Anna Yeatman

Who is the Subject of Human Rights

What is distinctive about human rights, when compared with the rights claims associated with modern citizenship, animals, or nonbiological units of conscious being (artificial intelligence)? It is suggested that each of these discourses constitutes the subject of rights differently. This article concentrates on both philosophical and psychological means of registering the unique individuality of the subject of human rights. Because human rights is predicated of all human beings, it is a universal discourse and one that Kant called “cosmopolitan right.” The subject of human rights is also the subject in its existential integrity or wholeness. This article explores tensions between the subject of human rights and the jurisdictionally limited and exclusive subject of modern citizenship, tensions that pose new demands on states with respect to international law and standards.

The Subject of Citizenship

Considerations of citizenship of whatever kind demand an idea of citizenship. There cannot be an idea of citizenship without an account of the subject of citizenship. This paper argues that the subject of citizenship is “the individual” considered as an integrated unit of organic and subjective life. It is this idea of the individual that is the referent for the idea of self-preservation in early modern civil philosophy. It is difficult to appreciate the significance of “self-preservation” without using the vantage point of post-Freudian accounts of the self to open it up. Citizenship concerns the status of the human being considered as a person (a self). Citizenship also denotes the public aspect of individualism as this is instituted and secured through the agency of the state (considered in its republican sense as the state subject to law).

The New Contractualism and Individualized Personhood

A reply to Ramia Ramias central point of criticism of my work on the new contractualism has it that I reject social protection and the importance of social protection in providing a restraint on the destructive effects of liberal market principles. He has constructed a straw person. I never designed my work on the new contractualism to make such an argument. Nor can it be argued that my work in this area unwittingly proposes that social protection is unnecessary once classical liberalism has been opened up to a more complex and more inclusive dynamic of individualization of the kind that I associate with the new contractualism. Most of the opposition to contemporary contractualism comes from those who champion either an older tradition of non-individualized collectivism or contemporary communitarianism. In this context, contemporaries who work within the intellectual traditions of social democracy and sociology need to think again when they are tempted to echo the communitarian rhetoric of condemnation of individualization, individualism and fragmentation. Are they going to recycle the old antinomy of individual and society, where, traditionally, social democracy and sociology have championed the latter term, or are they going to accept the ethical challenge of individuality and think about the social conditions of its possibility? If we are to use the metaphor of protection, we must ensure that we do so in a way that does not trap us within the old liberal equation of a need for protection with a lack of individuality. Historically, protection has been accompanied by the deprivation of freedom to those who have been seen to need it (see Yeatman, 1984). Welfare policy still operates in this way. The new contractualism thesis If we are to take individuality seriously, we have to take the rich tradition of liberal thought seriously because it gives us insight into the nature of individuality, although I want to argue this is individuality of a particular historical type. Liberalism centres on a particular conception of the human subject. This is an already fully formed individual who possesses mature contractual capacity and who exercises this capacity on behalf of his and (as it now is) her freedom to be both self-governing and self-reliant. This conception of the human subject is structured by its existence as an individualized unit of private property. It emphasizes the freedom of the individual to do as (s)he wills. Since individuals can function only with the assistance of others, liberalism has to admit this truth, but it does so in a way that sustains the private propertied atomism of the individual. It admits the dependence of the individual on others in two ways. First, by way of exchange with other individuals, where the nature of the exchange confirms each in his or her standing as private individuals free to do as they will. Second, by way of a private relationship of government or command over other individuals, where these others are positioned as subject to the will of the self-governing individual. Historically, these others have been wives, children and employees. Today, children are still positioned in this way especially if they are under the age of 12. Where the first type of relationship of the liberal subject -- the reciprocity of an exchange relationship -- offers recognition to the individuality of those party to it, the second type of relationship of the liberal subject is predicated on a profound inequality. The individuality of the patrimonial head of the unit concerned, whether it is a family or firm, swallows up that of his dependants. They are to have no individuality of their own for the duration of their dependence on his government of them. As Carole Pateman (1979) puts it in her account of the liberal theory of obligation, these dependants are so positioned that they are compelled to exchange their obedience for the patrimonial individuals protection of them. …

The roles of scientific and non-scientific types of knowledge in the improvement of practice

This article discusses the problems posed for an adequate understanding of the multiple inputs into knowledge by the continuing epistemological dominance of scientific knowledge. This dominance is matched by the institutional dominance of academics in relation to practitioners. Practitioner knowledge is to be seen as part of the wider activity of social problem solving, which we would undertake more intelligently if we were able to identify and value the non-scientific knowledge inputs on which it depends as much as on the input of science. The article sees a more inclusive and ‘non-scientistic’ map of knowledge as the central condition for developing genuine partnership and exchange between academics, practitioners, and ordinary knowers. Action research is located as a valuable contribution which science can make to the improvement of practice, but it is not accepted as adequately taking up the non-scientific knowledge components of practice in particular, and social problem solving in general.

