Amnesty on stilts

Here's an appeal by the actor John Hurt. It's a call to action -- Hurt, speaking for Amnesty International, wants you to "join one million people in the UK" who will "stand up for humanity and human rights". (That silky-smooth voice; listening to that I'd even sign up for the phone book!)

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Now, this video should be very easy to agree with. We should try to minimize domestic violence? I believe that too! We should limit small arms proliferation? Absolutely, look at that appalling episode in Finland the other day! Torture is bad? Damn right it is!

Unfortunately, Amnesty isn't advocating a piecemeal, multilateral approach to these problems. The organisation ties it all up with a bigger ideology, a philosophical package that is -- some say, and I agree -- contentious, controversial, problematical, divisive. The idea of "natural human rights".

"Human rights are ours by birth," says Hurt. "They cannot be given or taken away by any individual, organization or court. They are inalienable. They belong to all of us."

Let me get that clear. We are born with rights which, apparently, are integral, universal, and come from nowhere; "they cannot be given.... by any individual, organization or court". This troubles me. Deeply. Nothing comes from nowhere. Even limbs, which we're also born with, come from somewhere -- we can trace their evolution through various stages in both the species and the individual foetus. Something cannot be both there and coming from nowhere.

So, assuming they come from somewhere, where do human rights come from? We can rule out God, for a start. The Old Testament talks a lot about obligations (don't eat this, treat that as an abomination) but nowhere about human rights. So let's google.

The Council of Europe website has a page entitled Where do human rights come from? It isn't very helpful. "The basis of human rights - respect for each individual human life and human dignity - can be found in most of the world's great religions and philosophies," it says. These rights are not created by texts, instruments and treaties, continues the page, only described by them. They already exist, you see, prior to their tabulation. They are inalienable and inherent.

But if we're really stubborn and keep asking the question, we arrive at places where these rights are derived from. "The most famous of these is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948", says the Council of Europe, adding, a bit later -- and almost plaintively! -- "most people associate the Council of Europe with human rights". Sweet! They come from nowhere and they apply everywhere, but we're personally very, very close with them. Universal human rights and us are like that! Good buddies! (It's a refrain we'll be hearing more of.)

So, okay, let's look up who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a Canadian called John P. Humphrey (1905 - 1995), helped by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American president. Humphrey lost his father early; he also lost a limb after a bad burn. Here's a proud CBC video claiming him for Canada. I mean for all the world... and Canada! "Say, isn't that the Canadian who actually wrote the declaration of human rights?" purrs the voiceover.

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Just before that punchline (which so neatly stitches local pride to universal impact) there's a lawyer who makes a pretty good objection. "Mr President," he says, "our country's legislation was arrived at democratically".

There are other problems with the idea of universal human rights than that such a natural, universal and sourceless thing is impossible to vote on. Firstly, the universality of it is muddied by disagreements -- healthy ones! -- over what these natural rights actually are. For the American constitution they're "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". For Locke, they were "life, liberty, and property". And what about conflicts between these rights? The right to private property conflicts often with the right to public property. Do the humans we define as children have a right to work, or a right not to? Are children "equal in dignity" with adults? Do we have the right to take the lives of those who take life? Does freedom of expression permit hate speech? And then there's the point Moondog makes in his song Enough About Human Rights; "what about dog rights, what about frog rights?"

The Wikipedia entry on human rights gives a good account of the philosophical underpinnings of all this. "The idea of human rights descended from the philosophical idea of natural rights which are considered to exist even when trampled by governments or society," it tells us. "Some recognize virtually no difference between the two and regard both as labels for the same thing, while others choose to keep the terms separate to eliminate association with some features traditionally associated with natural rights."

Turn to the natural rights entry and you can see why these "others" want to decouple human rights from natural ones: "Natural rights are a theory of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs... The concept of a natural right can be contrasted with the concept of a legal right: A natural right is one that is claimed to exist even when it is not enforced by the government or society as a whole, while a legal right is a right specifically created by the government or society, for the benefit of its members."

Count me with the "others" -- the idea that a human concept should be naturally-occurring is just not something I can buy. I agree with Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who said "Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts". Tony Blair's slip into rightism begins, for me, with his statement to the Sunday Telegraph in 1996 that he used to be a Utilitarian, but was now tending more towards a Natural Law view.

Let's be very clear, this comes down to a division between those who subscribe to a contract model of society and those who subscribe to a status one. The contract people (Utilitarians and relativists) see negotiated contracts everywhere. The status people (Natural Law enthusiasts, absolutists) see properties inherent in things. They're dangerous. They intervene, because they know they're on the right side, the side of nature. If they don't have God on their side, they at least have Nature. She's usually well-armed.

This is what I don't understand about Amnesty International. Why, in an appeal designed presumably to garner as much support as possible, must they alienate us relativists, we Utilitarians, we contract-not-status people? Why can't they just say wife-beating is bad and let's fight it with legislation? Why do they have to harp on about "natural, universal human rights", in a time -- precisely -- when militaristic aggression uses exactly these arguments to justify its adventures?

After all, we're talking about an organization named after a contract between the citizen and the state: an amnesty. "You broke the law, but we're letting you off." The idea of an amnesty without a state -- a universal amnesty, some kind of blanket forgiveness for universal crimes -- is, frankly, Kafkaesque. Amnesty is tottering on dangerous stilts.