In the years following the Second Great War, "human rights" has become the hymn of the liberal faithful, a sort of secular credo promising to redeem humanity from its own worst impulses. The concept promised to transfigure the moral landscape, to bring forth a world less fraught with violence, poverty, and injustice. Yet, the human rights discourse has fallen short in catalysing the transformative change it originally pledged, where most of the world’s population remains stubbornly resistant to its invocation. The problem, as I see it, is not with the aspiration itself—which I duly endorse—but with a vocabulary that is held captive by an age-old Platonic temptation for human transcendence above history and culture. Rather than appealing to some abstract notion of universal reason or legal obligation, a better move would be to engage human’s poetic faculties. It is through the imagination, not through a set of predefined ethical or legal codes which are at any rate rejected by most people, that reformative change occurs.

The Enlightenment myth:

We can present propositions which we western educated liberal-minded human rights activists take to be true today, to any person, past or present, and expect them to automatically be convinced if only they were sufficiently rational. Surely, under ‘ideal epistemic conditions’, any ‘ideal observer’ would be forced to accept those propositions because our best scientific theories as much as the document containing the Declaration of Human Rights, accurately corresponds to How Things Anyway Are. If we challenge Aristotle on his model of the heavens and of essences, Descartes on his theory of minds, Aquinas on the existence of God, and the Nazi prison guard on his racial ideology, then, if only they were sufficiently rational, they would, willy nilly, pick out the right sort of facts and change their propositional attitudes accordingly. After all, the world is like a jigsaw puzzle and our only task is to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The study of the sciences, in which Aquinas is wrong and Einstein right, and the study of social norms, where the Nazi is wrong and the human rights activist is right, both attain their status of right and wrong not by virtue of making more people within a particular community happier and meeting their current historically conditioned needs to cope, but because they all index eternal metaphysical truths. Human history, whether in the sciences or in matters of what should be done, are taken to be the progressive accumulation of such truths.

Why Appeals to ‘Human Rights!’ Don’t Work

These pronouncements are found in seminal works like Locke's "Second Treatise of Government," Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," Rousseau's "Social Contract," and Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals," as well as in the French and American Declarations, where we also find the genesis of a transformative idea: a vocabulary of universal human rights. These intellectual milestones laid the groundwork for one of the 20th century's most revolutionary cultural shifts—the emergence of a Human Rights ethos, founded on a principle of the inclusivity of individuals within the human species who were not previously counted as legitimate members of the moral community. This new moral framework ingeniously sidestepped the pitfalls of religious dogma and secular hedonism by anchoring itself in Kantian transcendental philosophy, and thereby bestowing upon every individual, regardless of other characteristics, a set of transcultural moral attributes.

The architects of this movement argued that it was through the exercise of universal human reason, rather than religious faith or scriptural revelation, that we arrived at the concept of inalienable human rights. This rationalist approach was seen as a necessary catalyst for aligning human civilisation with the principles of rationality, as though these conclusions were logically deducible from timeless philosophical premises. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words of the American Constitution, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he was channeling a sentiment that was far from marginal in his era. Jefferson attributed these "self-evident truths" to Kantian notions of human reason, rather than seeing them as the mere byproducts of a specific historical and geographical context, largely centred in Europe, rather than Africa or Asia. The irony that these "self-evident" principles were not so evident to countless generations before, and initially applied only to European immigrants, did little to expose their historical and cultural contingency.

In the United States, the journey to extend these "self-evident truths" to a broader demographic—beyond property-owning, cisgender, heterosexual males of European descent—took centuries marked by brutality, activism, and civil wars. Despite progress, it still largely in the custody of these groups. But while these lofty pronunciations of supposedly universal human rights served as the de jure philosophical underpinning for such extensions to other groups, such as in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the de facto driving force was rooted in lived experiences and compelling narratives rather than abstract philosophical arguments. This ethos was further globalised by the United Nations in a post-WW2 context, which adapted the American preamble "We the people of" to "We the people of the United Nations," that is, to broaden the moral community it represents.

Such ideas of ingrained rights are of course a historical construct which Darwin rendered outmoded, a story about ourselves in our cultural past that relied on themes of universality and eternality, one which needs to be superseded by new, more pragmatic (relative to our own century) stories about particularity and malleability. It was nevertheless a brilliant story for its time and we are happy that it rhetorically succeeded in helping us envision a cosmopolitan utopia, despite its failure.