Contracting Out and Public Values: A Symposium

The three papers that constitute this symposium were first commissioned for a workshop entitled Citizenship and Contractualism held in October 2000. The theme of that workshop centred on the contractualisation of the relationship between service deliverers and their clients. These three papers did not fit that theme. They are concerned more with the general use of contracting out as a tool of contemporary governance. I have used the title contracting out and public values because all three of these papers raise fundamental questions about the implications of contracting out for public values.

Varieties of Individualism

Iam someone who has participated in and thought about late twentiethcentury social movements that have used the rhetoric of self-determination and participatory democracy. I have been attracted to the rhetoric of participation and inclusion. In particular, I have been intrigued by the rethinking of political and ethical life that has been implicit in recent democratic movements. These are movements that, for one reason or another, have championed the idea that each human being is a subject who is entitled to participate in the decisions that govern his or her life, an idea that readily fans out into a broader proposition that all relationships between human subjects should be open to the voice of each, and thereby become subject to negotiation (in contemporary political language to dialogue and deliberation). This is a vision of “power over” ceding place to “power with” in the conduct of relationships (this is the language used by the principal and teachers in a primary school I studied that is committed to including the children or students in the governance of the school at the levels of both the classroom and the whole school).1 That is to say, those with authority are expected to use it to invite all who are party to the relationship to become fully fledged participants in the relationship. To be a participant is to be present as someone whose voice and, as appropriate, choice are to count in the conduct of the relationship. It is also to be present as someone who can hold those who make decisions on behalf of the group to account for how those decisions impact the differently positioned members of this group.

Globality, State and Society

Globality denotes the development of society on a universal scale. Society is no longer contained by the nation state and social solidarity in the Durkheimian sense becomes global rather than national. This development intensifies the ethical challenge of modernity: the development of a cosmopolitan conception of the human subject. This paper asks what this ethical challenge demands both of us as individual citizens and of the states to which we belong. A cosmopolitan conception of the human subject is one that abstracts from group-based differences of identity in specifying what it is to be a person. Whether people get to be persons depends on the action of the state in providing a constitutional framework of right. It depends also on individuals becoming both willing and able to be self-determining persons who can recognise their fellows as persons. The development of a cosmopolitan conception of right is hindered by profound ambivalence about the modern project of self-determination and the demands it makes of us. It is hindered also by the lack of a secular account of the human subject and by conceptions of human rights that follow upon an onto-theological conception of the human subject. These are anti-statist in orientation and share this in common with laissez-faire economic globalism. Cosmopolitan right depends on both persons and states understanding what it would mean to re-conceive the res publica such that states are oriented as public authorities within a constitutionally governed interstate order.

Feminism and the Technological Age

Abstract Feminism advocates for the inclusion of women within the modern economy, but this has implicated feminism in a hyper-capitalist and instrumental mode of organising social life. Feminism has helped to legitimise the ubiquitous reach of this regime into all areas of social life, even parenting. Feminism can learn from Heideggers proposition that in questioning modern technology we may open up a way of coming into a free relationship with it—to be open to the divinity of living beings and things. Jessica Benjamins account of the relationship between the mother and her infant in terms of intersubjectivity seems to fit Heideggers proposition for it highlights a dynamic and receptive exchange between two unique living beings. The question for feminism at this time is: how can it own its complicity with modern technology while opening up its distinctive contribution to finding a way of coming into a free relationship with it?

Book Reviews : SITUATING THE SELF: GENDER, COM MUNITY AND POSTMODERNISM IN CONTEMPORARY ETHICS Seyla Benhabib, Cambridge, Polity, 1992, pp. 266

In detailing the process of the research, the fi-ustrations of attempting to secure funding in a medical setting for qualitative research emerge very clearly. The stings and arrows encountered and the modifications made act both as a warning to others and an encouragement to persist. The honesty of this documentation could also act as a model for research report writing which generally in PhD theses as well as in academic publishing tends to obliterate all

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Jessica Benjamin offers a two-person, relational account of freedom understood in terms of intersubjectivity. She sees the conditions of possibility of this account as arising out of the historical process of challenge to the established patriarchal one-person account of freedom that is led by the feminist insistence on the feminine/maternal other as a subject in her own right. Where the patriarchal conception of freedom operates in terms of one will prevailing over the other, a relationship of domination that is structured as a subject–object dualism, the two-person account of freedom works with a subject-to-subject relationship where the tension between one subject’s will and the other’s is not resolved, but kept in play. Benjamin offers a historically contextualized phenomenological account of the reconfiguration of relationships (most particularly, those of ‘mothering’ and psychoanalysis) in terms of intersubjectivity. This is not a historicist account for there is nothing that suggests that the contest between the one-person and two-person conceptions of freedom will be resolved. Benjamin specifies intersubjectivity in terms of a two-subject interaction where both self-assertion and mutual recognition are dynamically entwined. A two-person conception of freedom enables a both/and understanding of the relationship between creativity and limit, self and other, freedom and law, and autonomy and dependency. The significance of Benjamin’s work is that she offers an excellent start for the reconstruction of our idea of freedom as a two-person rather than a one-person conception.