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Reimagining Human Rights
Religion and the Common Good
William R. O'Neill
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eBook - ePub
Reimagining Human Rights
Religion and the Common Good
William R. O'Neill
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Ă propos de ce livre
In Reimagining Human Rights, William O'Neill presents an interpretation of human rights "from below, " showing how victims of atrocity can embrace the rhetoric of human rights to dismantle old narratives of power and advance new ones. Topics covered include race and mass incarceration, immigration and refugee policy, and ecological responsibility.
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Sous-sujet
TeologĂa cristianaCHAPTER ONE
Interpreting Rights
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
âBertolt Brecht
The killings began on the evening of Easter Wednesday, April 6, 1994, and continued for three months. By the end over eight hundred thousand Tutsis as well as Hutus who opposed the genocide were massacred. Between that second week of April and the third week of May it is estimated that the daily rate of killing was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps. Three-quarters of the Rwandese Tutsi population fell victim to the genocide; the elderly, children, the infirmânone were spared. Nor was there haven. The churches, formerly offering sanctuary, were the first places attacked.1 In their environs âmore Rwandese citizens died . . . than anywhere else.â2 The horror was unmitigated but not inexplicable, for the killing was due less to atavistic enmity than to a racist mythology nurtured in the colonial period and abetted by Belgian and later French realpolitik.3 Although favoring elite interests, the totalizing myth of Hutu supremacy divested the imagined âotherâ of moral standing so that the massacres by the Interahamwe (the militia) seemed banal.4 In a perverse inversion of Emmanuel LĂ©vinasâs dictum, neighbor refused to see the neighborâs face upon which was inscribed the command âThou shalt not kill.â5 So, too, members of the United Nations Security Council refused to acknowledge the Rwandan killings as genocide lest they incur legal obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to which they were signatories. At the behest of the United States, United Nations peacekeeping troops in Rwanda (UNIMIR) were summarily withdrawn, along with all foreign nationals.6 Others were left to die.
Yet mere wretchedness, Albert Camus reminds us, is not tragedy.7 Whether we see these cruelest months as morally tragic or merely an unimportant failure of realpolitik depends upon evoking what was effaced: bringing to word the transgressed command. And recognizing the nature, force, and scope of victimsâ claims, as I noted in the introduction, is the first, indispensable critical or deconstructive role of rights.8 Yet memory speaks, I will argue, as command in the solidarity of remembrance, through what Benjamin calls anamnestic solidarity: the constructive role of rights.9 Here the interpretative burden shifts to identifying correlative duties and duty-bearers in redeeming claim-rights. Finally, the deconstructive and constructive uses combine in a hermeneutic of reconstructive redress. For the denial of rights leaves moral traces, such as in victimsâ claims to repentance or reparation. As we shall see, these distinct yet finally inseparable uses of rights configure not only the legal/juridical and ethical but also the religious interpretation of rights. Indeed, our differences regarding the fit of these terms explain, in part, why social reconciliation remains such a vexed issue. Desmond Tutuâs pleas for âconfession, forgiveness and reconciliation in the lives of nationsâ meet with his fellow Nobel laureate Wole Soyinkaâs objection, that justice is ill served by âdischarging the guilty without evidence of mitigationâor remorse.â10
How, then, can the exigent demands of individual rights be reconciled with âthe healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationshipsâ?11 Must we choose between the âpolitics of [individual] rightsâ and the âpolitics of the common goodâ in restorative justice?12 Or is Tutuâs appeal to Ubuntuâthe fusing of liberal justice and communitarian solidarityâmerely a religious bricolage of incommensurable warrants and backings? As will be shown, any rapprochement must take seriously the genealogy of our differences. For it is only against the inherited theoretical background that the originality of Tutuâs translation appears. Let me first, then, offer a brief genealogy of our rival rhetorics and then elaborate the threefold use of rights at play in âtelling the story.â I conclude with a brief response to several salient criticisms of rights rhetoric.
