way that
the status of human rights is undermined. She makes a lot of the fact
that the Declaration of Independence associates our basic rights with
self-evidence. If they were self-evident, as she claims the Founders
said they were, then they need not be argued for. A self-evident fact
needs no proof. Thus the fact of the existence of the universe needs no
proof — any effort to prove it would already acknowledge that it is
true. That’s why it is a self-evident truth.
What the Declaration states, of course, is that “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” not that they are
self-evident. And for purposes of a brief, succinct, inspiring
announcement — a declaration — that’s all that is needed, namely, to
treat those truths as if they were (that is, to hold them to be),
self-evident.
In
fact, however, they are anything but. Just as John Locke and all of his
followers who have labored long and hard to prove that these rights
exist knew well and good. The existence of our rights must be
demonstrated, shown. It’s not enough to assume them.
Dr.
Hunt, however, claims that the Founders believed that it is
self-evident that we have these rights and proposes that they function,
therefore, as religious truths based on faith, not as discoveries — as
inventions not as something discovered and real. But this will not
wash. Over the centuries basic human rights were gradually identified,
as a result of a better and better knowledge of human relations and
community life and its role in human affairs. So by now most of us know
that all of us have these rights in our communities, apart from some
rare cases of crucially incapacitated people. And we can therefore
confidently state, for example, that a country in which these rights are
not acknowledged and protected fails at being fully just.
