Theoretical and Practical Objections to Human Rights

The first Marxist critique of human rights as a response to the French Declaration was given by Karl Marx in 1843, in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’. Marx’s critique of human rights rests on the belief that the man of human rights is abstract. Rights idealise and support an inhuman social order, underpinned by the abstract man of the declarations and, they turn real people into abstract ciphers.

The new objections to human rights are more radical and harsh, but mostly directed to the failure of human rights movement and the gap between the idea of human rights and its practice more than the idea itself. Though some critiques originate from postmodern thinkers who consider a transformation from grant narratives to small narratives, from human rights to the rights of children, to the rights of immigrants necessary and unavoidable; the others esteeming the idea of human rights in itself criticize the practice of human rights which seems them far from securing human rights to all members of the world community, referring especially the huge gap between the idea of human rights and its practice.

The proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French people was in 1789.

Conceptual objections are mostly directed either to the vagueness and abstractness of the concept of human rights, and of human nature on which the idea of human rights supposed to be to rest, and of the claim of universality.

A different but complementary argument is developed by Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue, when discussing the idea of human rights. According to him, not only are there no human rights, the notion of a right itself is not found in every society. After pointing out that claims to the possession of rights presuppose the existence of a set of socially established rules, he goes on, ‘Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods and in particular social circumstances.

Even the concept of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights differs in some respect from the concept of human rights in the twin Covenants of UN. Human rights in the Universal Declaration are conceived of mainly as principles of action, concerning how human beings should treat others, whereas human rights in the Covenants are considered basic ethical principles for social organization and state, which takes community or people as its subject.

Citing from late Derrida the statement that “no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on earth” (Kapur, 2006, 699; Derrida), she tries to portray the huge gap between the idea and its practice.

At best, rights create a common framework, a common set of reference points that can assist parties in conflict to deliberate together. Common language, however, does not necessarily facilitate agreement” (Ignatieff, 2003, 20).

In that period, the highly influential thought of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud and their followers, the great philosophers of ‘suspicion’ according to Paul Ricoeur, successfully challenged the assumptions of liberal humanism, ‘the philosophy of the progressive realisation of the whole man throughout history.

“All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”.

Gearty answers this question condemning the practice of human rights. “Bills of rights, written constitutions, judicial decisions on rights and so on are not, I said, the whole of the human rights story; they are merely means to an end. That end is the proper achievement of human rights. If these methods of securing this end fail then they should be condemned. Judiciallyenforced bills of rights do fail … That view is one rooted in the simple insight that each of us counts, that we are each equally worthy of esteem. This esteem is not on account of what we do, how we look, or how bright we are, or what color we are, or where we come from, or our ethnic group, it is simply on account of the fact that we are” (Gearty, 2006, 4).

Some social scientists and philosophers of our era as Douzinas, Demboor, Gearty and Baxi are skeptical to the human rights claiming its deviation from its original utopian and revolutionary nature. But they consider human rights as the latest expression of resistance to domination and oppression; and parts of a philosophy and practice of emancipation.

Douzinas considers human rights “also the weapon of resistance to state omnipotence and an important antidote to the inherent ability of sovereign power to negate the autonomy of the individuals in whose name it came into existence” (Douzinas, 2000, 20-21).

David Kennedy, a pioneer human rights lawyer and activist, condemns human rights movement becoming a part of the problem even though it has been contributed to build a more human rights friendly world today. He emphasizes that more than sixty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there is much to celebrate and human rights is no longer only an idea, but we have an enormous library of legal norms and aspirational declarations. Kennedy concludes that human rights movement has done a great deal of good, freeing individuals from great harm, and raising the standards by which governments are judged; and as a natural result of those developments, human rights advocacy has become at once a professional practice and a movement today.

Some scholars as Douzinas, Gearty, Baxi and Demboor claim that human rights today have reversed their initial values and become tools of governments or individual desires. “… Natural and human rights has been reversed turning them into tools of public power and individual desire”.

The triumph of humanist pragmatism opens the door for both opportunities and dangers. Law can provide a framework for talking across cultures about justice and efficacy of wartime violence, but modern law is surprisingly fluid and pragmatic and supplies rarely clear rules and sharp distinctions. Consequently, two parties of a war feel their cause is just, and they are not responsible for the deaths and sufferings of war. 

The universality of human rights has been a concern for a wide group of intellectuals and scholars since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN in 1948. The word “universal” in the title of the UN declaration has sparked off a chain of discussion on the concept of universality. The universality of human rights has been questioned, but without reaching a clear concept of universality.

The modern critics of human rights are more radical and harsh, but mostly directed to the failure of human rights movements and the gap between the idea of human rights and its practice more than the idea itself.

“Human rights today remain the only proven effective means to assure human dignity in societies dominated by markets and states” (Donnelly, 2013, 97). But it would not mean that human rights can safeguard the rights of all people in the world. We should keep in mind that it is only a tool to protect the rights of people, and it becomes successful only by means of other political, economic and social conditions.

The problem of universality is also noted by Marxists and feminists, but from a different angle. Marxists refer to the lack of universality of human rights since human rights are primarily beneficial to the bourgeois. Feminists are not sympathetic to universality of human rights, because of the exclusion of women from their definition and implementation. On the other hand, the solutions of feminist critiques fall either within or outside liberal parameters.