Sunday, November 1, 2009

In Chapter 1 of the the Clapham book, Jeremy Bentham is quoted as saying "hunger is not bread," meaning that just because someone has a desire does not mean that those desires are in themselves rights to have what we desire. His point seems especially interesting for claims such as the right to life. Whether this is being applied to one's own life, or to another person's, explaining what gives humans as humans a right to life seems difficult.

For example, if I am struggling to swim in the middle of the ocean, I can yell that my desire for life should be respected. While everyone might join in respecting the fact that I do have this desire, but my claiming a right to life against an ocean does nothing. If I drown, it is not a violation of rights, but simply the result of being in the world where I can't always have what I desire.

Similarly, if I am getting mugged and see someone pull out a gun, I can yell that it is illegal to murder, that I would be really happy to not die just yet, but if I yelled out I have a right to my life, against who is it that I am making this claim? If my muggers do not believe in my right to live, its just like drowning in the ocean. If there is an absolute right that the muggers are breaking by killing me, then it still doesn't seem to matter since they don't respect it. They might even join in acknowledging the fact that I desire to live, but ultimately my having a right to life claims an obligation against others not to take it from me.

Despite the fact that I, in a sense, own myself and my life more than I own anything else, without the mutual recognition and consent of this desire by others my claiming a right to life seems meaningless. It has no use unless everyone else agrees to abide by it, and as a result is not really a human right but rather is a right afforded only to those humans who share similar desires and so choose to accept it.

I guess I'm just hung up and wondering a right to life is, and more basically what it means to claim a human right in the first place. On one hand talking about human rights sounds like a social contract of desires that first have to be agreed upon by all humans to ever actually take effect. Individuals share the same strong desires for things such as life which is translated into a right to life by the social contract made by a group of individuals looking to protect that desire. A right to life would then not be an inherent human right, but rather a common human desire that has been developed and protected by a collection of like minded individuals.

In this case, the muggers attacking me might not be violating my right to life that I claim, because they are not part of the human community that shares my value and desire for life. Like drowning in the ocean, my claim of a right to life is irrelevant if those who are depriving me of my life do not recognize my desire and are as a result not a part my community of rights. On the other hand, human rights talk sometimes seems to imply that humans as humans have certain rights inherent in our simply being alive, that exist and can be held against other humans regardless of whether or not they agree or respect them. As a result, even when a person does does something that they do not consider a human rights violation, they can still be held responsible for it because it is considered a right regardless of what individuals actually think of it. As a result, the muggers would in this case be held responsible for violating my human right to life even in the case they didn't agree or recognize this right at all, if it even is a right. It seems to me that determining whether human rights are really just renamed shared and protected desires and nothing more, like what Bentham suggest, or actually inherent and universal human rights, along the lines that Kant would defend, seems like a big question that has to be tackled before a discussion of what constitutes a human rights violation can really get going.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting interesting thoughts, definitely a lot to think about.
    Perhaps I am more personally drawn to the argument that the right to (our own) life is a right that we are given when we are born.

    "It has no use unless everyone else agrees to abide by it, and as a result is not really a human right but rather is a right afforded only to those humans who share similar desires and so choose to accept it." I find that argument compelling, although not terribly useful when talking about international law and human rights in that sense, which I believe to be what Clapham is attempting to do.

    It just seems that to step back and begin thinking about a world where people don't respect the right to life, is moving us into some more theoretical realm....I don't know, I just think that it makes more sense to talk about human rights in the human rights discourse, which must say that life is a human right, regardless of whether people choose to respect that.

    Your point about the right to life being irrelevant against nature was a neat one. In your example of drowning in the ocean, or if a tornado killed me in my house, no one would call that a human rights violation. But in the instance of the mugger, if he chooses to kill you because he doesn't believe in the right to life in general, or your right to life in specific, I still think you would have to say that your human rights were violated. To say that they weren't, because this man didn't believe in them, I believe falls back to the sorts of lazy relativism that we've touched on in class.

    Interesting post, though.

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  2. I have to echo Kara's point here. If a mugger decides to kill you, that does not mean that he doesn't believe in your right to live. Rather, he is making the choice to deny you the most basic human right - life. Firing shots after you call out that murder is illegal and that you have a right to live doesn't indicate that he doesn't believe those things, but that he is actively choosing to disregard the truth and violate your rights. And I know you mentioned that life might be a socially constructed human right, but I, personally, believe it is innate, which I'm sure affected my response.

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