The Global Status of Human Rights

Abstract

lecture began at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 23, and was given by Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University; the discussant was Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton University. ** THE GLOBAL STATUS OF HUMAN RIGHTS By Amartya Sen I feel very honored to have the opportunity to give the Grotius Lecture at this august forum. I cannot claim to be a legal scholar, with any expertise on international law, and I cannot hide my sense of inadequacy in giving this lecture in the name of one of the pioneering thinkers on law in general and international law in particular. But I take some encouragement from the fact that the great Hugo Grotius showed in his own trail-blazing work a deep interest in linking legal thinking to other disciplines of human thought. Grotius was particularly partial to poetry, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had noted, in comparing Grotius's ideas with those of Thomas Hobbes. In his book Emile, Rousseau even went on to say: The truth is that their [Hobbes's and Grotius's] principles are exactly the same; they only differ in their expression. They also differ in their method. Hobbes relies on sophisms, and Grotius on the poets; all the rest is the same. (1) Whether or not we accept Rousseau's thesis (I shall come to that question later on in this lecture), it can certainly be argued that Grotius had a noticeable passion for linking up different disciplines of what can be called human reasoning. Many of his arguments make good use of what appears reasonable in common human thought. Indeed, the idea that the sea is a shared territory, which all are free to use--an idea that Grotius discussed in his book Free Sea (published in 1609) with powerful appeal to the common understanding of reasonableness--provides a general view of political normativity that is not parasitic on legislated law by one nation or another. I intend to take that as my point of departure, since the idea of human rights makes a similar appeal to the political normativity of rights that all human beings are supposed to have. That, to be sure, is not Grotius's claim, but there is clearly a strong analogy here. At least one of the concepts of human rights--and one which I would like to pursue in this lecture--shares with Grotius's ideas (including the argument for the shared freedom of the sea), the understanding that certain basic entitlements come not from specific national legislations, but from the recognition that these freedoms, to which people in general could be taken to be entitled, come from a general appreciation of ethical normativity, rather than any specific territorial legislation. global status of human rights can be seen in a similar normative perspective. There are still many issues to sort out in pursuing this line of thought, since it is a complicated claim, which can be resisted in many different ways. To defend that approach, we have to address several points of reasoned resistance to the idea of human rights that have been quite powerful in practice, and they demand reasoned examination and scrutiny, which we must not evade. To give the idea its due, we have to examine in particular what is entailed by the recognition that some particular claim should count as a human right. This raises some general questions. How should we think about the basis of human rights? What is the nature of the discipline of human rights, which can give plausibility to the claims of such rights? These are questions that I must address in this talk. (2) LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS How, then, does the idea of human rights relate to law? It is not surprising that there is a strong temptation to link human rights to law. While the idea of human rights is of comparatively recent origin, the concept of legal rights is old, well-established and widely used. …