Thought, 8:3, 396-409, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2018.1506261 Historically, the standard interpretation of human rights is continuous with the history of liberal citizenship rights. Even though the Soviet Union was involved in the negotiations that created the UD, their participation did not affect the legal form the declaration took. The negotiations that led to the promulgation of the UD stretched from January 1947 until December 1948. They were overseen by Eleanor Roosevelt and the various arguments synthesized into draft form by Canadian lawyer John Humpheries, both of whom clearly had the model of liberal-democratic constitutions in mind as their guiding idea (Morsink 1999, 4–13). They freed that idea of liberal rights as actionable claims held by individuals from the bounds of nationality so that they could be asserted by individuals against any state whatsoever. Hence, they completed the process of abstraction, traced by Marx in “On the Jewish Question,” of rights from the concrete social situation of human beings (Marx 1975, 166–167). Whereas liberal rights extended citizenship to (at the time) all white males, independently of factors such as class, so too human rights extended analogous legal entitlements to all people, regardless of citizenship. As Louis Henkin argues, the “national rights theories or systems, harkening back through English, American, and French constitutionalism to John Locke et. al.” are the historical basis of human rights (Henkin 1981, 263). The aim was to provide similar protections to the security of individual persons and their interests that liberal citizenships rights did, but, since human rights are not dependent upon citizenship, they could be used by citizens of totalitarian societies to undermine the oppressive political structures under which they lived. Considered philosophically, the standard interpretation of human rights is rooted in the classical liberal understanding of the moral equality of persons. They assume, as Noberto Bobbio puts it, that “the individual has intrinsic value. The value of the state is instrumental, the value of the human beings it is supposed to protect is intrinsic” (Bobbio 1996, 43). The proper purpose of the state, therefore, “is the growth of the individual, free as far as is possible from external conditioning” (Bobbio 1996, 43). Human rights sought an international consensus around this value such that, over time, all states would secure, as a minimum necessary for state legitimacy, the rights asserted in the UD. If we thus put the historical and the political together, we get a political project in which the basic institutions of liberal-capitalist society, private property, regulated markets, representative political institutions are posited as norms for all societies to seek to realize. Positive or social rights can form part of the package but these are interpreted in a way that limits their transformative power. That is, they are interpreted in such a way as to ensure that they do not undermine capitalist property relations but rather secure them. Henkin thus reassures classical liberals fearful of the re-distributive potential of positive rights that they have nothing to fear: it was not Marx, it was Bismarck, the conservative Iron Chancellor of Germany who introduced the welfare state into Europe. Following him, the French and English introduced their own versions. But this essential contribution by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had its more recent antecedents in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He spoke of freedoms, not rights, but his freedoms included “freedom from want.” (Henkin 1999, 20) The positive social rights listed in the UD include “the right to social security” and all other economic, social, and cultural rights “indispensable for . . . dignity” (UN 1948, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Article 22). As with classical liberalism, the UD is silent on how this goal is to be achieved, and the liberal leading lights who drafted it worried more about the problem of oppressive exercise of state power than the oppressive power that reified market forces exercise over people’s lives and life-horizons. While they do not recognize or correct for the reified power of market forces, human rights in the standard interpretation do provide a basis for a critique of existing patterns of wealth distribution. The critique of wealth distribution derives from the observable fact that, as Thomas Pogge notes, the global economy fails to enable people to meet “their basic needs” (Pogge 2010, 29). Hence human rights provide “the philosophical underpinning for an account of core human entitlements that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires” (Nussbaum 2006, 70). Poverty is thus understood as primarily an economic-moral problem of wealth distribution, not a structural economic-moral problem of class structure and wealth production through the exploitation of labour. Standard interpretation policy thus demands “the redistribution of wealth throughout the globe” (Caney 2010, 136) but not the overthrow of class power. The whole structural issue of alienation and exploitation of labour (including the reproductive labour of women) disappears. The social causes of poverty disappear behind distribution as mere appearance. For the standard interpretation, legal recognition of moral equality entails policies that re-distribute some wealth from the ruling to the working class, nationally and globally, but not changes in class structure that would weaken or undermine the ruling class’ control over universally needed productive resources—the material basis of the social processes through which they extract and appropriate wealth from workers. The standard interpretation becomes radically transformative only with regard to certain cultural practices. Rituals and social structures that are rooted in organicist principles of social organization which determine individual identity by their place in the social whole and which see the good life as fulfilling the assigned duties of one’s station seem, to proponents of the standard interpretation, to violate the dignity of individuals understood as atomic centres of interest and desire. Defenders of the standard interpretation are not absolutely wrong in their arguments on this front. Defences of non-liberal value systems in the Global South can be cynical ruses employed by ruling groups to avoid critique by invoking cultural values which have little to do with their own contemporary social and political reality. As Rhoda Howard argues, defenders of “cultural difference” in the Global North often “confuse Asian, African, and Central and South American states with [no longer extant] indigenous societies, excusing thereby uses of power against