CIAO DATE: 08/2014
Volume: 28, Issue: 2
Summer 2014
Table of Contents, Volume 28.2 (Summer 2014)
This issue features essays by Roger Berkowitz on "Drones and the Question of 'The Human'" and Alan Sussman on the philosophical foundations of human rights; a special centennial roundtable on "The Future of Human Rights," featuring Beth A. Simmons, Philip Alston, James W. Nickel, Jack Donnelly, and Andrew Gilmour; a review essay by Jens Bartelson on empire and sovereignty; and book reviews by Dale Jamieson, Tom Bailey, and Simon Cotton.
Why Human Rights Are Called Human Rights (PDF)
Alan Sussman
The title of this essay is rather ambitious and the space available is hardly sufficient to examine two words of almost limitless expanse—"human rights"—whether standing alone or in tandem. This requires that I begin with (and remained disciplined by) what a teacher of mine, Leo Strauss, called "low facts." My low facts are these: We call ourselves humans because we have certain characteristics that define our nature. We are social and political animals, as Aristotle noted, and possess attributes not shared by other animals. The ancients noted this, of course, when they defined our principal behavioral and cognitive distinction from the rest of the natural world as the faculty of speech. The Greek word for this, logos, means much more than speech, as it connotes word and reason and, in the more common understanding, talking and writing, praising and criticizing, persuading and reading. While other animals communicate by making sounds of attraction or warning, leaving smells, and so on, none read newspapers, make speeches, publish their memoirs, or write poetry.
"Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World" by John Broome (PDF)
Dale Jamieson
This is the inaugural volume in the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah. John Broome, the author of this volume, is a trained economist, distinguished philosopher, and a lead author of the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. He is very well suited to fulfill the mandate of the series, which is to "broaden the set of issues taken up by the human rights community." It is thus surprising that the book does not discuss human rights (or rights at all), nor locate itself in relation to much of the relevant literature. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book, displaying the author’s characteristic virtues of clarity, concision, precision, and intellectual honesty.
"Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency" by Lea Ypi (PDF)
Tom Bailey
In Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi proposes a novel approach to political theory in relation to the issue of global equality. She fiercely criticizes the tendency to abstract from the realities of political agency in "ideal" theorizing, since, she insists, such abstraction renders the conclusions drawn practically irrelevant and indeterminate. But she also refuses to treat current political practices and norms as given constraints in the manner of "nonideal" theorizing, on the grounds that the selection of relevant practices and norms is always morally loaded and their analysis inevitably conservative. Instead, Ypi proposes that theory begin with a specific political conflict, diagnose the failure of existing practices and norms to resolve it, and, in this light, develop better practices and norms. She calls this approach "dialectical" insofar as it considers political practices and norms to develop progressively in resolving emerging political problems, and "activist" or "avant-garde" in its responding and contributing to political change through appropriate political agents.
"Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy" by Aaron James (PDF)
Simon Cotton
We are all familiar with the claim that the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are unjust or otherwise objectionable. Yet this claim faces substantial hurdles in motivating corrective action. Most significantly, wealthy states face political pressures against moderating their bargaining positions. But this is not the only problem. First, there remains the suspicion that these rules are not, in fact, objectionable, or that they are only mildly so—perhaps "bad" but not "unjust." After all, no country is forced to be subject to them; the WTO is a voluntary institution. Second, we still have to determine what rules would be just. Is it really the job of the WTO to compensate for inherent inequalities between countries? In this book, the first philosophical work devoted exclusively to "fair trade," Aaron James seeks to combat the second of these challenges directly. In doing so, he also combats the first.
