Which rights are universal?

Political Theory

Volumn 27, Issue 6, 1999, Pages 849-856

  Bell, Daniel A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033249523     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591799027006007     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. Charney might reply that the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) ought to be universal and that he didn't mean to imply that civil and political rights are more fundamental than social and economic rights. The problem with this response is that the UDHR does not specify which rights are more fundamental than others and thus cannot be useful when rights conflict in practice (which helps to explain why the UDHR is generally viewed as a wish list of political desiderata, of little usefulness in concrete political disputes that involve trade-offs between valued goods). At least the U.S. Constitution has the virtue of rankings some rights above others (as does John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which ranks civil and political rights over social and economic rights). A defender of universal human rights must "identify a basic minimum of rights" that have priority over other rights and political goods.
2. I thank Perry Link for this information. Link notes that Fang "did not want the government to be able to say he incited the students, because he wanted it to be obvious that the movement was spontaneous, incited by no one" (e-mail correspondence, April 12, 1999).
3. It is worth noting that Fang also appeals to the rights as a means for a nation-building argument - see FangLizhi, Bringing Down the Gret Wall (New York: Norton, 1990), 157-88.
4. Arguably, the spring 1989 movement had even deeper 'Confucian' roots. Confucianism has long promoted the value of rule by a moral and intellectual elite, and (consequently) Chinese intellectuals have traditionally been granted uncommon (by U.S. standards) amounts of legitimacy, prestige, and respect. It is quite striking that more than one million ordinary Beijing people participated in a movement led by students from China's most prestigious universities (consider the (un)likelihood of the American equivalent - a few dozen students from Harvard and MIT leading a movement for radical political change with the enthusiastic support and participation of a million working-class Bostonians).
5. Wuer Kaixi, "New May Fourth Manifesto," in Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement, ed. Han Minzhu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 136-37.
6. It might be argued in response that the protesters 'appropriated' the Statue of Liberty, which suggests that they were inspired by the 'American' value of freedom. It is worth noting, however, that the Statue of Liberty was renamed the "Goddess of Democracy," with two hands on the torch to symbolize the difficulty of implementing democracy in China. An American symbol, it seems, was transformed and used for a distinctly Chinese purpose.
7. This interpretation of the spring 1989 protests helps to explain why student protesters turned so vehemently against the United States following the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. This time, Chinese patriotism seemed to require opposition, rather than adherence, to American values. It might be argued in response that Chinese students were manipulated by the state-controlled media, but judging from the (similar) reaction of many mainland Chinese students studying and working in countries outside China, this reaction seems to have come largely 'from the heart'.
8. Even the Beijing University pamphlet quoted by Charney makes this point. The pamphlet begins by paying lip service to 'universality', but it ends with the following lines: Now people have again realized the truth that "men are born equal." When other countries in the world are relying on this historical inevitability to modernize quickly, it is time that our poor and backward country with its two thousand years of feudal dynasties begin to open a new chapter in the [country's historical] annals. We should never forget: "People are their own masters!" "Power belongs to the great people." Note the concern with building up China's national power and not falling behind other modernizing countries (as well as the Marxist language about historical inevitability). Empowering the people is viewed as a crucial means to empowering the nation.
9. Charles Taylor, "Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights," in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 5.
10. Ibid., 124.
11. Of course, one can always imagine potentially dire implications, such as one where "the scope of rights was limited to the right to life, a right exercised in a life of slavery." Fortunately, most members of the human rights community do not seem overly preoccupied with such philosophical dilemmas - they focus on the far more urgent task of exposing gross human rights violations that mass murderers and ethnic cleansers would rather keep secret. But what if there really were an official, publicly articulated commitment to (say) enslaving the people? Does that mean outsiders shouldn't intervene, even if they have the power to do so? Of course not. As Orlando Patterson points out, "There is absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their master" [quoted in Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 250]. So outsiders should intervene, being fairly confident that the liberated slaves will be grateful after the fact.
12. Quoted in Joanne R. Bauerand Daniel A. Bell's introduction to East Asian Challenge, 14.
13. Western European and Asian countries have long been pressing the United States to recognize that some economic rights such as the rights to food and decent health care are as fundamental as civil and political liberties (meaning that they shouldn't be subordinated to the latter in cases of conflict), with little success thus far (e.g., the United States has yet to ratify the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). In this piece, I discuss a right that has yet to receive much discussion in the United States - the right to be cared for by adult children. This right was emphasized by several East Asian participants during the course of a recent multiyear dialogue on human rights between prominent East Asian and North American intellectuals and human rights activists (see especially Joseph Chan, "A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China," in East Asian Challenge, 235-36).
14. It might be argued that the right to be cared for by adult children is too specific to be included in a universal bill of rights. But the UDHR has articles on family rights and responsibilities that are just as specific (see, e.g., articles 16,25.2,26.3). More straightforwardly, it is widely assumed that children have a right to be cared for by their own parents (barring extreme circumstances), and the Confucian viewpoint is that elderly parents have a similar right to claim care from their adult children. A more fundamental problem, in my view, is that Western countries are not likely to accept that the right to be cared for by adult children should be viewed as more basic than other valued rights and political goals. More generally, it will be much easier to settle on a list of valued rights like the UDHR than to achieve a worldwide consensus on aranking of valued rights that provides guidance in cases of conflict.
15. In my view, however, several important issues still need to be resolved before we can feel confident about the prospects of achieving a truly universal human rights regime - see my article, "Toward an International Human Rights (and Responsibilities) Regime: Some Obstacles," in The Responsive Community 9 no. 1 (1998/1999): 72-78.
16. See Norani Othman, "Grounding Human Rights Arguments in Non-Western Culture: Shari'a and the Citizenship Rights of Women in a Modern Islamic State," in East Asian Challenge, chap. 7.