Women’s human rights may be unicorns, but they can fight wicked witches

Abstract

This essay responds to Alasdair MacIntyre’s skeptical claim that human rights are like “witches” and “unicorns”—as in, they don’t exist, and thus cannot be subject to abstract rational justification. Putting aside the issue of the abstract rational justification of human rights, I focus on the more urgent practical question of how human rights might be meaningfully alleged when they do not yet exist within society, culture, law, or policy. Borrowing from MacIntyre’s narrative theory of ethics to undermine his skeptical view of human rights, I contend that human rights—whether understood as moral rights or as political rights—can be coherently alleged through the same kind of narrative framework that MacIntyre argued was essential to any intelligible ethical system of thought. In particular, imaginative narrative frameworks—such as those found in stories and films—have been crucial for the enterprise of demanding human rights for the powerless, especially girls and women. Putting at its center a feminist interpretation of the classic American film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), this article playfully, yet ultimately seriously, challenges MacIntyre’s dismissal of rights as “witches and unicorns” by showing how allegations of women’s human rights derive much of their power for fighting human wrongs from their historically (although not essentially) imaginative character as well as their deeper narrative structure.