The future of human rights

Abstract

In this essay I examine a cluster of new scholarship that focuses on the future of human rights in an age of existential risk. Focusing on two issues—climate change and autonomous weapons—I make two arguments. First, the optimists who believe our current institutions are ready for the challenges facing us are wrong. Second, the pessimists who believe our current institutions will succeed only if they radically change are not being pessimistic enough.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s new essay, “Disruption and Emergence: How to Think about Human Rights Futures,” is replete with claims that read like science fiction. We are asked to imagine futures that includes robotic persons, off-planet living, uploading minds, interspecies kinship, the fresh invention of global religions, and a post-nation-state system of global order.

Out of all the possibilities that Choi-Fitzpatrick asks us to consider, there is one that stands out clearly as the most outlandish. Looking at the realistic dystopia on our horizon—a world destabilized by unchecked and catastrophic climate change, unregulated and explosive artificial intelligence, and unpredictable and violent power shifts in our political and economic empires—Choi-Fitzpatrick says that the “scenario that taxes our imagination the least” is the following, which he calls the “conventional account”:

It may be that current collective action efforts (e.g., mass mobilization, non-violent resistance, voting, boycotts and buycots), current norms (e.g., individualism, equality, community, solidarity, anthropocentric rights), and current social, economic, and political institutions (e.g., states, markets, media, courts, intergovernmental organizations) are sufficient to address significant change.

This claim does not tax our imagination the least. The optimism necessary to accept the conventional account is simply Panglossian.

Choi-Fitzpatrick, of course, isn’t Panglossian, and the point of his essay is not to examine the conventional account. He wants instead to look at the nightmare alternative: what if the optimists are wrong? What will it look like for humanity if our human rights norms and institutions are inadequate to the challenges ahead? Notably, he frames his argument as a provocative thought experiment, a low probability “what if?” rather than an urgent call to action. In this brief reaction piece I’m going to do two things. First, I’ll explain why I think Choi-Fitzpatrick is seriously underselling the plausibility of his hypothetical doomsday. Second, I will talk about how his answers fit into current scholarship on the future of human rights.

So to begin, let’s look at one human rights concern by way of the conventional account Choi-Fitzpatrick describes above: the right to a healthy environment. As the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Declaration characterizes it:

A point has been reached in history when we must shape our actions throughout the world with a more prudent care for their environmental consequences. Through ignorance or indifference we can do massive and irreversible harm to the earthly environment on which our life and well being depend. Conversely, through fuller knowledge and wiser action, we can achieve for ourselves and our posterity a better life in an environment more in keeping with human needs and hopes … To achieve this environmental goal will demand the acceptance of responsibility by citizens and communities and by enterprises and institutions at every level, all sharing equitably in common efforts (UNEP, 1972).

Fast forward about fifty years. As a delegate to COP26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow in 2021, I spent days walking through the national pavilions and hearing about all the things that were being done to address climate change, from blue carbon resilience credits and globally coordinated efforts to advance urban resilience in coastal cities to market-driven innovations like clean energy tax credits and Bloomberg L.P.’s philanthropic commitments to rallying local climate action (Bloomberg, 2021). Outside Glasgow’s SEC Center, approximately 100,000 people gathered in exuberant defiance to march for climate action. The mood of collective optimism – and the ambitious pledge the summit was on the brink of making to “phase out” coal – was emotionally giddying for delegates like me who found themselves awash in the unfamiliar feeling of hope.

But meanwhile, in the auditorium, the SBSTA-IPCC (Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) laid out the physical science basis for high-pessimism thinking. These included likely scenarios—such as global warming exceeding 2 °C unless we achieved dramatic reductions in greenhouse gases in the next few decades—along with a truly terrifying set of slides dubbed “low-likelihood, high impact” that forecast, for instance, sea levels rising more than fifteen meters. Simultaneously and ominously, 503 lobbyists representing 100 fossil fuel companies and 30 trade associations stalked the exhibition halls (Dewan, 2021). And then, at the eleventh hour, India and China joined together to make an unexpected threat: they would junk the entire pact unless its single most important contribution—the pledge to phase out coal—was gutted. And so, it was gutted.

As the news filtered into the exhibition halls, delegates reacted visibly, as if to a physical gut punch. COP26 president Alok Sharma gaveled out the conference almost immediately after, visibly struggling to hold back tears as he apologized to everybody. Heading toward the exits, delegates had to walk past Tuvalu’s life-sized exhibit of smiling polar bears in life-jackets next to a penguin committing suicide by hanging.

And that’s how the conventional approach is working when facing only one of our crises. The problem is that we have more than one problem—and that they are multiplicative rather than additive. At the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, experts outlined how a collection of diverse emerging risks will coalesce into a resource-driven “polycrisis” by 2030—that is, a situation “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” In other words, it is no longer possible to think of failures to mitigate climate change separately from large-scale involuntary migration. And together these cannot be separated from debt crises and the breakdown of critical information infrastructure. And all these together cannot be fruitfully examined in isolation from geoeconomic confrontation, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and a range of other equally harrowing global emergencies (World Economic Forum, 2023).