The essentialist attitude underlying the story—not the culture that it begot—seems to now be more trouble than its worth. The dogmatic invocation of ‘human rights’ as some kind of inviolable, eternal principles does not persuade unconvinced population to alternate their moral identity by adopting the values of inclusivity that ideally undergird the human rights culture. Most of the world’s population do not identify themselves in non-exclusionary ways; a sense of who they are is that they are not Others, and the sheer formulaic invocation of ‘Human Rights!’ does not provide them any reasons to alternate their moral identities. Nor does it give them any reasons to alternate their practical identities; when living in insecure condition, to be sceptical and untrustworthy of Others can be the most rational thing to do.

In the following, I will be focusing mostly on these points about the pragmatics of human rights discourse, as well as the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the enduring Human Rights project. First, however, a personal anecdote to illustrate the former.

Some of my friends grew up in war-torn countries, faced with insecure circumstances and little time to imagine what it’s like to be in the shoes of people they don’t identify with. They were not brought up to think that prejudice against some racial or religious groups is unacceptable and had grown up signing songs whenever it would rain like “Fall Oh Rain Fall, [redacted ethnic group] are our dogs” and rejoining with their holy scripture that God will punish sexual minorities. I could not, however much I tried, to get them to see people like sexual minorities as non-degenerate cases of humanity by simply appealing to something called ‘human rights’, because not being a [redacted ethnic group] or queer is essential for their self-image. Human rights is simply not a relevant moral consideration to appeal to and just begs the questions at hand: “why should we care about membership of the same species?”.

Of course some questions have to begged, we must take some things on assumption. But the point is, a large part of the human species across the globe, including the ‘West’, does not share our (the minority who believe in them) human rights assumption that being human automatically entitles one to a certain standard of treatment. The phrase ‘Human Rights’ has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something that is good’ and its converse ‘something that is bad’. Therefore it must be, the Eurocentric Human Rights activist goes on to think, that their mere invocation would change the course of behaviour of anyone, because after all, Human Rights are eternal values, True for everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances, within any timeframe, and any rational deliberation would come to deduce them from basic premises. Unfortunately this attitude lends itself to an utterly unpragmatic approach to moral persuasion.

Demanding my friends to be more ‘rational’ is neither here nor there because they aren’t being irrational; all the relevant facts are known and there doesn’t appear to be any inconsistencies in their webs of beliefs, goals, interests and desires. They simply have a different frame of reference that, once consulted, yields different results, just the same as the truth of the proposition ‘the Earth is in motion’ is also always relative to a frame of reference (if I take London as a fixed point then the proposition is true, if I take the sun as a fixed point, then it is false). 

Saying that not respecting Otherness is irrational just translates into some sort of expression that “I super duper really truly disapprove of it” and saying it is rational just expresses that “I super duper really truly commend it”. Neither conceptual analysis, thought experiments, analogies locating inconsistencies, hypothetical scenarios, reducing the positions to absurdities nor any other argumentative tools will get them to consider queers as deserving equal treatment, just as much as these tools would fail to get a 19th century slave owner to consider black people as having full personhood. Proselytising using consideration I value will not work just as I will not be persuaded that queers are degenerates by an appeal to consideration they value but I do not, such as to scripture or tradition.

Liberalism (itself a heterogenous tradition, but here I mean that in the genealogy of John Dewey, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer—and not its economic construal related to Hayek and Co.) and the human rights project that accompanies it, is a parochial and idiosyncratic creed, rejected by most of the world’s population and held by a small minority of it, and one which competes with other universalisms—from Christianity and Islam to Confucianism—about the right, the good and true; and is in the eyes of most of the world (whether rightly or wrongly) just one more value the paternalistic West wishes to impose on the rest of us, a neo-colonial project; domination continued through other means. This is a growing view among some self-styled ‘post-colonial’ scholars (though an important field nonetheless), stuck in a self-referential paradox as a result of an excess liberalism. This leads them to condemn it as “Hegemony” “Orientalism” “Monologue” “Cultural Imperialism” “Neoliberalism” and so on, such that their moral self-confidence collapses onto itself. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz highlighted this notion that hangs on the back of the minds of many non-Western populations when he wrote:

