Constructing dignity: Human rights as a praxis of egalitarian freedom

ABSTRACT

Familiar philosophical accounts of the relationship between human rights and human dignity treat dignity as the foundation of human rights. These accounts get the historical and conceptual relationship between rights and dignity wrong and obscure how power and politics shape human dignity in practice. This article sketches an alternative view that treats the emancipatory praxis of human rights as constitutive of a distinctive conception of dignity as egalitarian freedom. This political account clarifies the historical and conceptual relationships between dignity and human rights in ways that provide powerful critical leverage on some obdurate controversies in the field. Additionally, it makes the analysis of power and struggle central to our understanding of dignity and human rights at a political moment when such an analysis proves indispensable.

Notes

1. On the distinction between justification and articulation, see Rorty (1988: 260).

2. Donnelly understands human rights as a means to realize a particular (liberal) conception of human dignity (Donnelly 1982: 314) and sees them as necessarily anchored in a liberal regime (Howard and Donnelly 1986).

3. Notice the tension between this position and Donnelly's earlier, anthropologically informed arguments about dignity (see footnote 2 and surrounding text).

4. I emphasize the praxis; the tradition of natural rights theory is arguably more ancient (Tuck 1979).

5. This account challenges recent scholarship that insists on a clear and sharp distinction between human rights—that is, international legal human rights—and the broader tradition of emancipatory political thought drawing on arguments for natural rights, freedom, and equality (e.g., Moyn 2010). I cannot directly join this debate here. I will only insist that it is possible to discern and learn from continuities between historical and contemporary human rights praxis without denying there is something novel and distinctive about the international legal human rights regime constructed following World War II; like Stammers, I hold that “[t]o assume that the meaningful history of human rights only begins in 1948 means that 350 years of Western history, let alone other histories, are ignored” (Stammers 2009: 23).

6. As Jeanne Morefield suggests, Said's contrapuntal thinking offers one way of doing so (see Morefield forthcoming).

7. Zivi is sometimes too dismissive of the material benefits that human rights praxis can deliver (e.g., Zivi 2012: 67, 121). The constitutive functions of rights she identifies need not conflict with their more traditional political functions.

8. It would be better, I think, to say “rights-claiming subject.” Stammers seems to see success in terms of institutionalization (despite its perils), which he regards as crucial to this accumulation of power. But, as we shall see, it is the performance, not only the success, of the claims that matters.

9. One reader of this article suggested that perhaps my account points toward a Hegelian understanding of dignity. If the suggestion is that a more philosophical approach to recognition is required to ground the account, I reject it emphatically; if, however, it is meant to reinforce that there is a phenomenological basis for dignity in the affirmation one (sometimes) finds through political engagement and other forms of social interaction, I endorse it wholeheartedly. There is a vast literature on recognition that unfortunately I cannot engage with here. For a good overview see Taylor (1994), Honneth (1995), and Markell (2003).

10. Again, let me emphasize the point made earlier about the significant political differences between claiming one's own rights and having others claim rights on one's behalf. It is through this distinction that we must approach questions about the use of human rights as a tool of domination; unfortunately, I cannot pursue this point here.

11. It also assumes that moral imperatives carry some special normative force, although as Philippa Foot (1972) argued, pinpointing this force proves impossible.

12. I cannot delve further into this important distinction or the broader issues here; see Goodhart (2018: chapter 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Goodhart

Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds secondary appointments in Philosophy and in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. He is Director of the Global Studies Center and a University Honors College Faculty Fellow.