Assignment 3
According to Wendy Brown in her book “‘The Most We Can Hope For…”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” Michael Ignatieff states that Human rights are a protection or privilege that every human should have in order to protect themselves from, cruelty, torture, abuse or violence. But for Brown Human right is not just protect people from the injustice is let them act and have these rights. When we talk about human rights it is not just about people’s rights but also about the political power over these rights.
Wendy Brown mentions how Michael Ignatieff has three claims about human rights. In his first claim, Ignatieff argues that every individual who has rights is able to decide about his life and what is good or bad for him. Contrary to Ignatieff, Brown believes that even though people have rights it will be always somebody deciding what is best for them. One of the examples she mentions is the 2003 Invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. In that moment this invasion was supposed to help people in Iraq giving them a message of human rights. But the reality was different and this invasion ended in a war and a lot of dead people. In this example, there were more political and economic interests than human rights (Pg,456).
In Ignatieff’s second claim, he says that the human rights of an individual should be limited to the ability of the individual to act, leaving aside vital needs such as food, shelter, and medicine. At this point I agree with Wendy Brown that human rights activism is more than “a pure defense of the innocent and powerless”, is a way to violate their rights to have free access to vital needs as food, housing, and healthcare.This is what we would call Capitalism over human rights.
In his third claim, Ignatieff’s argues that human rights “empower individuals (Pg. 458), to protect themselves and against suffering. Even though human rights means that an individual has the decision in some aspects of their lives, as Wendy Brown mentions there will always be a government or political power who decides what is good or bad for that individual.
Finally, Wendy concludes her essay saying that “the most we can hope for” is maybe the reduction of the suffering that human rights are supposed to give all people in the world. (pg, 462).
