Humans as Political Beings – Savvy Essay Writers | savvyessaywriters.net
Humans as Political Beings – Savvy Essay Writers | savvyessaywriters.net
Human Rights / Humans as Political Beings
Lecture 2.4
Natural Rights, Civil Rights, Human Rights
So far, in this unit of the course, the notion of “rights” has come up several times. Both Hobbes, Locke, and Mills discuss rights in some way.
As you may recall, Hobbes defines right as a type of liberty, the freedom to do something without impediment. Both Hobbes and Locke believe that humans have natural rights, that is inherent freedoms that they are endowed with by nature. In other words, because humans and the world are they way they are, humans come with pre-given rights. For Hobbes the principle right held by humans was to do whatever it takes to survive. For Locke it was to defend one’s property (including one’s life).
For Hobbes, when humans enter a social contract and form a government with laws, they give up
their natural rights. For Locke, the institution of government provides a way of guaranteeing one’s natural rights by codifying those rights into law. When a sovereign power establishes rights for its citizens and laws for protecting those rights, we get civil rights.
Natural rights apply in the state of nature while civil rights apply in civilization. Human rights refer to those rights which humans hold simply because they are human. Such rights are closer in kind to natural rights, but are often reflected in civil rights.
The notion of human rights gets invoked frequently in discussions of violations of human dignity and ethics. But where do human rights come from? Are they real? Who guarantees them? How effective are they in protecting vulnerable people? Do other-than-human beings have rights, too?
Amartya Sen, 1933 – Sen was born in West Bengal India in 1933. He received is B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Economics at Trinity College in Cambridge, England. His research has included topics such as social choice theory, economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement, decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies. His interest in global welfare and human rights was partly inspired by his experience of witnessing famine in India.
Sen has served on various economic advisory boards including the American Economic Association. He has also received numerous awards for his work, the most prestigious of which was the Nobel Prize in economics.
Sen currently teaches at Harvard University.
Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975
Arendt was born in Linden, Germany in 1906 to a Jewish family. She studied under the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers while at university. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Marburg in 1926. She fled Germany to Paris in 1933 after being briefly held in a detention camp. After the outbreak of WWII, she and her husband fled to the U.S.
Arendt’s most famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was based on her reporting of the trial of infamous Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. It was extremely controversial partly because she claimed that evil was “banal” and that Eichmann wasn’t a devil but just a boring, unthinking person incapable of seeing the world from another’s perspective.
Arendt is considered to be one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.
United Nations The United Nations is an international organization that was established in 1945 and currently includes 193 member nations. The U.N. has four main offices located in New York City, Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna.
It was established following WWII for the purpose of preventing further catastrophic wars and protecting and securing the future of humanity around the globe. The U.N. consists of 5 active bodies: The General Assembly (for deliberation and discussion), Security Council (for dealing with peace and security issues), Economic and Social Council (for promoting economic growth and cooperation), International Court of Justice (for holding war criminals accountable), and Secretariat (for providing studies, info, services).
The concept of human rights was essential to the message of the U.N.’s founding charter.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights In 1948, the U.N. ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). According the the U.N. it marks a common standard of achievements for all peoples and nations, and sets out the fundamental human rights that should be universally protected.
By definition, human rights, are rights/freedoms that come with being human. If you’re human, you have human rights. But how do we know what those rights are? The UDHR includes 30 articles, some of which list more than one right. These include things like the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community to the right to be recognized as a person before the law to the right of parents to seek education for their children.
Look over the list of UDHR articles and think about the following:
● Are all of these rights natural rights? ● How did these rights get recognized as rights? ● Why do these rights, as implied by their name “human rights,” only apply to humans? ● What is the purpose of drafting up a list of rights is then signed and ratified by the member-nations of the
U.N.? ● Does this charter tell us how to recognize when a being is a human?
The Need for Human Rights The UDHR begins with several claims about the necessity of recognizing human rights, principally that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (1). In other words, when everyone recognizes these rights as fundamental to human life and well-being, humans as a species can flourish in prosperity, freedom, and peace. A recognition of universal human rights can foster mutual respect among different people of different nationalities, religions, ethnic backgrounds, genders, and political affiliations.
The principles laid out by the UDHR are meant to help countries around the world to structure their own constitutions and laws as well a their international relationships. It helps to establish the idea that humans are more alike than they are different. This is especially important because difference has been one of the leading justifications for war, slavery, genocide, gendercide, and colonization. Even though the member countries of the U.N. ratified (officially consented to make valid) the UDHR, humans rights violations occur throughout the world all the time in the most politically and economically stable nations (U.S., Japan, Germany, etc.) and in less stable nations (Venezuela, Syria, Somalia).
Thus, the UDHR is an ideal to which the member nations of the world (and especially the drafters of the resolution) hope to aspire. As Sen explains, “The understanding that some rights are not fully realized, and may not be fully realizable under present circumstances…suggests the need to work towards changing the prevailing circumstances to make the unrealized rights realizable, and ultimately, realized (1005).
Need for Human Rights (2)
Sen’s assessment of the need for human rights coincides with that of the U.N. According to Sen, “proclamations of human rights are to be seen as ethical demands” and “an assertion of the importance of…the freedoms that are identified and privileged in the formulation of the rights in question” (1000).
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to systematize, recommend, and defend principles and concepts of right human behavior. Generally, the goal of ethics is recognized as the effort to help humans live good lives. Good, in this case, can refer to all sorts of notions of “good” from the opposite of evil to correct and right to that which is most valuable.
This means, that from Sen’s perspective, when someone claims that something like healthcare is a human right, that person is saying that without unfettered (free) access to healthcare, humans cannot live good lives. Or, if you believe that humans should lead good lives, they should all have access to affordable healthcare. From this view, healthcare is a right because it is necessary for living a good human life.
In other words, when people assert their human rights, claim that humans rights have been violated, or draft legislation to protect human rights, they are making an ethical assertion about the value of certain freedoms for the good of individual humans and human society.
Need for Human Rights (3) For Sen, human rights can be “parents of law.” That is, ethical demands for the recognition of rights like access to affordable healthcare, the freedom to practice one’s religion or practice no religion, and the freedom to get a fair trial can and should inspire lawmakers within nations to draft laws that will enshrine and protect such rights. Of course, this comes with the understanding that any given government has the welfare of its citizens as its primary concern.
However, Sen is careful to point out that “an ethical understanding of human rights…goes against seeing them as legal demands” (1000). In other words, human rights are not civil rights, that is rights granted to be people based on the law of their nation.
Even though a nation’s interest in protecting human rights typically begins with protecting its own citizens, the UDHR implies that countries must not only take an interest in their own citizens but in all of humanity. The U.N. is an extra-sovereign, inter-governmental body. In other words, it has no official sovereign power; it does not rule over other nations like nations rule over their citizens. Rather, it is more like an assembly, a means by which representatives of other nations can come together to discuss problems that extend beyond their country’s borders (i.e. climate change, war, famine, epidemics).
This means that the U.N. needs to convince nations to come to the defense of humans who live in other…
