Susan Mendus

Human Rights in Political Theory

The two quotations draw attention to a considerable, and interesting, conundrum inherent in any attempt to discuss the status of human rights in political theory. This is that, in recent years, as political commitment to human rights has grown, philosophical commitment has waned. Since 1945, political commitment has been expressed in numerous Charters and Declarations of which the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights are only the most familiar. Simultaneously, membership of organizations such as Amnesty International has burgeoned, and human rights legislation has increased at both national and international level. Even though, as Lukes points out, human rights are violated virtually everywhere, the principle that they should be defended is asserted virtually everywhere. ‘Virtually no one actually rejects the principle of defending human rights.’ No one, that is, except political philosophers. For in the same post-war period, the philosophical credentials of human rights have been subjected to considerable scrutiny, and have regularly been found wanting. There is, of course. nothing new in philosophical scepticism about human rights: every undergraduate student is familiar with Bentham’s assertion that ‘Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense nonsense upon stilt^.^ And with Karl Marx’s allegation that ‘none of the socalled rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as he is in civil society, namely an individual withdrawn behind his private interests and whims and separated from the community’.4 But what is troubling is that these philosophical reservations have increased rather than diminished against a

The Tigers of Wrath and the Horses of Instruction

Reading through the vast and still burgeoning literature on the Rushdie affair, it is surprisingly difficult to establish precisely what the debate is about: in part it is about how to read novels; in part it is about the nature of Islamic fundamentalism; in part it is about the preservation of cultural identity in a multicultural society. Most pervasively, however, it is a debate about the values which inform modern liberal societies — a debate in which liberal culture, with its emphasis on rationality, choice and the sovereignty of the individual, is pitted against cultures which emphasise sanctity, tradition, and group identity.

THE PRACTICAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL

It is commonly held that Kant’s discussion of freedom and his attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity is a complete failure. Having argued in the early part of The Critique of Pure Reason that everything in the phenomenal realm is causally determined, he is then saddled with the problem of explaining how there can be free actions for which the agent may properly be held to be morally responsible. His answer to this puzzle is to insist that there can be genuine freedom, but that such freedom is reserved for the noumenal realm. However, since ordinary decisions and events occur in the phenomenal realm, it would appear that they must be determined by previous decisions and events within that series. And if that is the case, then the alleged freedom for which Kant makes room does no honest work, or at any rate not the sort of work he wanted it to do — namely, to explain how a man might properly be held responsible for the actions he performs. It would seem that Kant succeeds in justifying freedom ‘if anywhere, then everywhere.’1

Tragedy, Moral Conflict, and Liberalism

The central question of this chapter is how modern liberal political theory can understand and make sense of value pluralism and the conflicts upon which it is premissed. It is a commonplace that liberalism was born out of conflict, and has been partly characterized ever since as a series of attempts to accommodate it within the framework of the nation-state.1 However, it is also true that liberals have proposed many different routes to the resolution, or containment, of conflict, and these different routes are manifestations of different understandings of conflict itself both within an individual life and between lives. Thus, some assert the irreducible heterogeneity of value: John Stuart Mill famously inveighs against the attempt to model all human life on a single pattern and tells us that ‘human beings are not sheep, and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him unless they are either made to his measure or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from; and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat?’2 On Mill’s account, plurality is the natural (and indeed desirable) condition of humanity. We should neither hope for nor expect the elimination of conflict, and a world in which there is diversity is richer and better for it.

The Serpent and the Dove

In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler describes the world of the American detective story as a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety.1 Nevertheless, down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.2 What are the possibilities of being such a man (or woman) in the world as we know it? The hero of the American detective story (of the HammettChandler genre) is not only a good man, and a man of honour, but also a man who must get things done. In Dashiel Hammetts Red Harvest he is the man who is sent in to clean up the pig-sty that is Poisonville, and in so doing he becomes poisoned himself. He has a choice between being effective and being good, but he cannot be both together. Poisonville is right, he says despairingly. Its poisoned me. Much recent moral and political philosophy has concurred with this conclusion: being politically effective and being good are mutually exclusive at least some of the time, and there is, it is held, a noncontingent connection between political efficacy and a willingness to engage in the shabby, the shady and the dishonourable, if not the downright murderous and criminal. It is, says Bernard Williams, a predictable and probable hazard of public life that there will be situations in which something morally disagreeable is clearly required. To

