Are Human Rights Liberal?

Abstract

This paper provides a liberal critique of paternalistic tendencies in the contemporary human rights concept. In contrast to familiar arguments that the paternalism of human rights comes from a false universalism, concealing a culturally specific normativity or gender inequality, I critique what I take to be the way contemporary human rights thinking reconceives of the rights-bearer. First, the theory reconceives of the rights-bearing subject not as a self-willing moral agent but as a needy individual whose vital interests need protection. Second, this reconceptualization of rights opens the door for a paternalistic political practice, in which an external, third party “exercises” the rights rather than the rights-bearing subject himself. Together, these moves are at odds both with the emphasis in earlier liberal thought on the self-willing moral agent as the foundation of rights, and with the antipaternalistic politics connected to this view of the rights-bearer. The thrust of the argument is not that universal human rights embody a false universalism or have an inherent tendency to violate their own pretensions to liberty and equality, but rather that there is something problematic in the generalization of a recent, but predominant, view of the rights-bearer. This critique bears some similarity with a radical criticism of human rights common today, but, in contrast to these anti-liberal critics, I wish to show why a liberal should be concerned with the ascendant way of thinking about the rights-bearer. In the first two sections of this paper I discuss the modernity of rights and outline the classic liberal view. In the third section I analyze the way contemporary human rights depart from earlier liberal conceptions of the dignity of the rights-bearing subject. In the fourth, I discuss how this reconceptualization has paternalistic implications that liberals should find troubling.