This fact, that the principles that animate liberalism are not so self-evident to others, even serious and reasonable others, as they are to liberals, is evident these days everywhere you look. In the resistance to a universal code of human rights as inapplicable to poor countries bent on development and indeed a device, mischievously contrived by the already rich, to hinder such development; in the father-knows-best moralism of a Lee Kuan Yew, paddling truants, journalists, and bumptious businessmen as insufficiently Confucian, or a Suharto, opposing free trade unions, free newspapers, and free elections as contrary to the spirit of Asian communalism; and in a broad range of discourses praising ritual, hierarchy, wholeness, and tribal wisdom, it is clear that Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Mill are particular voices of a particular history, not equally persuasive to all who hear them or their present-day champions.

Morality as ‘We’ Identity and Loyalty

The mistake is to think that moral norms are a matter of knowledge of timeless ‘moral facts’, and if only my friends had gained some more knowledge of these moral facts, then they will come to accept the norms about human rights that i have internalised just as easily as they would accept the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4.

The reason that moral persuasion doesn’t work that way is because ‘reasons’ or ‘justifications’ for actions and beliefs are not properties instantiated in the world in the form of ready-made principles, and then mapped on to our linguistic constructs; but the other way around. Justifications for beliefs and actions is a social enterprise (they don’t appear from Thomas Nagel’s ‘Nowhere’) and different linguistic communities historically developed different ways of talking about things, and hence different standards for beliefs/actions. And so this leaves us with the notion that there is no principled distinction between causes for belief (such as force, enculturation, what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’, propaganda, media influence) on the one hand, and reasons or justifications for belief, on the other.

The proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 is uncontroversial not because it describes Reality more accurately or because it constitutes ‘the realm of facts and not values’, but because it is not central to anyone’s self-image; it is not a belief that serves as a criterion of dividing people into the good sorts of people who one wants to be like (one’s community), and the bad ones. This is in contrast to moral justifications, which are highly contested and play a more central role in people's self-concepts and group affiliations.

According to philosophers like Richard Rorty and Annette Baier, following Wilfred Sellars conception of morality as ‘we-intentions’, when an individual asks herself ‘how should I act?’, the question is implicitly indexed to the justificatory standards of a linguistic community, as when a mother tells her child "we do not hit other people" or “we do not wear clothes like them”. An ‘immoral action’, in this sense, refers to the kind of things we don’t do; that only animals do, only barbarians do, only people of other tribes, families, countries, time periods, do. And if one of ‘us’ continues to perform that action, she is no longer one of us. Thus, while moral philosophers construe morality as the action guiding norms, i.e., as the question ‘how should I act?’, Rorty and co. suggest that the question is better construed as ‘who is my ‘we’; which moral identity should I adopt?’ and ‘why should I retain my current moral identity?’.

The community who I identify with, who I am proud to belong to and attribute my loyalty towards, happens to despise people who do X (e.g., sex outside of marriage) or who identify as Y (e.g., non-whites, lesbians, Indians). So I internalise those norms and it becomes constitutive to my moral identity, and I start to utter: “We (the community I identify with) don’t approve of thus and so”. When I express this, I am simultaneously reporting a norm which has its source as my internalisation of the empirical fact that ‘this norm is held by my community’.

On the other hand, when I stand back from my community and say: “They don’t approve of thus and so”, I am reporting an empirical fact whose source is ‘the fact that the norm is externalised by that community’. And when, in exceptional moments, I do indeed act against the set of norms I have internalised from my community, only then have I adopted a new moral identity. And because moral identities don’t exist ‘out there’ independent of any community standards, and because moral norms cannot be argued for in a non-circular way, this new moral identity is indexed to the normative standards of a new community.

There is perhaps a need to expand a bit more on this inextricable link between moral identity and moral language.

