The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Buch 65 von 111: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Gregg, Benjamin

 
9780812248050: The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812248058 ISBN 13: 9780812248050
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The nation state operates on a logic of exclusion: no state can offer citizenship and legal rights to all comers. From the logic of exclusion a state derives its sovereign power. Yet this exclusivity undermines the project of advancing human rights globally. That project operates on a logic of inclusion: all people, regardless of citizenship status or territorial location, would everywhere be recognized as bearers of human rights. In practice, human rights are afforded, if at all, then only to citizens of those few states that sometimes regard human rights as moral necessities of domestic commitments—or for states that find that stance politically expedient for the moment.

This discouraging reality in the first decades of the twenty-first century prompts the question: What political arrangement might better conduce the local embrace and enduring practice of human rights? In The Human Rights State, Benjamin Gregg challenges the conviction that the nation state can only have a zero-sum relationship with human rights: national sovereignty is possible or human rights are possible, but not both, not in the same place, at the same time. He argues that the human rights project would be more effective if established and enforced at local levels as locally valid norms, and from there encouraged to expand outward toward overlaps with other locally established and enforced conceptions of human rights grown in their own local soils.

Proposing a metaphorical human rights state that operates within or alongside a nation state, Gregg describes networks of activists that encourage local political and legal systems to generate domestic obligations to enforce human rights. Geographic boundaries and national sovereignties would remain intact but diminished to the extent necessary to extend human rights to all persons, without reservation, across national borders, by rendering human rights an integral aspect of the nation state's constitution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benjamin Gregg teaches social and political theory at the University of Texas, Austin. He is author of Human Rights as Social Construction; Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration Across Communities; and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism.

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Introduction
A Project for the Free Embrace of Human Rights

The playwright Bertolt Brecht spent fourteen years in exile. He was officially stateless for twelve. He fled Germany in February 1933, one month after the Nazis took power. After shorter stays in various cities, including Prague, Vienna, Zürich, and Paris, he spent a longer period in Denmark and then in Sweden. When the Germans occupied Denmark and attacked Norway in 1940, and neutral Sweden allowed Germany transit routes for its Norwegian campaign, Brecht fled in April to Finland by ship. He remained in Finland until May 1941, when he left by train for Leningrad, then Moscow, then Vladivostok and, only nine days before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, by Swedish boat to Los Angeles, which he reached in July. He returned to Europe in 1947.

While he and his companions struggled to get visas to the United States, Brecht started a play in rural Marlebäck, four hours outside Helsinki, in 1940, and worked on it intermittently until 1944, in Los Angeles. He sets his Flüchtlingsgespräche, or Conversations in Exile, in a bar at the Helsinki Railway Station where two German refugees, Ziffel, a physicist, and Kalle, a laborer, while away their time sparring in a loosely connected series of meandering exchanges. "These encompass memories of childhood and school years as well as of exile, some of which . . . are recognizable as Brecht's own" (Parker 2014:421). At one point Ziffel says to Kalle, "The passport is the noblest part of a person. It isn't generated in the plain and simple way people are. A person can be begotten anywhere in the world, in the most frivolous of ways—but not a passport. That's why a passport, so long as it's a good one, is recognized—whereas a person can be ever so good yet still be denied recognition." Brecht captures in this passage the topsy-turvy world of rights: what matters is not the human being but rather his or her legal status. Thus the person is reduced to an epiphenomenon of a formal document issued by a nation state. And a passport assumes some of the qualities usually attributed instead to human beings: nobility; grounds for social and legal recognition; the bearer of "goodness" and "badness."

This book offers a critique of this topsy-turvy logic. It then develops an alternative logic. This "inclusionary logic" is a vision not of rights in general but of human rights in particular. It has several core features. Consider each in turn.

Social Construction as Method

This book takes forward a project I began in Human Rights as Social Construction. There I argue for human rights as worldly social constructions. Human rights in this context may take any number of overlapping forms, from the "human rights idea" to the "human rights project," from "human rights thinking" to "human rights communities," as well as human rights themselves.

To say that human rights are socially constructed is to regard them wholly as products of human imagination. It is to regard them as this-worldly products of human hand, as distinguished from otherworldly givens, whether theological or metaphysical.

This is a rather optimistic view. It is the conviction that we humans can pull ourselves up morally by our own normative bootstraps. It is the belief that communities can assume the stance of active producers of their fate rather than regarding themselves as passive "consumers" of otherworldly givens.

To say that human communities invent moralities is to say that moralities are cultural claims. In this sense I regard human rights as political phenomena, as a matter of political agency, toward social justice. Ideas of justice, behaviors that create and reinforce justice, and institutions that provide justice—for example, by treating all members of society as legal and moral equals—do not start out as universals. They start out as particular expressions of agency. They begin as historically and culturally particular. And they are always embedded in socially constructed structures: cultural traditions, philosophical schools, social mores, legal systems. This book seeks to show how, in the longue durée, human rights as political phenomena can aspire to eventual universal purchase. The idea of a human rights state is a means of advancing a realistic cosmopolitanism.

As social constructions, human rights are contingent norms. That is, their validity depends on humans regarding them as valid. To construe the validity of human rights as relative to the humans who construct them is to view human rights in their element of moral relativism. It is to view them in their medium of historical and cultural perspectivalism. It is to view them as essentially "political" in nature. A specifically political social construction is a contingent, this-worldly idea. Its moral potential cannot be harvested unless it is always open to contestation, reinterpretation, and adaptation. Its moral potential needs a community open to negotiation and compromise in the effort to achieve agreement among participants on matters of human rights. The forging and reforging of agreement on human rights can still lead to a nonidiosyncratic perspective. In a postmetaphysical landscape, a nonidiosyncratic perspective replaces what religion and metaphysics regard as perspectives true or valid universally or a priori or eternally.

A nonidiosyncratic perspective is true or valid because it is held consensually, not because it is inherently neutral or acultural or transcendent. And if the validity of human rights is contingent, fallibilistic, and locally embedded, truth and justice at any given time refer to a temporary report from the field of experience and inquiry, a "snapshot" for current orientation, always revisable. Understood in this relativist sense, truth and justice are neither impossible nor drained of their capacity to motivate behavior. Rather, both truth and justice are driven not by some epistemological imperative for objectivity but by a pragmatic imperative for desired results. As social constructions, human rights are not some absolute or timeless cornerstone for moral theory. They are a "rhetorical vehicle" that can convey various meanings under different circumstances and can serve multiple purposes in different contexts. Among these meanings and purposes are elements of justice, such as rights to life, safety, and personal liberty; to belief, expression, and conscience; to privacy and property.

On this approach, human rights are one more example of what human culture can imagine. While their historical achievement would be an extraordinary event in human history, human rights are not themselves something special or extraordinary. They are not the work of extraordinary individuals or groups, and the most common people in the most ordinary of circumstances can imagine and create them. They do not require any special way of thinking. They work with readily understandable intuitions, such as the moral usefulness of putting oneself in the other's shoes. They work with well-known ideas such as "prudential reciprocity," which motivates behavior along the lines of mutual benefit. Such mundane characteristics mark potential for beginning to develop a human rights consciousness in almost any community in which people can be motivated to practice reciprocity and are capable of putting themselves in the other's shoes.

Yet social construction is not just one more comprehensive view. It can coexist with a wide range of competing comprehensive doctrines. For example, it can cooperate with persons of faith who share the goal of advancing human rights. Regardless of its empirical, secular orientation within the social sciences, my proposal in no way seeks to dissuade the faithful from their faith. Even as I reject "theological and...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812248058
ISBN 13 
9780812248050
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
283
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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