Foundations of Human Rights: The Unfinished Business

Abstract

Over the two years it took them to draft the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the eighteen members of the U.N.'s first Human Rights Commission had surprisingly few discussions of why human beings have rights or why some rights are universal.' After the horrors of two world wars, the need for a minimal common standard of decency seemed evident. One of the first tasks assigned to the new Commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt was the preparation of an "international bill of rights." The Commissioners, in haste to complete their work before the deepening Cold War made its acceptance by the General Assembly impossible, left the problem of foundations for another day. At the Commission's first session in January 1947, China's Peng-chun Chang and Lebanon's Charles Malik did try to initiate a discussion of the premises on which such a document might be based. 2 Chang was a Confucian philosopher and educator who had done postgraduate work with John Dewey, and Malik was a philosopher of science who had studied with Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger. Their suggestions precipitated the Commission's first argument. The Yugoslav, French and English delegates began to wrangle over the relation between man and society. Several other Commissioners became impatient with that sort of discussion. They just wanted to get on with the business at hand. After a time, India's Hansa Mehta broke in. She was one of two women on the Commission, a pioneering human rights activist, a crusader against British colonialism, and an advocate for women's equality. She said, "We are here to affirm faith in fundamental human rights. Whether the human person comes first or the society, I do not think we should discuss that problem now. We do not need to enter into this maze of ideology. '3 Charles Malik, who had been literally called out of his Beirut classroom and pressed into public service by the government of newly independent 1. For details of the framing of the Universal Declaration, see Mary Ann Glendon, Rights from Wrongs (forthcoming, Random House). 2. Human Rights Commission, First Session, Summary Records (E/CN.4/SR.7 p. 4).

“The First Generation to End Poverty and the Last to Save the Planet?”—Western Individualism, Human Rights and the Value of Nature in the Ethics of Global Sustainable Development

“…There are different approaches within philosophy on how to justify human rights within ethical theory. I cannot enter into the debate about which of the suggested theories is most promising [18][19][20]. Standard accounts encompass most prominent ethical theories.…”

“…In fact, the idea of human dignity is not a Western invention, even though the human rights might have first been elaborated in the West [29]. Along this line, it has indeed quite early on been argued that ideas of "freedom, human dignity, tolerance and neighborliness" can be found in many different cultures and are not just 'Western' concepts [19]. The human rights framework should further be seen as guaranteeing a minimal set of fundamental rights to basic necessities for agency without determining richer notions of moral self-understanding.…”

Challenges to Human Dignity in the Ecology Movement

“…As Mary Ann Glendon describes, the 1948 Declaration sought a political consensus instead of providing a moral or philosophical treatise on human nature and the rights and dignities derived from it. 6 In spite of this deficiency, nations affirmed human rights and dignity because man's inhumanity to man was fresh in their minds—the Holocaust, slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansings, political murders of dissidents in totalitarian regimes, religious coercion, human trafficking, torture and degradation of prisoners. It was through this via negativa that they affirmed the existence of universal human rights.…”

The Myth of Universality: The UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee” and the Making of Human Rights

“…A year later, as Glendon's research advanced, she returned to the UNESCO survey, now in the context of a formal campaign against charges that the UDHR, and human rights more generally, were a set of essentially Western political and philosophical ideas masquerading as universal truths 8 . In an extended defense of human rights universality, Glendon argued that the UNESCO committee had “discovered to its surprise that a few basic practical concepts of humane conduct were so widely shared that they ‘may be viewed as implicit in man's nature as a member of society’” (Glendon 1999, 5, quoting from McKeon's essay in UNESCO 1949, 45). But it was through the publication of her 2001 A World Made New that the far-reaching implications of the UNESCO human rights survey reached a global audience.…”