We don’t think in thoughts (i.e., in intentional mental states) first and then look for signs and symbols to map them on to; to think is to use signs and symbols. To have thoughts, we have to have meanings; we can’t have the belief that cats are mammals without having an understanding what the meanings of those signs (‘cat’, ‘are’ and ‘mammal’) are.1 Those signs and symbols are passed on to us by past and present sign and symbol-using humans, thereby linking us to a linguistic community. And though many signs and symbols will be the same across linguistic communities, given that they will be produced by very similar causal pressures, some others will be more contingent and sensitive to the particular linguistic habits of the community, including of the people the community want its members to be like, and those who it does not want its members to be like and wish that they distance themselves from. So when the human rights activist asks the ‘transphobe’, for instance, to refer to others with their preferred pronouns, the activist is not only asking the transphobe to speak differently out of courtesy, but—because our choice of language shapes us—the activist is implicitly asking her to literally alternate who she is and change her moral identity, her community loyalties, commitments and affections.

What the human rights culture attempts to do is restructure the parochial “we” into [the superset of all human beings], so that loyalty is owed to a convergent, monolithic ‘human’ community. What this means is that it asks of people to change their moral identity and adopt a new one. The way it goes about doing so is by espousing universalisable moral principles that all humans are claimed to share in virtue of being the class ‘human’. Having been given no reason to accept changing their loyalties and identities other than being presented with a document entitled ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, people not enculturated in those principles safely ignore such principles no matter how much human rights activists huff and puff that these principle are, in fact, Human Rights Principles, and not just any principles.

Where someone’s loyalty, obligation and commitment to a community, one that relies on its self-image as not being the good sort of people— the people who are not queers or [X ethnic group] or infidels or apostates etc. —conflicts with a proclaimed universal principle, then simply reiterating that the universal principle in question is a universal principle just leaves the question begged on its knees. The phrase ‘Human rights!’ is commonly invoked like a magic spell as if its simple invocation will alter the current practices of those whom we do not agree with. Admonishments with formulaic and impotent—because universalist—statements such as “This is a violation of Human Rights!” does not provide those who have not been enculturated into our (the extreme minority who actually hold on to them) social practices with the conceptual resources necessary to evoke the desired emotional reaction which we seek; it doesn’t give them any reason to change their moral and practical identities. They are rhetorically bunk.

Non-WEIRD populations, many of whom are non-pluralistic and less individualistic, have no reason to change their loyalties and practical identities because many wish to belong to more particularistic and identifiable groups. The emergence and continuation of nation-states and the principle of self-determination so widely held today seems to evidence this fact. The need to belong—whether to a church, class, or even a small clique—is a psychological human need. It is hardly attainable without forming an in-group which is constitutively exclusionary, i.e., which is identifiable by not being the out-group. That is not to imply that “sticking to” A group means “sticking it to” B group, but it is to imply that our first-order obligations will be indexed to a particularistic community, and that we almost never reject the moral views of the community (say, about sex outside of marriage) in favour of a broad general principle. If we take Rorty and co.’s argument seriously, then given that morality is, in part, the expression of a constitutively exclusionary identity that’s derivative from one’s linguistic community, and a moral identity one had been enculturated into, then hope for universal human rights will continue to be frustrated absent the convergence of a monolithic global community; that is, absent of the abjuration of the nation-state system and a return to, as I argued for elsewhere, a more egalitarian, decentralised, anarchism. In other terms, most of the world’s population will happily recite with Kipling that “All nice people like Us are We / And everybody else is They”.

Human Rights? Which Humans?

There’s nothing special about having moral principles. All groups, from the nazis and the slaveholders to feminists and human rights activists, have moral principles. These principles are not absolute, as every principle has historically been immediately relativised and attached with endless caveats. ‘Thou shall not kill’ …unless it is a member of the tribe next door or unless one is a soldier in combat or unless one is an executioner etc. etc. The only commonality between them is that there is a group to which these moral principles apply.

But even where this delineating line has been made fuzzier or expanded to include humanity as the reference point of the moral community, as was championed by most Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Hume and Rousseau (with the exception of Hobbes), a contradiction-dissolving distinction was always ready-at-hand to justify one’s particularistic, enculturated norms, no matter how arbitrary: pagans, women, and sexual and ethnic minorities, for instance, have historically been identified as degenerate cases of humanity, and therefore unworthy of being counted within ‘our’ human moral community. This is exemplified by the notion pointed out by feminism philosopher Annette Baier that to do violence to a woman was, until very recently, doing violence to a sovereign (father, brother, pimp, etc.) who owns the woman and might take offence to the violence, as opposed to doing violence to a sovereign human being qua human.

