Rights Flashcards
Antigone
Sophocles’s (497-406 BCE)
Antigone plot
Follows the tragic conflict between divine law and human authority
After a civil war, King Creon decrees that Polynices, deemed a traitor, must not be buried, but his sister Antigone defies this order, believing it is her sacred duty
She is sentenced to death, leading to a chain of devastation—her fiancé Haemon (Creon’s son) and Creon’s wife both take their own lives in grief
In the end, Creon is left to face the ruin of his own rigid rule, realising too late the cost of his hubris
Creon confronts Antigone as to why she did what she did and if she knew he had passed a law against it
Questions what we mean by ‘law’ or ‘right’
Antigone’s response to Creon
‘Yes, for it was not Zeus who made this proclamation, nor was it Justice who lives with the gods below that established such laws among men, nor did I think your proclamations strong enough to have power to overrule, mortal as they were, the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods. For these have life, not simply today and yesterday, but for ever, and no one knows how long ago they were revealed.’
Emotions and Rights
To the Classic philosopher, the true philosopher is one who scorns emotions in favour of religion
In Plato’s account of Socrates’ death, he describes Socrates’ reaction to his friends’ emotions at his death sentence by stating that a true philosopher is completely in control of his emotions, and thus should never submit to the natural human impulse to be afraid, sad, or angry
Classical belief that emotions just be kept separate from laws, rights, and justice, continues to this day
Seneca
Ordered by Nero, who he tutored since childhood, to kill himself in front of his friends as punishment for supposed treason, calmly accepted this even with his friends’ outbursts
‘Pity is the sorrow of the mind’
Plato’s account of Socrates’ final words
‘Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?’
Revolutions
The American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 were pivotal in the conception of rights
Both cases reject the monarchy, one the church, and both attribute these rights to a Creator
Sets up the association between human rights and a radical, anti-establishment, anti-monarchy, political standpoint
The Declaration of Independence 1776
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’
Assumes a creator
‘Men’ refers to the gender of men and did not apply to slaves
The revolution was in part because the British Empire was on the brink of abolishing slavery
The Declaration of the Rights of Man 1789
‘The representatives of the French People, formed into a National Assembly, considering ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments, have resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man’
‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good’
UNDHR (7)
(UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Goes back to WWII
Problem was that everything the Nazi party did was technically legal
Made by Eleanor Roosevelt
God is absent in this Declaration - Based on a collective assumption and also due to the contributions of communist and/or secular nations
Does not have any force of law
An aspirational yet highly influential document
President Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union address
American foreign policy would be down to four principles
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Expanded international law from practical necessity to ethical governance
UNDHR Article One
‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’
Rights-Based Frameworks
The UDHR lead to a rights-based framework being introduced by many nations into international policy e.g. the UK and the EU, often based on the UDHR
1972 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
Began to explore synergies between Rights and Developments
Mary Robinson, 2001
‘A rights-based approach is a conceptual framework for the process of human development’
James Griffin, On Human Rights
Argues that the term ‘human right’ is almost criterionless
It is impossible to decide when the term is being used correctly or incorrectly and thus the language of human rights is debased
How can we referee between competing rights?
e.g. The right to freedom of speech versus the right of protection from fear
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
‘The notion of obligation comes before that of rights’
Escaped from France during WWII to London where she joined the Free French
Asked to write this philosophical basis for a post-war French Constitution, immediately dismissed by Charles du Gaulle
‘A right is not effective in itself, but only in relation to the obligation it corresponds’
Argues that rights only have as much power as the ability or willingness of another person to recognise them
The selfish nature of rights, which are what you are owed, is skewed and we should be thinking of what we owe others
Christianity and Rights
19th century - As a consequence of the association between revolution and human rights, the Catholic Church was very skeptical of human rights, but this changed post-war
Gustavo Guttierez, The Power of the Poor (5)
Liberation theology
Inspired by Karl Marx
Initially very skeptical about rights, seeing them as a Trojan Horse for liberal political thought (e.g. property rights often being the basis)
Rights have often been misappropriated by those intent upon exploiting the poor to defend e.g. the refusal to grant property rights to those in Favelas
They’ll say, ‘We must uphold property rights,’ meaning: the rights of the already-rich to own land—even if it means evicting thousands of poor families who’ve lived there for generations
Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights (6)
Argued that the idea of human rights is inherently religious
Argues that human rights are based on the belief in the sacredness of each person
He claims secular approaches struggle to justify why all humans have equal moral worth
Perry highlights the influence of Christian ideas, such as being made in the image of God
He believes religious faith provides the strongest motivation to uphold human rights
He says the universality of human rights makes most sense if grounded in a divine source
Nigel Biggar, What’s Wrong With Rights (5)
Begins with the idea that what he terms ‘rights fundamentalists’ have damaged how we think about rights, he finds them morally unhelpful - they are counter-intuitively doing harm to a proper use of right-language
Believes moral arguments to be complex and involving a series of negotiations, which he believes people are trying to cut short by asserting a right without justifying it
‘There are no natural rights’
Subjective rights need not be individualistic
If you want to shape the world according to a political and ethical agenda, it is illogical and inefficient to go against those rights you espouse
Pope Benedict XVI
Deus Caritas Est, 2005
DCE - supererogatory
Love goes beyond justice, positioning it as a supererogatory act
Christian love should not be reduced to rights talk – love involves sacrificial generosity, which is not legally enforceable
DCE - divine
He affirms ‘God is love’ as a central theological truth, grounding Christian social teaching in divine charity rather than legal obligation