Drones and the Question of "The Human" (PDF)
Roger Berkowitz
Domino’s Pizza is testing “Domicopter” drones to deliver pizzas, which will compete with Taco Bell’s “Tacocopter” drones. Not to be outdone, Amazon is working on an army of delivery drones that will cut out the postal service. In Denmark, farmers use drones to inspect fields for the appearance of harmful weeds, which reduces herbicide use as the drones directly apply pesticides only where it is needed. Environmentalists send drones into glacial caves or into deep waters, gathering data that would be too dangerous or expensive for human scientists to procure. Federal Express dreams of pilotless aerial and terrestrial drones that will transport goods more cheaply, reliably, and safely than vehicles operated by humans. Human rights activists deploy drones over conflict zones, intelligently searching for and documenting abuses for both rhetorical and legal purposes. Aid agencies send unmanned drones to villages deep in jungles or behind enemy lines, maneuvering hazardous terrain to bring food and supplies to endangered populations. Medical researchers are experimenting with injecting drone blood cells into humans that can mimic good cholesterol carriers or identify and neutralize cancerous cells. Parents in Vermont are using flying drones to accompany children to school, giving a whole new meaning to helicopter parenting. And Pilobolus, a New York dance company, has choreographed a dance in which drones and humans engage each other in the most human of acts: the creation of art. In all areas of life, there is a rush to adopt drones to make our lives better. But the significance of drones to human civilization is poorly understood. In our headlong embrace of drone technology, we are forgetting to ask two basic questions: What is a drone? And what does it mean that the once obvious boundary separating human and machine intelligence is being diminished?
The Future of the Human Rights Movement (PDF)
Beth A. Simmons
This essay will make three main points. First, the human rights movement is richer and much more complicated than a narrow focus on major Western transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) would suggest. Organizations such an Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are crucial, but they are not the dominant actors they were in the 1970s or 1980s. This is a positive development, because the success of the movement depends in large part on authentic and locally relevant rights movements throughout the world. Second, the movement has not achieved all of its multifarious (some would say, proliferating) goals, but it has contributed tremendously to the basic-rights chances of many people around the world. Third, despite some significant success, the movement faces challenges of which most activists are already acutely aware. Some of these challenges are external, and others are internal to the movement itself. Strands of the movement face official opposition to their operation, and even existence, from governments reasserting powerful counterclaims of security and state sovereignty. Human rights organizations (HROs) also face internal tensions about how to prioritize specific rights; difficult strategic decisions about how, where, and when to compromise when pragmatism seems necessary; and perennial issues regarding perceived elitism and professionalism of HROs on the one hand and local experience and suffering on the other. These are reminders that there is nothing inevitable, unidirectional, or unanimous about the success of human rights. However, none of these challenges will be fatal, and most strands of the movement are likely to adapt rather than collapse or disintegrate, at least in the foreseeable future.
Against a World Court for Human Rights (PDF)
Philip Alston
Too much of the debate about how respect for human rights can be advanced on a global basis currently revolves around crisis situations involving so-called mass atrocity crimes and the possibility of addressing abuse through the use of military force. This preoccupation, as understandable as it is, serves to mask much harder questions of how to deal with what might be termed silent and continuous atrocities, such as gross forms of gender or ethnic discrimination or systemic police violence, in ways that are achievable, effective, and sustainable. This more prosaic but ultimately more important quest is often left to, or perhaps expropriated by, international lawyers. Where the politician often finds solace in the deployment of military force, the international lawyer turns instinctively to the creation of a new mechanism of some sort. Those of modest inclination might opt for a committee or perhaps an inquiry procedure. The more ambitious, however, might advocate the establishment of a whole new court. And surely the most “visionary” of such proposals is one calling for the creation of a World Court of Human Rights. A version of this idea was put forward in the 1940s, but garnered no support. The idea has now been revived, in great detail, and with untrammeled ambition, under the auspices of an eminent group of international human rights law specialists. But a World Court of this type is not just an idea whose time has not yet come. The very idea fundamentally misconceives the nature of the challenges confronting an international community dedicated to eliminating major human rights violations. And, if it were ever realized, it would concentrate frighteningly broad powers in the hands of a tiny number of judges without the slightest consideration of the implications for the legitimate role of the state. To the extent that the proposal to create such a court is a heuristic device, public debate about it might arguably help in identifying some of the major challenges that confront the building of a more effective international human rights regime. For the most part, however, the proposal is a misguided distraction from deeper and much more important challenges.