Innocent Before God: Politics, Morality and the Case of Billy Budd

I begin with the story told by Herman Melville in his short novel, Billy Budd.The year is 1797. Britain is engaged in a long and bitter war against France, and the British war effort has been threatened by two naval mutinies: the Nore Mutiny and the mutiny at Spithead. The scene is His Majesty’s Ship, the Indomitable, and the central character is Billy Budd, sailor. Billy Budd is a young man of exceptional beauty, both physical and moral, whose only flaw is a stammer. He is loved by all his fellow sailors except the master-at-arms, John Claggart. The incarnation of evil, Claggart recognises in Billy the incarnation of goodness, and is consumed by a jealousy which leads him to accuse Billy (falsely) of inciting the crew to mutiny. Alone with Claggart and the ship’s Captain, Edward Vere, Billy hears the lying charge against him. He is enraged, but his stammer prevents him from responding in words. He strikes Claggart, and the blow is fatal. Billy Budd, sailor, has killed the master-at-arms of one of His Majesty’s ships on active service, and the penalty for this is death.

The Concept of Toleration

In modern society, problems of toleration arise most often and most obviously in connection with racial, religious or sexual matters: in Britain, the Brixton disorders of 1981 were held to be both a symptom and a consequence of a deeply embedded racial intolerance. Reporting on the disorders, Lord Scarman remarked; ‘All the evidence I have received, both on the subject of racial disadvantage and more generally, suggests that racialism and discrimination against black people — often hidden, sometimes unconscious — remain a major source of social tension and conflict’ (Scarman, 1986, p.172). Racial intolerance and discrimination, whilst not identified as the direct cause of disorder, were held to be important social conditions serving to create a disposition towards violent protest of the sort which flared in Brixton on the weekend of 10–12 April 1981. Members of the black community attributed their poverty and deprivation to racial discrimination and, as Scarman puts it; ‘once you have deprivation and once minorities perceive that they are at the end of every queue, then race heats up the furnace of anger to an unbearable temperature’ (pp.xiv–xv).

To Have and to Hold: Liberalism and the Marriage Contract

The starting point of this chapter is a question about the nature and extent of modern liberalism. Specifically, it addresses the question; ‘How comprehensive can liberalism be, and how much of social and moral life can it aspire to explain?’ The question is prompted by a (somewhat crude) distinction between historical and modern liberalism. Historically, liberals have usually set themselves rather modest aims and have distinguished between the scope of political philosophy and the scope of moral philosophy. Both Locke and Hume differentiate between the requirements of political justice and the prior, and independent, dictates of morality. They construe politics as being necessitated by our imperfect moral nature. As Sandel points out: nFor Hume, justice cannot be the first virtue of social institutions, and in some cases it is doubtfully a virtue at all … Insofar as mutual benevolence and enlarged affections could be cultivated more widely, the need for ‘the cautious, jealous virtue of justice’ would diminish in proportion, and mankind would be the better for it.1 nMore recently, however, political liberalism has expanded into a theory which includes both moral and political concerns.Thus Rawls’s early liberalism aspires to provide an account of moral and political life, in which all institutions are subject to the same conditions of justification, and all are called to the tribunal of justice.

Time and Chance: Kantian Ethics and Feminist Philosophy

In the book of Ecclesiastes we read: nAnd I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.1 n‘Time’ and ‘chance’ have become the watchwords of much modern moral philosophy, with its emphasis on the centrality of tradition (Alasdair MacIntyre); the fragility of goodness (Martha Nussbaum); and the ubiquity of luck (Bernard Williams). Ecclesiastes conjectures what Richard Rorty confirms: that there is no escape from time and chance; no rationality independent of a tradition; no hiding place from the unfair judgements of an often hostile world.2

Defending the bad against the worse: Education and democracy

Recent writings in philosophy of education have expressed pessimism about the possibility of educating students to think for themselves. Similarly, recent writings in political philosophy have expressed pessimism about the possibility of attaining democracy. In this paper, I suggest that such pessimism is premature and may be alleviated, if not removed, by interpreting both educational enlightenment and the democratic ideal as processes, rather than end states. They are, moreover, processes which exist in symbiotic relationship with one another. Thus educational practices may improve the prospects of attaining democracy, and political practices may strengthen education.