The Rights Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page B

met these tests. 21 Instead, I want to make the more general point that the concept of human rights is a self-limiting kind of authority. Yes, it mandates the use of force in exceptional circumstances. But those who invokeit to justify force are committing themselves to use force with maximum restraint, to seek the consent of victims and the consent of other states, and to leave when the job is done.
    Having said all this, I must not pretend that justifications of force will ever be anything but controversial. What some will see as a mission of humanitarian rescue, others are bound to see as an imperialist violation of the sovereignty of a people. People who talk about human-rights principles as if they were the common sense of humankind fail to understand that all rights claims, including those that seem perfectly self-evident to us, are bound to be controversial to others. A belief in human rights is not a faith like a religion, and the authority it confers is not the authority of faith, only the authority of argument. Human rights are not the trump cards that end arguments. In the real business of moral life, there are no trumps. There are only reasons, and some are more convincing than others. If this is true, then the legitimacy of human-rights interventions — the large ones that marshal armies and the small ones that intercede in personal lives — can only ever be limited and conditional. This is a blessing in disguise, for it means that they will never command the kind of consensus that sometimes justifies unlimited brutality.
    It would be a mistake, in other words, to think of human rights as a pure and abstract morality. Rights are used to justify acts of power and resistance, and like all such languages, rights talk is open to abuse. Rights talk can be used to justify evil as well as good. But properlyunderstood, it is self-limiting. To say you have a right to do X is to imply the right of Y to resist. To say you have a right, moreover, is to engage in justification, and all justification implies the possibility of rebuttal.
    Let me sum up. The first presumption I have argued against in these lectures is that the language of rights is an apologia for force. I am committed to the language of rights for precisely the opposite reason: because it mandates limits to the use of force.
    The second presumption I have opposed is the claim that rights language fragments community. I shall have more to say about this in later lectures, because the charge simply won’t go away, but for the moment I want to emphasize that rights create reciprocities, and that these reciprocities are the very bedrock of community. Moreover, rights express not only individual claims, but also collective values: above all, the idea that rights are indivisible. If they come for you, they also come for me. That means we must stick together.
    The third claim I have criticized in these lectures is that rights are hostile to difference. Marx was simply wrong when he claimed, in 1843, that rights talk reduces us all to abstract, equal individuals, held together by our biological sameness. The claim I would make is the reverse. If the supreme value that rights seek to protect is human agency, then the chief expression of human agency is difference, the ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities, and claims, at once individually and collectively. To believe in rights is to believe in defending difference.
    The final argument, most basic of all, is that rights are not abstractions. They are the very heart of our community and the very core of our values. We have them because those who went before us fought for them, and in some cases died for them. Our commitment to rights is a commitment to our ancestors. We owe it to them to maintain the vitality of the right to dissent, the right to belong, and the right to be different. In my next lecture, I want to explain, in more detail, how a single community like ours struggles to reconcile