What Future for Human Rights? (PDF)
James W. Nickel
Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao’s heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth’s human population was well under three billion. When we read the Universal Declaration today, however, we find that it still speaks to many if not all of our problems. It addresses torture; detention without trial; authoritarian regimes that restrict fundamental freedoms and punish political participation; discrimination on grounds of race, gender, and religion; and inadequate access to food, education, and economic opportunities. Further, its norms have been embodied in international treaties that are widely accepted. The 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for example, has been ratified by 167 countries and entered into force in 1976. The European and Inter-American courts of human rights have developed large bodies of innovative jurisprudence addressing issues such as terrorism, privacy of home and family, and the land claims of indigenous peoples. And specialized treaties have applied human rights principles to the problems of minorities, women, migrant workers, children, and the disabled. So perhaps human rights will be like the U.S. Bill of Rights and survive for centuries—albeit with many amendments and reinterpretations.
State Sovereignty and International Human Rights (PDF)
Jack Donnelly
I am skeptical of our ability to predict, or even forecast, the future—of human rights or any other important social practice. Nonetheless, an understanding of the paths that have brought us to where we are today can facilitate thinking about the future. Thus, I approach the topic by examining the reshaping of international ideas and practices of state sovereignty and human rights since the end of World War II. I argue that in the initial decades after the war, international society constructed an absolutist conception of exclusive territorial jurisdiction that was fundamentally antagonistic to international human rights. At the same time, though, human rights were for the first time included among the fundamental norms of international society. And over the past two decades, dominant understandings of sovereignty have become less absolutist and more human rights–friendly, a trend that I suggest is likely to continue to develop, modestly, in the coming years.
The Future of Human Rights: A View from the United Nations (PDF)
Andrew Gilmour
Ever since the Charter of the United Nations was signed in 1945, human rights have constituted one of its three pillars, along with peace and development. As noted in a dictum coined during the World Summit of 2005: “There can be no peace without development, no development without peace, and neither without respect for human rights.” But while progress has been made in all three domains, it is with respect to human rights that the organization’s performance has experienced some of its greatest shortcomings. Not coincidentally, the human rights pillar receives only a fraction of the resources enjoyed by the other two—a mere 3 percent of the general budget. The spring of 2014 saw the twentieth anniversary of one of the two emblematic failures of the United Nations: the genocide in Rwanda in April 1994. Two weeks after the killings began, the Security Council reduced the number of peacekeepers in the country to just a tenth of the mission’s original 2,500. Had UN peacekeepers been kept in place and authorized to take action, it might have been possible to save many of the 800,000 people killed over the following twelve weeks. Next year will mark the similarly tragic anniversary of the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, where—massively outnumbered, bereft of air cover, and finally overrun by Bosnian Serb forces—UN peacekeepers were gulled into handing over thousands of men and boys to soldiers who promptly carried out the bloodiest mass execution in Europe since World War II.
From Empire to Sovereignty—and Back? (PDF)
Jens Bartelson
Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 300 pp., $85 cloth, $27.99 paper. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires 1400–1900, Lauren Benton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 340 pp., $94 cloth, $28.99 paper. Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism, Jean L. Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 442 pp., $103 cloth, $37.99 paper. How do empires and sovereign states relate, conceptually as well as historically? More recent scholarship has started to address this question in greater detail. Given that empires long constituted the default mode of political organization on a planetary scale, when and how did a recognizably modern notion of sovereignty emerge, and how was the transition from a world of empires to a world of states carried out? Furthermore, given the distinctive territorial connotations of modern sovereignty, how could claims to such sovereignty be reconciled with geographically expansive forms of rule and the claims to universal and boundless authority that they implied? Finally, given that, in a globalized world, a fair share of political and legal authority has recently been relocated to actors other than states, does sovereignty still have any analytical and normative purchase? Although attempts to answer these questions have resulted in little agreement about the origins of sovereignty, about the mechanisms of its subsequent global diffusion, or about its future prospects, there is a growing awareness that the questions—and the answers we provide to them—necessarily hang together. It is no coincidence that many historians of political thought are in the process of rewriting the history of sovereignty in light of its changing status, and that political and legal theorists are revisiting the history of sovereignty in the hope of making better sense of its meaning and function today.