Floors Without Foundations: Ignatieff and Rorty on Human Rights

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As the International Declaration of Rights published by the United Nations in 1948 showed very clearly, it is doubtless not easy but it is possible to establish a common formulation of such practical conclusions, or in other words, of the various rights possessed by man in his personal and social existence. Yet it would be quite futile to look for a common rational justification of these practical conclusions and these rights. If we did so, we would run the risk of imposing arbitrary dogmatism or of being stopped short by irreconcilable differences.¹

Political liberalism, then, aims for a political conception of justice as a freestanding view. It offers no specific metaphysical or epistemological doctrine beyond what is implied by the political conception itself. As an account of political values, a freestanding political conception does not deny there being other values that apply, say, to the personal, the familial, and the associational; nor does it say that political values are separate from, or discontinuous with, other values. One aim, as I have said, is to specify the political domain and its conception of justice in such a way that its institutions can gain the support of an overlapping consensus.²

One of the shapes we have recently assumed is that of a human rights culture. I borrow the term "human rights culture" from the Argentinian jurist and philosopher Eduardo Rabossi. In an article called "Human Rights Naturalized," Rabossi argues that philosophers should think of this culture as a new, welcome fact of the post-Holocaust world. They should stop trying to get behind or beneath this fact, stop trying to detect and defend its so-called "philosophical pre-suppositions." On Rabossi's view, philosophers like Alan Gewirth are wrong to argue that human rights cannot depend on historical facts. "My basic point," Rabossi says, is that "the world has changed, that the human rights phenomenon renders human rights foundationalism outmoded and irrelevant."³

Far better, I would argue, to forgo these kinds of foundational arguments altogether and seek to build support for human rights on the basis of what such rights actually do for human beings. . . . People may not agree why we have rights, but they can agree that we need them. While the foundations for human rights belief may be contestable, the prudential grounds for believing in human rights protection are much more secure.⁴

All four authors believe that, even though some type and level of agreement can be reached on the ascription of specific rights to human beings, there remains an insoluble philosophical problem in speaking about such practical matters in speculative terms. The problem can be variously described as metaethical, metaphysical, or foundational. At its center is the plurality of competing comprehensive views of the good. Because such views have largely proven incompatible, at least three of the authors quoted shy away from invoking them. Yet not all agree that conflicts between conceptions of the good are irresolvable; nonetheless, all do agree that in pragmatic terms—in terms of trying to accomplish some modicum of justice here and now in world politics—engaging in a debate between comprehensive views is unsatisfactory. This does not entail that the views themselves are irrelevant to the kinds of and participants in agreements reached. Obviously, some comprehensive views are simply unacceptable, as it were, particularly those that exclude toleration. Agreement on specific rights prioritizes particular practices to universal justifications. Such justifications cannot be permanently ignored, however. And yet to prioritize pragmatic political agreement about what can and should be done here and now in this way is, I think, an inescapable, even though radically incomplete, panacea for peaceful coexistence in modern, globally connected communities.

Given the diversity of the characters, opinions, and beliefs of the authors in question—Jacques Maritain, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Michael Ignatieff—the similarity of approach and the willingness to compromise is striking. Indeed, it would seem that little has changed in the more than forty years that separate Maritain's musings about a possible consensus on practical resolutions immediately after...