This equally applied—and still does—to skin colour. Writing in 1899, African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote:

[The] widening of the idea of common humanity is of slow growth and today but dimly realized. We grant full citizenship in the World Commonwealth to the “Anglo-Saxon” (whatever that may mean), the Teuton and Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance, we extend it to the Celt and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilized world denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth-century Humanity. (My emphasis).

And so all moral principles that purport to be universal can be easily sidestepped by claiming that the relevant group in question is not part of the moral community. Historically, this has usually played out by claiming that the group is not human—or not fully human. This is why the first thing that groups do in order to justify their actions to themselves and others is dehumanise their victims, to show that they are not 'us', the real class of humans. The Israelis have to continuously dehumanise the Palestinians as, in the words of Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, “human animals”, in order to carry out the ongoing genocide. Australian military personnel had to dehumanise Afghans as ‘ragheads’ in order to murder Afghan civilians in cold blood for sport. The Hutus in Rwanda had to refer to Tutsis as cockroaches and snakes in order to hunt them down with machetes and genocide a million of them, as one participant of the genocide later remarked: "We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps”. Similarly, the Allied forced in Japan had to dehumanise Japanese people in order to firebomb Tokyo and murder a hundred thousand innocent civilians, something which an Allied commander testified at the time in saying that "we are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin." The Japanese, in turn, had to dehumanise the Chinese in order for the Rape of Nanjing to occur, as one participant of the massacre later remarked when interviewed, “perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman . . . but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig”. Likewise, a Japanese private who was ordered to bayonet a Chinese civilian for practice gave the following testimony;

One day Second Lieutenant Ono said to us, “You have never killed anyone yet, so today we shall have some killing practice. You must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only as something of rather less value than a dog or cat. Be brave! Now, those who wish to volunteer for killing practice, step forward . . . I plunged the bayonet into the petrified Chinese. When I opened my eyes again, he had slumped down into the pit. (Emphasise mine).

The ‘Mere Gook Rule’ is also another case in point, a US military policy during the Vietnam war dictating that US military personnel can kill and rape anyone so long as they are ‘mere gooks’; less than animals. To further hammer the point, the Holocaust was made possible only because Jews, queers, Romani people, Slavic people, were not seen as human in the yes of the nazis, who had to create propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew where Jews were portrayed as rats, and The Subhuman which remarked that “although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal”. A revealing quote from a participant of a pogrom in 1993 against Romani people moreover shows the precarity of ‘human’ as a universal criteria for moral consideration:

On reflection, though, it would have been better if we had burnt more of the people, not just the houses” . . . “We did not commit murder—how could you call killing Gypsies murder?” protested Maria. “Gypsies are not really people, you see. They are always killing each other. They are criminals, sub-human, vermin. And they are certainly not wanted here

Though the participant unconsciously refers to Romanians as ‘people’, she goes on to add that they are not ‘people’ par excellence, i.e., not ‘us’. Again and again history shows us that the category ‘human’ is reserved for the ingroup and is coextensive with ‘us’. If you want further evidence, watch as any allegiance to an abstract ‘humanity’ quickly dissipates when you present them with specific faces secured to particular bodies.

So, this idea of a human-subhuman division is historically rehashed based on whatever happens to be the exclusionary fab of the time; nationality, culture, race, religion, ethnicity and other ways of dividing human beings into ‘our’ kind and ‘their’ kind. Even groups like the Jacobins who fought under the principles of peaceful universalism, universal reason, liberty, fraternity and justice had to dehumanise the royalists in order to dance upon the ruins of the Bastille and for the ‘reign of terror’ to finally occur. So too did the Christian Knight, who rejoiced on universal ethical principles such as ‘Love your neighbour’, but who had to exclude muslims as relevant neighbours in order for the crusades to occur. We can also observe radical typifications of this in the famed U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, who can be seen as an encapsulation for the 19th century American slave-based society in which slavery was woven in the fabrics of its institutions; a man who is at once exalted as the beacon of liberty, equality, great intelligence and for being, in fact, an abolitionist, and yet who owned over 600 slaves working in his plantations. He hailed from same society which upheld a Constitution who’s very first article stipulates that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that such a stipulation is a ‘self-evident truth’. Those who revolted against George III in the name of universal human liberty and equality had no qualms with enslaving, lynching and torturing the Indians and Africans.