individuals that they would never accept as legitimate if practiced against themselves” (Howard 1995, 61; see also Burke 2010, 35). The problem of ideological invocation of “traditional values” by cynical elites is a real problem. The extent to which defenders of the standard interpretation countenance direct (armed) intervention in order to uphold human rights is a matter of dispute, but all defenders of the standard interpretation presuppose the moral superiority of human rights principles over cultural integrity and national sovereignty (Kaldor 2010, 341). However, as Amartya Sen notes, rarely are indigenous cultures without internal resources of critique and transformation, and standard interpretation critics of “cultural difference” are not sufficiently attentive to these internal resources for change, or the agency of oppressed people in the Global South. The very indigenous cultures often attacked for human rights violations by defenders of human rights from the Global North typically contain principles, Sen argues, that assert constraints on the legitimate exercise of power and protect core interests of individuals, even in organicist models of social organization (Sen 2009, 37, 330). Since the standard interpretation equates violations of human dignity with the transgression of liberal norms of atomic individuality, it is incapable of seeing the value for individuals of organic cultural forms that generate meaning and ensure material security or the power of the members of these cultures to change those aspects of their culture which are actually oppressive. In sum, the standard interpretation sees human rights as universalized expressions of the core moral value defended by the rights of classical liberalism: the supreme value of the dignity of the human individual. Although the standard interpretation acknowledges classical liberal rights as the historical source of human rights, it is not beholden to the dichotomies of classical liberal political theory (negative versus positive liberty, negative versus positive rights, formal freedoms versus substantive freedom, etc.). At the same time, the standard interpretation does not argue that the comprehensive and universal realization of human rights requires the fundamental transformation of capitalist society. That is the primary reason why radical critics of the capitalist world have been dismissive of the political and economic value of human rights to struggles against inequality, oppression, domination, and imperialist violence.
the standard interpretation of human rights is continuous with the history of liberal citizenship rights The negotiations that led to the promulgation of the UD stretched from January 1947 until December 1948 They freed that idea of liberal rights as actionable claims held by individuals from the bounds of nationality so that they could be asserted by individuals against any state whatsoever Whereas liberal rights extended citizenship to all white males so too human rights extended analogous legal entitlements to all people, regardless of citizenship The aim was to provide similar protections to the security of individual persons and their interests that liberal citizenships rights did, but, since human rights are not dependent upon citizenship, they could be used by citizens of totalitarian societies to undermine the oppressive political structures under which they lived. Considered philosophically, the standard interpretation of human rights is rooted in the classical liberal understanding of the moral equality of persons The proper purpose of the state, therefore, “is the growth of the individual, free as far as is possible from external conditioning” . If we thus put the historical and the political together, we get a political project in which the basic institutions of liberal-capitalist society, private property, regulated markets, representative political institutions are posited as norms for all societies to seek to realize. they are interpreted in such a way as to ensure that they do not undermine capitalist property relations but rather secure them it was not Marx, it was Bismarck, the conservative Iron Chancellor of Germany who introduced the welfare state into Europe The positive social rights listed in the UD include “the right to social security” and all other economic, social, and cultural rights “indispensable for . . . dignity As with classical liberalism, the UD is silent on how this goal is to be achieved, and the liberal leading lights who drafted it worried more about the problem of oppressive exercise of state power than the oppressive power that reified market forces exercise over people’s lives and life-horizons. human rights in the standard interpretation do provide a basis for a critique of existing patterns of wealth distribution. Hence human rights provide “the philosophical underpinning for an account of core human entitlements that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires Poverty is thus understood as primarily an economic-moral problem of wealth distribution, not a structural economic-moral problem of class structure and wealth production through the exploitation of labour Standard interpretation policy thus demands “the redistribution of wealth throughout the globe but not the overthrow of class power The social causes of poverty disappear behind distribution as mere appearance but not changes in class structure that would weaken or undermine the ruling class’ control over universally needed productive resources—the material basis of the social processes through which they extract and appropriate wealth from workers Defences of non-liberal value systems in the Global South can be cynical ruses employed by ruling groups to avoid critique by invoking cultural values which have little to do with their own contemporary social and political reality. The extent to which defenders of the standard interpretation countenance direct (armed) intervention in order to uphold human rights is a matter of dispute, but all defenders of the standard interpretation presuppose the moral superiority of human rights principles over cultural integrity and national sovereignty The very indigenous cultures often attacked for human rights violations by defenders of human rights from the Global North typically contain principles, that assert constraints on the legitimate exercise of power and protect core interests of individuals, even in organicist models of social organization the standard interpretation sees human rights as universalized expressions of the core moral value defended by the rights of classical liberalism: the supreme value of the dignity of the human individual. the standard interpretation does not argue that the comprehensive and universal realization of human rights requires the fundamental transformation of capitalist society