This chapter is written from Duncan Ivison’s dual perspective as a political theorist and as a senior administrator at the University of Sydney, which requires him to translate vision statements about the importance of “globalizing the curriculum” into practical reality. Ivison sets out three arguments for a globalized curriculum: the civilizational rationale, the global citizenship rationale, and the rationale of taking moral disagreement seriously. Only the last provides a strong underpinning for deparochializing a curriculum by decentering Western traditions in its core design. Like the “culture wars” of the 1990s, the civilizational rationale is an argument against decentering the West very much. Its purpose is to underscore the claim that ideas of toleration and respect for cultural diversity have their origins in Western thought traditions. The global citizenship rationale, which focuses on the kinds of knowledge students need to adapt and contribute to a globalized world, may not actually generate a strong commitment to going beyond Western traditions of cosmopolitan humanism. The best alternative is based on the reality of deep and persistent moral disagreements: if only we could learn how to hear them, we might find that sometimes cultural others have persuasive arguments against views we take for granted.

Introduction

Before we begin to engage with the various substantive theories of rights on offer, I want to lay out my approach to these questions a bit more explicitly. Although the book is intended as an introduction, among other things, its structure and organization reflect my own substantive views about the subject. How could it not? There are three ways in which I am going to approach the question of rights and I want to introduce them here: first, we should think of rights as representing a complex social practice; secondly, we shall aim for what I shall call a naturalistic approach to rights in general; and finally, among the different ways of characterizing rights, we shall focus on rights as statuses, instruments and conduits. Let me say some more about each of these now.

Rights as a social practice

Philosophers often want to keep two ways of approaching a concept or value separate, and for good reason. On the one hand, there is the project of philosophical justification, and on the other, the project of description or history. It is one thing to justify something, and quite another to describe it or show how it works, or how it was used by such and such a culture or person.

Introduction

So far we have been concentrating on theories of rights that are closely aligned to the notion of law, which is not unsurprising. Right and law are indeed closely related. But there are different modes of juridical thought. We have been exploring some of these differences in our discussion of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke and Kant. The differences between these philosophers are as significant, I think, as their shared commitment to the centrality of law to the language of rights, and to politics more generally. I also noted that civic humanism and republicanism (especially the neo-Roman conceptions of freedom) offered an alternative set of frameworks within which to make sense of rights, or even to displace them in favour of an emphasis on civic virtue. In this chapter we turn to yet another approach to rights, this time embodied in the philosophy of Hegel. Why read Hegel on rights? Well, for one thing, he is an important source for an influential set of critiques of modern liberalism that take aim at the centrality of individual rights (and the social contract) in their accounts of state, society and the self.

The aim of this book is to explore different arguments about rights in the context of various rich languages of moral and political philosophy. Locating rights in the midst of moral and political argument is crucial. Rights are often appealed to as part of a vision of the individual as radically disengaged from thick ethical theories that bind her to particular social roles or hierarchies. The idea of rights as providing a boundary around the individual, or at least around certain crucial aspects of her freedom, has been an influential image in the history of political thought. The image is true and powerful, but the conceptions of freedom and obligation that shape it are themselves the product of a particular set of moral claims. Boundaries abound in our talk about rights. But boundaries are also often ambiguous: they include as they exclude; they rule in as much as they rule out; and they stake out relationships as much as they separate.

Lawyers and moral philosophers frequently argue over the ultimate parentage of the concept of rights. But in this book, I shall be trying a different tack. I shall be focusing instead on the unavoidable political character of rights: the way arguments about rights are characterized by disagreement and conflict and by movement between the moral and the legal, and the abstract and the practical. It is a mistake to think that rights are either primarily a moral or legal concept.

Introduction

The simplest way to define human rights is to say that they are those rights that all human beings have just by virtue of being human. They are rights that individuals have, in other words, not because of any special relations with others, or through membership of a particular society, but simply by being human. But it then becomes apparent that we need to say more about exactly what those rights are, and to what and to whom the corresponding duties refer. And to do that we have to show how those rights derive from the relevant sense of our humanity. But what is the relevant sense?