It may seem like absurd hypocrisy, but in their lights, only members of the ingroup are really ‘human’. Genocide is justified in the same sense in which we today justify the mass slaughter of nonhuman animals; they are simply deemed not human—and that’s enough. Imagine a world where there are nonhuman creatures in humanoid forms walking about disguised as humans, and might in fact be malevolent towards us ‘real’ humans. Historically, this attribute has often been ascribed to members of the outgroup. They are something more akin to zombies that need to be eradicated.

We must also recall that many public intellectuals—philosophers, botanists and natural scientists with their biological taxonomies—expressed the zeitgeist of 18-19th century America when they preached that Africans and Indians were naturally inferior beings to which the social construct ‘race’ came to hold a species-level distinction in the public consciousness. There was no contradiction to reconcile, a distinction was made available: slaves were not of the same species. When Hume, for instance, remarked that “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites” and that “their difference, etc., is proof of a different species” or when Forster said that “non-white and white are related species: major differences, also human, yet not: our species” or when Voltaire categorised “Negroes” closer to children and apes than human beings, they were not expressing an uncommon view. It is also why, I presume, we do not want non-human animal corpses in storefronts to bear any resemblances they have to ‘us’, invariably presented as chunks of flesh with no discernible body parts or faces lest we remember that they are not so ontologically distinct from the featherless bipeds that we are. 

While it’s plausible that most human beings developed some cross-cultural idea about treating some human group as pretty much always an end in itself just as much as we developed similar cross-cultural taste preferences, but the important question is (as pointed out by Annette Baier): which humans beings? The disgusting tribesmen in the cave next door, of whom I cannot be certain aren’t out to kill me? Every society asks itself ‘which group of beings can we kill and plunder’?

The Human Rights culture is predicated on ‘inalienable’ rights extended to all humans with the assumption that ‘human’ actually means all humans. But this rarely ever translates as such in practice, even in contemporary societies that enshrine human rights in their legal systems. The examples provided show that ‘Human’ is too sublime, too general, abstract and decontextualised to be practicable, and has the potential of eliding identity-specific privileges and marginalisations. Preaching absolute principles of human rights as the sole tool of moral persuasion seems to be to that extent misguided.

And so, to humanise the ‘Other’, invocations of moral principles of human rights are impotent in comparison to narratives that extend our imaginations of others that are alien to us and whom we have failed to notice and are not what we call "we". As Rorty argues, anthropologists, historians, ethnographers, novelists, journalists do this by "showing how to explain their odd behavior in terms of a coherent, if unfamiliar, set of beliefs and desires—as opposed to explaining this behavior with terms like stupidity, madness, baseness or sin". I expand on this more preferred path in the final section.

Human Rights are Constructed, and That’s Okay

A lucky happenstance, by our current lights, is a contemporary Human Rights culture whose ideals are egalitarian in principle (even if they were applied arbitrarily) which culminated in building institutions and practices grounded on those ideals. What emerged is a self-questioning culture which actively attempts to be anti-ethnocentric and seeks to expand the notion of who counts as ‘us’, and one that prides itself in including those who previously did not count and who’s interests were not considered (e.g. women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, nonhuman animals, sexual minorities, transgender persons).

But this does not mean that humans “have” rights inscribed into the bosoms of the species as some kind of metaphysical properties. After Darwin's thesis was taken seriously, viz. that humans are plastic and malleable creatures of biology and of prudence and not as moral and static creatures, it became very difficult to conceive of humanity as having some intrinsic nature with universalisable intrinsic rights, and to be in some way metaphysically distinct from the rest of the animals. One close look at the phenomena of feral children shows how blurred the human-nonhuman animal line is, with the only distinction being enculturation (children adopted by monkeys/ wolves/dogs/sheep/goats for even less than a year during their formative years continue to behave and speak like monkeys/wolves/dogs/sheep/goats for the rest of their lives!). Human rights are a summary of certain rules and social practices we, the minority liberal-minded individuals, think ought to apply to humans qua humans, and work to slowly expand who counts within that category.

Between Paternalism and Alienation

Essentialism is the belief that certain qualities or characteristics are essential to the nature or identity of something, in this case, human rights. In the context of human rights, essentialism implies that there are unchanging, eternal truths or moral laws that underpin these rights.