I. A GENEALOGY OF DIFFERENCE
Natural rights, it seems, are the currency of modernityâthe coin of a disenchanted realm. The âultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life,â wrote Max Weber, while our fragmented values (a demystified polytheism) succeed to the âgrandiose moral fervor of Christian ethics.â13 With the eclipse of the religiously inspired ideal of the common good, the liberties of the moderns reign supreme.14 Grotiusâs modern heirs speak not of the divine finality of natural law (the jus naturale of the medievals) but of the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man.15 So it is for partisans and critics alike: the Western effective history of rights begins with what JĂŒrgen Habermas calls the âpositivizationâ (Positivierung) of the classical jus naturale of modernity. Civic virtue gives way to âa neutral sphere of personal choiceâ in which, as Mandeville put it, private vice makes public virtue.16
Recent historiography, as noted in the introduction, belies the secular myth of origins. In his magisterial treatise Brian Tierney contends that the origins of subjective natural rights in late twelfth-century canonical jurisprudence betrayed little of the âatomic individualismâ of the âmore egotistical impulses of early modern capitalism.â The use of rights was not ânecessarily opposed to the communitarian values of traditional societies. Nor was the idea dependent on any particular version of Western philosophy; rather, it coexisted with a variety of philosophies, including the religiously oriented systems of the medieval era and the secularized doctrines of the Enlightenment.â17 Indeed, as we shall see, the originality of Tutuâs translation of rights in the South African TRCâone not beholden to the antinomies of modern liberal theoryârests in part on recovering the communitarian values of traditional societies, including the religiously oriented ideal of Ubuntu as expressed in victimsâ narrative testimony.18 Yet the history of rights is also a history of forgetting. The secularized doctrines of the Enlightenment set the stage for our (post)modern rhetorical rivalries: variations wrung from the modern strain of natural rights and the neo-Hegelian or Aristotelian ethical riposte.19
The Liberal Metanarrative
While for Aquinas natural law (lex naturalis) preserves âhappiness and its parts for the body politic,â for modern social-contract theorists, influenced as they are by nominalist legal theory, social obligation is incurred voluntaristically.20 Divested of its inner teleology, nature, one might say, has ceased to tell a moral tale. For there is, says Hobbes, âno such Finis Ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good).â Augustineâs cor inquietum is now but âa continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to anotherââthe natural bonum commune of âthe old Morall Philosophersâ becomes the war âof every man against every man.â21 In this nominalist vein Hobbes opposes liberty as the âRIGHT OF NATUREâ (Jus Naturale) âto use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Natureâ to the âLAW OF NATURE, (Lex Naturalis),â which âdetermineth, and bindeth.â22 For, stripped of Grotiusâs natural sociability, it is âthe foresight of their own preservationâ that leads men âwho naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over othersâ to submit to âthat restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths).â23 Society is itself a grand artifice, âan Artificiall Personâ created by our mundane fiat.24 And hence the irony: to attain our mortal ends we must sacrifice our natural right of liberty to the ordained order of Hobbesâs âMortall God,â Leviathan.25
Lockeâs state of nature is, by contrast, a relatively peaceable kingdom. Deferring to the âjudicious Hooker,â Locke grounds natureâs civility of mores in our natural equality, from which springs âthe obligation to mutual love.â Yet the âlaw of natureâ regulating our natural âstate of libertyâ turns less on Aquinasâs (or Richard Hookerâs) bonum commune than on the domain of individual, prepolitical rights.26 For Locke, writes Louis DuprĂ©, âthe existence of individual rights precedes that of the community, which previously had been considered the concrete source of right.â27 Private property (even in oneâs âown personâ) becomes the regnant metaphor of rights, the preservation and protection of which underwrite the social contract.
Rousseau, too, appeals to the doctrine of a social contract. Yet where Hobbesâs pactum subjectionis resolves the will of all into the will of one, Rousseau depicts the social bond (lien social) as the willâs self-limitation; indeed, it is only âwith civil so...
Table des matiĂšres
- Cover
- Half title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Interpreting Rights
- Chapter Two: Justifying Rights
- Chapter Three: Rights and Religion
- Chapter Four: Applying Human Rights
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
Normes de citation pour Reimagining Human Rights
APA 6 Citation
OâNeill, W. (2021). Reimagining Human Rights ([edition unavailable]). Georgetown University Press. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/1438184/reimagining-human-rights-religion-and-the-common-good-pdf (Original work published 2021)
Chicago Citation
OâNeill, William. (2021) 2021. Reimagining Human Rights. [Edition unavailable]. Georgetown University Press. https://www.perlego.com/book/1438184/reimagining-human-rights-religion-and-the-common-good-pdf.
Harvard Citation
OâNeill, W. (2021) Reimagining Human Rights. [edition unavailable]. Georgetown University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1438184/reimagining-human-rights-religion-and-the-common-good-pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2022).
MLA 7 Citation
OâNeill, William. Reimagining Human Rights. [edition unavailable]. Georgetown University Press, 2021. Web. 14 Oct. 2022.