Putting the question in this way can lead us to something like an argument for natural rights. Or it may lead to something like the appeal to dignity, as in Kant's moral theory. More generally, in his influential paper (Hart 1984), Hart distinguished between “general rights” and “special rights”, and many contemporary philosophers have seen this as offering a way of making sense of human rights (see the discussion in Beitz 2001; 2003). “General rights” are rights that belong to all men “capable of choice”, in the absence of any special conditions or relations that give rise to “special rights”. The one general right he identifies is the “equal right of all men to be free”, although there may well be others (ibid.).

Introduction

So far we have seen how rights are used to mark the moral status or standing of agents in various ways. We have also explored how they can be understood as instruments to promote certain goals, whether “utility”, equality of resources or welfare. But they can also, I shall argue, be understood as conduits, that is, as modes for distributing capabilities and forms of power and influence and thus shaping behaviour as much as constraining it. The key idea here is that rights are often implicated in various relations of power as much as they are a means of criticizing them. Part of this is due to the fact that if rights are to be enforceable, even in principle, then they require infrastructure: laws, rules, effective social norms, bureaucracies; all manner of institutions. Even negative rights require positive enforcement. So rights are implicated in relations of power not only because power must be exercised to enforce them, or that one can possess all manner of rights (including basic civil and political rights) and still be subject to various forms of power, but also because rights themselves represent a distinctive relation of power. It is this cluster of ideas that I want to explore in more detail in this chapter.

It is important to notice that although there are clear differences between each of these different ways of conceiving of rights – as statuses, instruments and conduits – in any particular instance they will often overlap. The appeal to interests helps us make sense of the complexity and dynamic nature of rights claims, and especially of the particular systems of rights that emerge historically and in different contexts. The appeal to status pushes us towards fundamental principles and conceptions of human agency (and even beyond), and thus towards debates about foundations and the philosophical grounding of rights. Seeing rights as conduits, on the other hand, orients us in the direction of power.

Introduction

In Chapter 1 I suggested that we look at rights in three ways: as statuses, instruments and conduits. Up until now we have been exploring at least four different ways in which rights can be understood to refer to the fundamental status of persons, whether as the workmanship of God, as possessing some crucial moral faculty, as possessing inherent dignity or as constituted by mutual recognition. In Chapters 6 and 7, we turn to the notion of rights as instruments and conduits. Of course, they can be all three of these things at once, as we shall see, and part of my argument is that a political theory of rights must especially try to capture the sense in which that can be true. But for now I want to treat these ideas separately.

I also argued in Chapter 1 that we should approach rights “naturalistically”. In turning to the idea of rights as instruments and conduits it is hoped that the distinctive nature of this approach will become apparent. If rights are instruments, then they are not primary, but rather derivative of some other valuable moral end or goal. And if they are conduits for the distribution of responsibilities and powers, and yet also for forms of “government” more broadly understood, then they do not only help explain the legitimacy of political power but are implicated in various relations of power themselves.

Introduction

One familiar way of making sense of rights is to think of them as related to control over our property and ourselves. This intuition lies behind the attractiveness of the “choice” theory of rights that we discussed in Chapter 1. In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at this way of understanding rights, which also has interesting connections with the natural law tradition, which we have been discussing in Chapter 2. Central here is the notion of self- ownership; I “own” myself in the sense that no one else has the right to use my body, or control my choices, unless I consent. What is striking about this idea is how it has been central to a range of different political ideologies and traditions. Libertarians take it very seriously, but so too do Marxists and egalitarian liberals. A central theme of this chapter is the way conceptions of the self inform and shape our conceptions of rights. The normative idea of self- ownership points to a set of ways of thinking about what is most distinctive or significant about human beings and why they should have rights.

Introduction

Rights are connected to substantive views about the nature of persons. They are a way of expressing what it would mean to treat someone as a person, and as a citizen of a particular kind of state or political community. Rights also emerged in relation to a particular set of historical circumstances. They are associated with a concern about the kinds of threats that individuals face from the exercise of social and political power, by both the state and other powerful political actors. It is not just a matter of who should rule, but how there can be any legitimate coercive rule at all, given that individuals are supposed to be free and self-determining in the first place. The Grotian and Lockean emphasis on natural rights and natural law has been an influential language in which to make sense of these ideas. Here and in Chapter 5, I want to turn to two other ways of thinking about rights: dignity and recognition.