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ABSTRACT
As political tools to further human rights, formal state apologies function partly as promises to the future generations of both parties to carry forward the respectful relationship the apology (re)establishes. In this sense, apologies logically resemble rights as well, since all rights, and especially environmental rights, are very future-oriented things. This article explores the value of viewing environmental human rights essentially as formal apologies to future generations, thereby granting legal recognition (including standing) and political clout to the environmental rights of future generations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Richard P. Hiskes is Professor of Political Science and Director of Human Rights at Grand Valley State University, and Professor Emeritus from the University of Connecticut. He is the author of several books and articles in the area of human rights theory, and former Editor of the Journal of Human Rights.
Notes
1 Richard P. Hiskes, The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2 See Gilbert Harman, ‘Moral Relativism as a Foundation for Natural Rights?’, Journal of Libertarian Studies 4 (1980): 367–71.
3 Environmental human rights have been widely accepted in the past decade as real rights, even though it is clear both that they pertain mainly to groups as collective rights, and they invoke the rights of future generations in a manner more stringent than other rights. International documents that acknowledge environment human rights include the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and The African Charter on Human and People's Rights (1982), among others. For discussions of the nature and dynamics of environmental human rights, see Tim Hayward, Constitutional Environmental Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Richard P. Hiskes, ‘The Right to a Green Future: Human Rights, Environmentalism, and Intergenerational Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly 27 (November 2005): 1346–64; Hiskes, The Human Right to a Green Future; James W. Nickel, ‘The Human Right to a Safe Environment: Philosophical Perspectives on its Scope and Justification’, Yale Journal of International Law 18 (1993): 281–5.
4 Hannah Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 157–8.
5 Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), xi.
6 Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), 114.
7 Michael Marrus, ‘Official Apologies and the Quest for Historical Justice’, Journal of Human Rights 6 (2007): 75–105; 79.
8 Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd, ‘The Practice of Public Apologies: A Qualified Defense’ (2002), http://www.ijr.org.za/sa_mon/art_pgs/gov_verwoed.PDF. Quoted in Janna Thompson, ‘Apology, Justice and Respect’, in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 31–44; 34.
9 United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II, para. 1 (1948).
10 See Tanya H. Lee, ‘7 Apologies Made to Native Americans’, Indian Country Today, 1 July 2015, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/events/7-apologies-made-to-american-indians/.
11 African Commission on Human and People's Rights, ‘African Charter on Human and People's Rights’, Article 20; para. 1 (1981).
12 Richard B. Bilder, ‘The Role of Apology in International Law’, in Gibney et al., The Age of Apology, 25.
13 Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59.
14 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). For discussions of the status of future persons written before Parfit, see T. Schwartz, ‘Obligations to Posterity’, in Obligations to Future Generations, ed. R. Sikora and B. Barry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 3–14; R. Adams, ‘Existence, Self-interest, and the Problem of Evil’, Nous 13 (1979): 53–65; and Gregory S. Kavka, ‘The Paradox of Future Individuals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 11 (1981): 93–112.
15 Deryck Beyleveld, ‘Human Rights: A Gewirthian Approach’, in Human Rights and Sustainability, ed. Gerhard Bos and Marcus Duwell (London: Routledge, 2016).
16 Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 53–5.
17 Beyleveld, ‘Human Rights’, 145.
18 See Gerhard Bos, ‘A Chain of Status: Long-term Responsibility in the Context of Human Rights’, in Bos and Duwell, Human Rights and Sustainability, 107–20.
19 Jorg Chet Tremmel and Ned Chambers, ‘Review of Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman (eds.), “Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem (Springer)”’, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, April 3, 2010.
20 Arguments over the ontological – and legal – status of group rights, of course, continue. I would argue that the definition of genocide both as a separate crime than murder and as the targeting groups, ends the debate that groups can have rights, particularly the group right of existence, as stipulated in the African Charter. For continued discussion of the concept of group rights, see Hiskes, The Human Right to a Green Future; and Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Denver: University of Colorado Press, 1989). For discussion of continuing issues emanating from the granting of group rights see William Kymlicka, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable: Minority Group Rights’, Dissent (Summer 1996): 22–30.
21 Janna Thompson, ‘Apology, Justice and Respect’, in Gibney, et al., The Age of Apology, 43.
22 Ibid., 39.
23 Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies, 53.
24 Richard P. Hiskes, ‘A Very Promising Species: From Hobbes to the Human Right to Water’, in The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents in the Global Age, ed. Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
25 Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies.
26 Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 36.
27 Hayward, Constitutional Environmental Rights, 8.
28 Ibid.
29 Bilder, ‘The Role of Apology in International Law’, 17.
30 Mark Gibney and Niklaus Steiner, ‘Apology and the American “War on Terror”’, in Gibney, et al., The Age of Apology, 287–97; 288.
31 Jeremy Waldron, ‘Superseding Historic Injustice’, Ethics 103 (1992): 4–24, 6.
32 See for example, Hiskes, ‘The Right to a Green Future’; and Hiskes, The Human Right to a Green Future; Edith Brown-Weiss, ‘In Fairness to Future Generations and Sustainable Development’, American University International Law Review 8 (1992): 19–26; Shari Collins-Chobanian, ‘Beyond Sax and Welfare Interests’, Environmental Ethics 22 (2000): 133–48.
33 Henry Shue, Basic Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
34 Hiskes, ‘The Right to a Green Future’; Hiskes, and The Human Right to a Green Future.
35 See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), for her argument that modern human rights began in the empathetic experience of contemporary novels in western Europe.
36 This is Alan Gewirth's term. Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
37 I am grateful to Marcus Duwell and to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
38 Case 6:15-cv-01517-TC. US District Court for Oregon. Decision Filed 04/08/2016.