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ABSTRACT
In this article we focus critically on the normative foundations of the project outlined by Benjamin Gregg in The Human Rights State (2016). In developing our analysis of Gregg’s project, we consider it in the context of the inspiration it draws from the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. We argue that Arendt does not give Gregg any robust support for his anti-foundationalism, and that Rancière’s politics of dissensus makes an uneasy ally for Gregg’s constructivism. We argue that we need strong moral foundations to motivate critique and ground valid construction, and that they need not draw us back into the authoritarianism so often associated with classical foundations on which human rights claims have sometimes relied. We suggest that the right kind of thin but strong moral foundations are most clearly articulated in the work of the critical theorist Rainer Forst, and that Forst’s constructivism and his emphasis on dissensus makes his perspective particularly compatible with Gregg’s project. In the final parts of the article, we expose what we see as the unacknowledged normative foundations of Gregg’s position. We conclude by briefly examining the practical significance of his neglect of those foundations and the moral context that are crucial for tackling the governance gap in business human rights issues.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support given by the editors of this special issue during the development of this article. We are grateful for the detailed and generous advice given by René Wolfsteller, and for the inspiration provided by Benjamin Gregg.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Yingru Li is completing a PhD in Accounting at the University of Glasgow. Her main research interests are accountability, social justice and human rights in business.
John McKernan holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Glasgow. John is Professor of Accounting and head of the accounting and finance subject group at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. His main research interests are accountability, business ethics and human rights in business.
Notes
1. Benjamin Gregg, The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
2. Ibid., 42.
3. Rainer Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims. Reply to Simone Chambers, Stephen White and Lea Ypi’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 3 (2015): 227.
4. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 16.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. John Tasioulas, ‘Human Rights, No Dogmas: The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’, SSRN (2015): 1. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2561420
8. John Gerard Ruggie, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (Norton Global Ethics Series) (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2013).
9. Ibid., 2.
10. Ibid., 11.
11. Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27.
12. Ibid., 232.
13. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 200; Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 232.
14. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 107.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 301.
16. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 193.
17. Ibid., 195.
18. Ibid.
19. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Arendt on the Foundations of Equality’, in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. S. Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20.
20. Ibid., 37.
21. Ibid., 38.
22. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 296.
23. Frank Michelman, ‘Parsing “A Right to Have Rights”’, Constellations 3, no. 2 (1996): 207.
24. Ibid.
25. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 185.
26. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 298.
27. Ibid., 219.
28. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 48.
29. Ibid., 33.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Ibid., 227.
32. Ibid., 47.
33. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 70.
34. Ibid., 71.
35. Ibid., 68.
36. Jacques Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October 61 (1992): 60.
37. Ibid., 73.
38. Ibid., 59.
39. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 224.
40. James Ingram, ‘Cosmopolitanism from Below: Universalism as Contestation’, Critical Horizons 17, no. 1 (2016): 74.
41. Rancière, Dissensus, 70.
42. Ingram, ‘Cosmopolitanism from Below’, 74.
43. Rancière, Dissensus, 68; Gregg, The Human Rights State, 23.
44. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 23.
45. James Ingram, ‘The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice’, Journal for Human Rights/Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte 9, no. 1 (2015): 21.
46. Ibid., 3.
47. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
48. Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2.
49. Michelman, ‘Parsing “A Right to Have Rights”’, 205.
50. Rainer Forst, ‘The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive Approach’, Ethics 120, no. 4 (2010): 730.
51. Forst, The Right to Justification, 2.
52. Ibid., 205.
53. Ibid., 209–10.
54. Ibid.
55. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934, 1967).
56. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 78.
57. Ibid., 79.
58. Ibid., 78.
59. Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims’, 226.
60. Forst, The Right to Justification, 5.
61. Ibid., 5.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 18.
64. Ibid., 19.
65. Ibid., 2.
66. Rancière, Dissensus, 70; Forst, The Right to Justification, 2.
67. Rancière, Disagreement, 17.
68. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 89.
69. Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
70. Jodi Dean, ‘The Politics of Avoidance: The Limits of Weak Ontology’, Hedgehog Review 7, no. 2 (2005).
71. Forst, The Right to Justification, 204.
72. Ibid., 204.
73. Ibid., 45.
74. Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims’, 227.
75. Ibid., 227.
76. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 27–8, 125.
77. Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims’, 228.
78. Ibid., 227.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 229.
81. Forst, The Right to Justification, 36.
82. Ibid., 55.
83. Ibid., 60.
84. Ibid., 61.
85. Ibid., 61.
86. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 5.
87. Ibid., 11.
88. Ibid., 68.
89. Ibid., 10.
90. Ibid., 139.
91. Gregg, Human Rights as Social Constructions, 27.
92. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 198.
93. Benjamin Gregg, Thick Moralities, Thin Politics. Social Integration Across Communities of Belief (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction, 72.
94. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23.
95. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 175.
96. Ibid., 17.
97. Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims’, 229.
98. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 176.
99. Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics Grounds, Method and Aims’, 229.
100. Ibid.
101. Forst, The Right to Justification, 39.
102. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 11.
103. Forst, The Right to Justification, 55.
104. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 89.
105. Forst, The Right to Justification, 63.
106. Gregg, The Human Rights State, 46.
107. Ibid., 39.
108. Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 7.
109. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
110. United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework’, UN Doc. A/HRC/17/31 (2011). http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_EN.pdf.
111. Forst Rainer, ‘Noumenal Power’, Journal of Political Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2015): 112.
112. Wesley Cragg, ‘Ethics, Enlightened Self-Interest, and the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights: A Critical Look at the Justificatory Foundations of the UN Framework’, Business Ethics Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2012): 9–36, 25.
113. UNHRC, ‘Business and Human Rights: Further Steps Toward the Operationalization of the “Protect, Respect and Remedy » Framework’, UN Doc. A/HRC/14/27 (2010), para. 81. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/trans_corporations/docs/A-HRC-14-27.pdf
114. Ibid., para. 15.
115. Gerald A Cohen, ‘Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, no. 1 (1997): 3–30.
116. John Braithwaite, ‘Responsive Regulation and Developing Economies’, World Development 34, no. 5 (2006): 884–98.
117. Andreas Rasche, ‘Collaborative Governance 2.0’, Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society 10, no. 4 (2010): 500–11.
118. Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘Disaggregated Sovereignty: Towards the Public Accountability of Global Government Networks’, Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 159–90.