Worse still, the wicked concatenation of our polycrisis is laced through with another dystopic theoretical concept: “existential risk.” Nick Bostrom at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute is a leading scholar in the field. He offers a chilling set of detailed philosophical thought experiments that normalize the most severe alarmism. What if global warming turns out to accelerate faster, with harsher outcomes, than we anticipated? What if synthetic biology produces discoveries that allow small teams of semi-skilled people to deploy catastrophic bioweapons or start global pandemics? What if experimentation in high-energy physics generates planet-swallowing black holes? What if we invent a technology that neutralizes nuclear second-strike capabilities, strongly incentivizing a preemptive first strike?

Bostrom calls it the “vulnerable world hypothesis.” Here it is:

If technological development continues then a set of capabilities will at some point be attained that make the devastation of civilization extremely likely, unless civilization sufficiently exits the semi-anarchic default condition. (Bostrom, 2019, 457)

The “semi-anarchic default condition” is Bostrom’s phrase for our current global order, which is defined by “limited capacity for preventive policing,” “limited capacity for global governance,” and “diverse motivations” (by which he means there is a wide enough array of actors that, essentially, there will always be somebody around who is willing to press the big, red, game-over button) (Bostrom, 2019).

The dangers we now face are mutually escalating in historically unprecedented ways. Think of it as extinction-intersectionality: looked at singly, our challenges are daunting; piled one on top of another, they are nigh unthinkable. 2021 provided an emblematic historical overlap, with two unprecedented challenges processed by way of conventional solutions in immediate sequence. Just weeks after the COP26 debacle in Glasgow, the United Nations convened another meeting: the Sixth Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva (UNODA, 2021). Regularly updated since 1983, the CCW puts restrictions on conventional weapons that cause unjustifiable or indiscriminate harm, such as landmines and incendiary weapons. In 2021—thanks in large part to the work of humanitarian organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which had been ringing alarm bells for years—negotiators attempted to add autonomous weapons to the list.

Autonomous weapons are, in brief, exactly what they sound like—weapons that are designed to operate without supervision, like non-anthropomorphic spinoffs from the Terminator movie franchise. Concerns about the continued development and future use of autonomous weapons include the apocalyptic ease with which such weapons could be equipped with WMDs, the catastrophic effects of a new arms race, the devastating potential of individual and system-wide glitches, and a fundamental moral objection to the idea that algorithms should govern decisions over who lives and dies (Dawes, Dec 21, 2021).

The Sixth Review Conference was a historic test case for what our current institutions can achieve. Autonomous weapons are a historically unprecedented technology that present an immediate and potentially existential risk to humanity. Indeed, prior to the review conference, thirty nations joined together calling for a total ban (Dawes, Dec 16, 2021). Meanwhile, the CCW is one of the more effective international tools available to the global community, with a track record that includes eliminating altogether the risk of blinding laser weapons. So what happened when leaders finally gathered in Geneva? Russia, the US, India, and Israel banded together to stop negotiations over autonomous weapons before they could begin (Human Rights Watch, 2021).

Each age believes it faces uniquely destabilizing threats. Choi-Fitzpatrick wants to persuade us—temporarily, for the sake of argument—that this time, it might be for real. He gathers all of the disparate catastrophes above into one three-part hypothesis: namely, that our current systems of promoting human flourishing—from local activism to global governance—are inadequate in the face of systematically disruptive changes that will be generated by innovations in science and technology (e.g., the rise of “artificial” persons), categorical shifts in climate systems (e.g., a dramatic reduction in global access to drinking water), and tectonic geopolitical changes (e.g., the rise of China and the establishment of an alternative normative ecology to human rights). As Choi-Fitzpatrick maps out each wing in his blueprint of catastrophes, he offers a variation of the same calming preface: “We can perhaps dismiss the hypothesis” of global upheaval “if” major forces like “the rights community” or “norms and institutions” effectively rise to the challenge. At first, I thought Choi-Fitzpatrick was in such moments guarding himself against charges of alarmism. But soon I realized that the mildness of his doomspeak is in fact an aspect of his solutions-based approach. There are some who believe panic will get us going, and some who believe panic will shut us down. Choi-Fitzpatrick is among the latter.

Choi-Fitzpatrick gives us a fundamentally hopeful way of engaging with scenarios of civilizational decline and even existential risk. Yes, it may turn out that this era of human rights won’t be able to save the human. But that just means we need to get our act together and do the spadework for a new era of human rights. His “Recommendations” section for this work deals in abstract categories (expanded agendas, new goals, new tools, new interlocutors, etc.) that—however much they lack detailed prognostication—provide an outline of focus for anticipating disruptive change. I imagine it as a map for future research conducted by those unpersuaded by the optimistic conventional account with which we started. Bostrom is a preparatory case study, in that we can cut-and-paste his detailed cost-benefit analyses of potential solutions to the doom-by-science scenario—which range from the generalized adoption of a global stance of technological relinquishment to the reinvention of global governance structures to enable a comprehensive capacity for global surveillance (Bostrom, 2019, pp. 462–468)—into the technology section of Choi-Fitzpatrick’s “Recommendations” outline.

