Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of "Impure" Victims

The contempt we always feel for losers—Jews in the thirties, Muslims now—combines with our disgust at the winners' behavior to produce the semi-conscious attitude: "a plague on both your houses." ¹

In this passage, Richard Rorty is commenting on the failure of the United States and its European allies to take effective military action to stop the massacres and genocidal rape camps Serbians launched against Muslims during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. Instead of construing the problem as a question of what we owe to distant others or a question about the limits of national sovereignty, Rorty frames it in terms of moral psychology. "We" perceive victims as contemptible losers. ² "We" perceive victimizers as disgusting brutes. Both are morally tainted and hence unworthy of "our" moral attention and response.

Stated baldly, this seems undeniably true and utterly bizarre. People shy away from trouble and extra responsibilities. So it's no surprise that "we" would stick our collective head in the sand during the Holocaust and the "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans. Lost in this orgy of "there's blame all around"-ism is John Locke's firm distinction between wrongdoers and victims.

"In transgressing the law of nature," Locke avers, "the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity." ³ Such an individual "so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature." ⁴ By injuring another person—a right-holder—the perpetrator becomes an enemy of the whole human species, more like a rogue elephant running wild and causing indiscriminate harm than an adult human being. ⁵ In taking leave of reason, offenders forfeit their rights, which clears the way for others to punish them. ⁶ In sum, Locke divides people into three rights-based categories: (1) bearers of rights who deserve protection from harm; (2) offenders who deserve to be punished for violating someone's rights; and (3) victims who deserve compensation because someone has violated their rights.

Admittedly, Rorty is discussing a far more complicated situation with very high stakes—military intervention in another state's treatment of its own citizens. However, Rorty does not comment on the niceties of international law, nor does he speculate about the possibility that intervening might cause greater loss of life and aggravate the trauma. Instead, he focuses on why humanitarian intervention is pretty much a nonstarter in the popular imagination—why "we" do not conceptualize the victims' peril and suffering, on the one hand, and their assailants' cruelty and brazen flouting of human rights, on the other, in Locke's crystalline moral terms. According to Rorty, "we" perceive the people caught up in the crisis through schemas that render all of the parties despicable, thereby freeing us to guiltlessly ignore their plight.

In Locke's moral world, a one-to-one correspondence obtains between recognized rights and cognizable violations of rights and between recognized bearers of rights and cognizable victims of rights violations. However, if Rorty is right about how onlookers frame human rights crises, these seemingly straightforward correlations have broken down. Indeed, I am skeptical that they ever held in practice. Yet the philosophical literature on victims is spotty. The main topics that grab philosophers' attention are defending and interpreting human rights, proposing policies to recompense victims of rights violations or otherwise repair the damage wrought by rights violations, and demonstrating that social policy and legal institutions systematically occlude the victimization of members of historically subordinated social groups. Ignoring the question of how to conceptualize victims, philosophers implicitly adopt Locke's view that victims are just people whose rights have been violated. I believe that things aren't so simple—that prevalent conceptions of victims adversely affect our capacity to recognize violations of human rights and to secure the respect we owe to victims.

My argument proceeds in four stages. First, I analyze two victim paradigms that emerged in the late twentieth century along with the initial iteration of the international human rights regime—the pathetic victim paradigm and the...