On the other hand, universalism is the belief that certain rights and values should be applicable to all humans, regardless of their cultural, social, or political background. Universalism does not necessarily assume that these rights are based on eternal truths or moral laws but rather that they are principles that societies should strive to uphold to ensure the dignity and well-being of all individuals.

While both essentialism and universalism advocate for the applicability of human rights to all individuals, they are based on different foundations. Essentialism focuses on unchanging moral laws, whereas universalism emphasises the importance of upholding certain principles to protect human dignity and well-being. My critique is limited to essentialism; that is, not with the idea of human rights being applicable to everyone, but rather with the underlying assumption that these rights are based on unchanging, eternal truths..

The essentialist view of human rights usually appeals to ‘natural law’ and eternal truths as a foundational justification. I argue that this leads to two misleading approaches: one of paternalism where unconvinced populations are viewed as children who lack knowledge of the moral facts, and one of alienation where they are ironically dehumanised, inviting a response of indifference such as that witnessed in the response to the Bosnian War and the Rwandan Genocide.

The first is a misdiagnosis where those who do not share the standards of our human right culture are viewed as being in error due to some childlike prejudice or superstition or at any rate, a misperception of the eternal ‘moral facts’—and not because they have simply been socialised into different practices. The difference between western, rich and democratic societies and other societies is thus taken to be one of knowledge, including knowledge of the moral facts. The remedy that this paternalistic view prescribes is not manipulating emotions by sentimental education but increasing ‘moral knowledge’ by teaching human rights principles of right and wrong actions.

But, as argued earlier, there is no such thing as ‘moral knowledge’ which populations inhabiting the northern hemisphere of the earth have privileged epistemic access to. While human rights sound nice to our ears, those values cannot be defended by an argument with neutral premises, without resorting to circularity. If we fail to acknowledge this we will be accused of smuggling in our parochial social practices into the definition of something eternal and transcendental.

The essentialist view of human rights can also result in alienation when it creates an "us vs. them" mentality, where those who uphold human rights are seen as morally superior, and those who violate them are regarded as brutes lacking moral agency. It ironically turning this brand of human rights on its head, where ‘human’ translates into ‘people like us’ and those who violate ‘human rights’ are seen as being more like animal brutes who lack moral agency than like ‘us’, and from which one conclusion that could follow is that there’s no point in getting involved between the quarrels of brutes. But indifference is only one side of the dehumanisation coin; the other extreme is dehumanisation and from that, a straight line follows to genocide, as when during ‘the War on Terror’, the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was justified as necessary to protect human rights, but the detainees were often dehumanised and subjected to torture, which goes against the very principles of human rights.

We may also add a third attitude which could lead to to a similar conclusion: the dogmatism that comes with the belief of eternal moral laws. This was partly the attitude that lead to the unfortunate series of events from 1921 to 1989 or the events of 1793-1794, because if a grand theory, such as Liberalism or Socialism or Human Rights, must be true by necessity, and because what is true is taken to be always desired, it shall be fought for no matter the consequences. The Crusades in the Middle Ages were fuelled by the dogmatic belief that Christianity was the only true religion, and its followers were morally obligated to spread it, often through violent means. Similarly, the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror, where thousands were executed in the name of upholding the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Atrocities in the name of eternal principles of the universal kind, as those preached by Marxists or Christians or Human Rights activists, are always seen by their holders as justifiable in the end after the rubble and dust settles. But human affairs do not follow pre-set rules as in logic and mathematics and there are no uniform answers to all human ills, such as Human Rights or Rationality or Hegelianism or Marxism or Christianity or Common Sense.

Narratives Over Principles

The presupposition underlying the contemporary Human Rights attitude finds its roots in Kant’s first formulation of human rights as a categorical imperative of treating all human beings as ends but it cannot be defended without begging the question, nor is it accepted by most of the world’s populations with which it is simply too risky to extend moral consideration outside of one’s tribe (in the most abstract sense of the word) or parochial community. Nor does the Human Rights culture, as derived from Kantian deontological notions, do much to those who don’t see others as fully human (the Nazis to the Jews, 19th century Whites to the Blacks, contemporary men to women, homophobes to queers, fundamentalists to apostates, etc.). Kant, after all, did believe that humans must be treated as ends in themselves but did not see blacks or women as fully human, but as lesser developed humans with infant rationality.