Admittedly, the “second human rights era” that Choi-Fitzpatrick imagines remains largely undefined—but that is more a theoretical claim that an argumentative lack. That is, Choi-Fitzpatrick’s essay is a thought experiment that asks us to imagine ourselves on the cusp of the human-rights equivalent of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. To take Kuhn’s analogy from his seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: We are like people encountering the rabbit-duck optical illusion for the first time. Right now, we can only see a duck. But at some point a gestalt-switch will occur, and we will suddenly see a rabbit. That won’t be because we predicted and prepared for a rabbit, though. Right now, the rabbit (that is, our human rights future) is beyond imagination (Kuhn, 1996).

The sort of futurology Choi-Fitzpatrick engages in here has recently started trending in human rights research, as evidenced by the subjunctive work of writers like Mathias Risse, Mark Goodale, Alison Brysk, William Schulz, and Sushma Raman (Brysk, 2018; Gellers, 2020; Risse, 2019; Schulz & Raman, 2020). Together these scholars take up a range of considerations, from near-term issues like transgender rights to far-term issues like robot rights. Choi-Fitzpatrick’s essay, and the research he is calling for, is importantly different from all of this. These scholars, unlike Choi-Fitzpatrick, operate with default faith in the conventional account—but with three important codicils. The first codicil is long, the second and third are short.

Here’s the first codicil. The “conventional” in conventional account doesn’t have to mean “conventional” in the way impugned by, say, Greta Thunberg, who called COP26 a failure before it even began because it relied upon the governance structures we already have in place: “Business as usual,” she declared, “and blah, blah, blah” (Meredith, 2021). My favorite research case study for radically unconventional conventionalism—a project, in fact, that I used like a shield to deflect the wide-eyed, innocent despair of my youngest child whenever he asked, “What are you doing about climate change?”—is the movement to add “ecocide” as a fifth international crime at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

COP26 and the CCW made 2021 a year of near existential despair, but a “side event” held at the ICC’s annual meeting in The Hague that December just about saved it. The Republic of Vanuatu, the Independent State of Samoa, and the NGO Stop Ecocide International proposed there a working definition for ecocide as a new international crime, alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. Ecocide is “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts” (Stop Ecocide International, 2021). Here, let me indulge, uncharacteristically, in optimism. Efforts to mitigate climate change will be immediately and significantly bolstered from the moment an ecocide amendment to the Rome Statute is first proposed. Even though the ICC cannot prosecute corporations, it can prosecute corporate officers. Investor-owned corporations, like Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell, will need to begin immediate plans for avoiding international criminal behavior. Undoing corporate immunity in this way will be a global game changer, significantly reducing climate abuse.

Here’s the second codicil. The faith human rights institutionalists have in the conventional account isn’t a naïve faith. It seems to me, rather, that it is quite clearly performative. In that way they are working in the spirit of Kathryn Sikkink, whose recent book Evidence for Hope is premised, I believe, upon a foundational concept that goes all the way back to the philosophical pragmatism of William James: namely, that, belief is a key component in making reality (Sikkink, 2017). If you choose to believe in the institutions of human rights, you can strengthen them and make them more effective. If you choose despair—as I did in Glasgow—you undermine them. However much I, in my worst moments, may worry that the conventional account is implausible, I nonetheless also believe that the work of people who embrace that account—like Shulz, Raman, Brysk, and Sikkink—is crucial. Risking a clumsy analogy: Our cloth masks were never going to solve the Covid crisis, but they were going to mitigate catastrophe and save lives. That said, as we masked up, we knew it wasn’t enough and we dreamed of a vaccine. So: Our human rights institutionalists are handing out masks, while Choi-Fitzpatrick is dreaming of a vaccine. They are not in opposition; they are complementary.

The final codicil is that Goodale—who stands in here for all those inclined to invoke a more ambitious Marxist theoretical framework—is perhaps not appropriately described as a “conventional account-ist.” Goodale’s Reinventing Human Rights clarifies the need for much more radical change than current institutions allow, naming it “translocal collective action” (Goodale, 2022, p. 51). Nonetheless, I still distinguish him and those like him from Choi-Fitzpatrick because his key theoretical inspirations—like the Marxist economic geography of David Harvey—fit squarely within our familiar critiques and larger intellectual “knowns,” while in contrast the promise of Choi-Fitzpatrick is the un-embarrassed embrace of unknowables.

Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that our polycrisis will “fundamentally transform” the field of human rights, that “the institutions, norms, and forms of collective action [will] become unrecognizable” to us (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2023). Duck, rabbit. He asks us to imagine ourselves now, in the before state, as something like artisan weavers on the cliff of the Industrial Revolution, banking our futures on the idea that we can make weaving by hand more efficient.

Meanwhile, the page of history is about to be turned.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Dawes

James Dawes is DeWitt Wallace Professor and Director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College. His areas of research expertise include human rights, narrative ethics, and artificial intelligence. He is the author of several books, including The Novel of Human Rights and Evil Men.