Assignment 01 – Self Intro & Hunt Introduction
Hello! I’m Allison Fabian, and this is my first semester at CWE. I am returning to school after a few years off to help me move forward in my career. I chose to take “Women’s Rights as Human Rights” for several reasons. I’ve always been interested in human rights and feel strongly that equal human rights are essential to the society I would like to live in. Particularly in the current political climate it’s important to know not just contemporary human right’s issues, but to be able to give them historical context. Yes, I am looking to improve my talking points, but also to educate myself, so I can act in ways that align with my thinking. I am especially concerned with women’s rights. I am a proud intersectional feminist, and my first Women’s Studies class opened my eyes to the injustices women face, from the obvious to the subtle. I’m excited to learn from the differing perspectives in the class.
——————————————–
The standout document in the Introduction to Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt is the US Declaration of Independence, and Hunt uses it as an anchor to offer an interesting study of the evolution of philosophies of human rights. Philosophies that were, at the time of the Enlightenment, spreading, with the US Declaration held as the standard. However, what really struck me was the importance of the language involved, and the ways that that language has changed. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of the unalienable rights of men, but used the phrase “natural rights” in his writings until adapting to the term “rights of man” in the late 1780s. The French had been using “rights of man” since the 1760s but the phrase “rights of man” wasn’t defined until 1789, when the marquis de Condorcet described them in his essay “On the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe”. Contemporarily, if any group was to write a manifesto it would absurd for them not to define their terms. Despite the perceived objectivity of a dictionary, words have subjective meanings and uses, that change and are redefined by those who use them.
The Declaration of Independence (and the writings that were inspired by it) described these unalienable rights of men as “self-evident”. The term strikes me as a bit egotistical- though there are other, more optimistic, ways to interpret the concept. For a group of wealthy, property-owning, white males to declare their rights to be “self-evident” is to say they all had an equal estimation of their inherent value and of the treatment they deserved. The lack of other voices in that conversation implies that these self-evident rights that Jefferson (followed by many others) wrote about, applied only to that privileged class.
The paradox of the self-evidence of rights is brought into the modern era with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which abandons “rights of man” for “human rights”. The key issue that the language is changing to address is the universality of the defined rights. Logically, human rights would apply to all humans, thus being self-evident. How can something self-evident require discussion, and not be applied unilaterally? However, then as now, these rights are not universal, and therefore not self-evident as the “Whereas” that begins the UN Declaration implies they are. Hunt tackles this conflict in thinking by linking the concept of the self-evident rights of man with moral autonomy, citing the work of J. B. Schneewind. Moral autonomy requires not only the capacity to reason, but also the independence to think and act freely. The groups excluded from the self-evident rights of man by Enlightenment philosophers, groups like women, children, slaves, those without property, and so on, were excluded based on the philosophers’ belief that those groups lacked the competence for moral autonomy. This is the same logic, in different language, that is used to further disenfranchise already marginalized groups today, and what the UN is attempting to combat by updating to “human rights”. For a document like the UN Declaration to be fully inclusive, and for terms denoting the self-evidence of rights to be accurate, there needs to be a universal consensus that absolutely all humans are entitled, without question, to the rights laid out within the document. I believe, as Hunt also concludes, that the antidote to the prejudiced logic that complicates the universality of rights, is empathy, learned through experience and interaction.