My critical reflection in this essay is inspired by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey who had naturalised Hegel's criticism of Universal Moral Law Kantianism while jettisoning his 'Absolute Spirit' meta-narrative by saying that there are no impartial, ahistorical criteria for social responsibility other than our choice of commitments to, and identifications with, a community; just as one is committed to a lover or friend—by trust, sensibility, love, solidarity and emotional friendships, and not universalisable human rights principles.

Kantian ‘principles’ of human rights are nonetheless useful, not as foundations or a ‘grounding’ for our frameworks in which to derive from further premises, but as a matter of pragmatism in guiding our institutions and reminding us of the sorts of considerations we care about, as well as being murky summaries of our general intuitions and practices in a post-Holocaust world.

But they reach their limit as tools of persuasion. “Reason'“ writes Richard Rorty, “can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken”. In this he is echoing Dewey when he wrote that ‘Imagination is the chief instrument of the good ... art is more moral than moralities.’

If we want to take Rorty and Dewey’s advice seriously we should consider replacing universal moral principles and philosophical treatises with other tools aimed at expanding the moral circle that appeal to people’s sentimentality. This might mean for teachers all over the world to assign reading to their students about how it feels to be in the shoes of a member of a marginalised group with the hope of expanding their sensibilities beyond their narrow experiences. Most societies are exclusionary, and so how it feels to be different is systematically suppressed along the lines of  categorisations from gender and sexuality, to nationality, ethnicity, class, religion and even species. The Greeks, for instance, thought of the world as divided between Greeks—which are Humans par excellence—and the savages. It was only in cultivating sensitivities to Others in writings such as Herodotus’ Histories and plays such as Aeschylus’ The Persians where Athenians came to extend a measure of sympathy to the otherwise alien and estranged Persians. Most societies moreover refer to themselves as ‘the people’ with the implication that those not part of the society are not people, or at any rate, not people par excellence.

Instead of Human rights principles as tools of persuasion, we should look unto and invest more on biographical narratives, plays, films, soap operas, poems, memoirs, and diaries to cultivate our sensibilities and extend our imaginations of others that are alien to us and whom we have failed to notice. As argued, presenting someone with a grand principle does not give them any reason to change their moral identity, but I suspect that helping them be more imaginative does. Assigning students memoirs such as I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing and The Diary of Anne Frank, or novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Uncle’ Tom’s Cabin and the like, helps them identify and empathise with the storyteller instead of an impersonal principle or an abstract and alien figure in a trolley problem, and affords them a window opportunity to experience the life of an oppressed person first-hand as if it was their own. As Fredrick Douglas writes in Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas, an American Slave, 

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs [songs the slaves would sing] would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.

Of course a necessary prerequisite for this sensitivity is security; to live in unhazardous conditions where one can be rest assured that other humans will not attack and humiliate her, such that her difference from others is not constitutive of who she is. Living in safe and stable environments allows people to be more open to understanding and empathising with others, as their own basic needs and well-being are taken care of. Conversely, in situations where people feel threatened or insecure, they may be more likely to close themselves off from others and prioritise their own survival.

At any rate, I think this is the reason why we have yet to acknowledge the plight of nonhuman animals to which we breed into existence, enslave and then slaughter 80 billion of them a year; it is complicated by the fact that nonhuman animals do not have a voice of their own, no equivalents to Anne Frank and Fredrick Douglas, to impress on our sensibilities. We can always of course mitigate this by ‘speaking for’ the animals, but this will always be less visceral, as almost all social justice movements are catalysed by the voices of those that suffer from the injustice. We can, however, promote documentaries, films, and books that reveal the experiences and lives of nonhuman animals and have a powerful impact on viewers and readers. By showcasing the conditions in which animals live, as well as their emotional and social lives, these works can inspire empathy and a desire to improve their welfare.

References

• Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, 1993 — From which the conclusions of the last sections are derived.

• Henrich et al., ‘The Weirdest Populatoins in the World’, 2010 — The section on moral psychology.

• David Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It — The section about the parochialism of the changing signifier ‘human’.

• Richard Rorty, ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’, 2010 — This essays is a mere footnote to Rorty’s paper. That paper is the thread which ties in all the assumptions made herein, especially the idea of viewing morality as moral identity.