Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus

4. Dignity, Community, and Human Rights

RhodaE. Howard4 . Dignity, Community, and Human Rights Introduction In this chapter I argue that most known human societies did not and do not have conceptions of human rights. Human rights are a moral good that one can accept—on an ethical basis—and that: everyone ought to have in the modern state-centricworld. To seek an anthropologically based consensus on rights by surveying all known human cultures, however, is to confuse the concepts of rights, dignity, and justice. One can find affinities, analogues, and precedents for the actual content of internationally accepted human rights in many religious and cultural (geographic and national ) traditions;2 but the actual concept of human rights, as will be seen, is particular and modern, arid representing a radical rupture from the many status-based,nonegalitarian, and hierarchical societies of the past and present. In many cultures, the social order stratifies "individuals" in ways that enhance dignity for some categories of people but leave other categories dishonored, without dignity or respect. Furthermore, most indigenous cultures of the various regions of the world—such as those of North America, Japan, and China—have privileged the community or the collectivity over the individual.3 Human rights arc a modern concept now universally applicable in principle because of the social evolution of the entire world toward state societies. The concept of human rights springs from modern human thought about the nature of justice; it does not spring from an anthropologically based consensus about the values, needs, or desires of human beings. As Jack Donnelly puts it, the concept of human rights is best interpreted by constructivist theory: Human rights aim to establish and guarantee the conditions necessary for the development of the human person envisioned in . . . [one particular] 82 Rhoda E. Howard underlying moral theory of human nature, thereby bringing into being that type of person. . . . The evolution of particular conceptions or lists of human rights is seen in the constructivist theory as the result of the reciprocal interactions of moral conceptions and material conditions of life, mediated through social institutions such as rights.' Human rights tend to be particularlycharacteristicof liberal and/or social democratic societies.5 These are societies that have undergone changes in the materialconditions of life, or, in Marxist terms, in the mode of production, in the direction of various forms of capitalism. These material changes coincided with various changes in ideology or moral conceptions , both in the strictly religious sphere and in conceptions of how society ought to be organized and of what makes a physical human being a social being. Ideologically rights-based societies, then, hold particular conceptions of human dignity and social justice that are in principle universally applicable, although not universal in origin. While ideals of dignity and justice can be located in all societies and can sometimes be used to buttress new ideals of the content of human rights,6 human rights arc a radically new concept in human history, and their acceptance in any given society constitutes a rupture of previous beliefsystems. Human Rights, Dignity, and Justice HUMAN RIGHTS Human rights adhere to the human being by virtue of being human, and for no other reason. Every human being ought to have human rights, regardless of status orachievement. In a rights-based political system, a person's human rights can in principle be removed only under very restricted circumstances adjudicable by law (for example, a convicted criminal loses the right to freedom of movement). Human rights are claims by the individual against society and thestate that, furthermore, "trump" other considerations such as the legal (but not human) right of a corporation to property. Human rights are private, individual, and autonomous. They are private because they inhere in the human person him- or herself, unmediatcd by social relations. They are consequently individual; an isolated human being can in principle exercise them. In addition, they are autonomous because again, in principle, no authority other than the individualis required to make human rights claims. Dignity, Community, and Human Rights 83 This means that the human being who holds rights holds them not only against the state, but also against "society," that is, against his or her community or even family. This orientation is a radical departure from the way most human societies in the past—and many in the present—have been or are organized. For most human societies, insofar as "rights" might be considered to be applicableat all, collective or...