Can Human Rights Survive?

• Author: Muraskin, David
• Position: Book review

Can Human Rights Survive? By Conor Gearty, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 174. $22.99 (paperback).

This work links together a collection of essays Gearty believes will serve as a manifesto for human rights activists and thinkers. He argues that the concept of human rights radicalizes, forcing people to recognize their similarities, and transform social structures to create equality of rights and opportunities. However, Gearty explains, this potential role for human rights has stagnated. In the modern world, where religion and philosophy have declined in popularity people find the idea of human rights lacking a value structure that motivates them to act.

Moreover, particularly since 9/11, Gearty worries that the concept of human rights has been co-opted by established legal systems. When legal regimes position human rights as an already embedded check on their conduct and a guarantee of fundamental freedoms, how can the concept truly realize its potential to challenge and alter existing norms?

In this manner, Gearty seeks to ask not so much whether human rights as a concept can survive but whether human rights as a social campaign can be reinvigorated and serve as a modern day anti-establishment tool that will generate new political realities--realities that bridge and reconstruct existing geographical, social and political distinctions to create a "solidarity of reciprocated esteem" (p. 141). Unfortunately for both Gearty and the reader, his effort suffers from an imprecise philosophical and historical foundation.

First, and foremost, one might note that the term "human rights" is not concretely defined in Gearty's work. This linguistic ambiguity is a consequence of the author's attempt to make his vision of human rights resound for everyone. As a result, the reader is left wondering what Gearty believes the human rights campaigner is working towards and how his concept of human rights could inspire a generation of anti-religion anti-philosophical cynics.

Initially, Gearty describes human rights as a Kantian ideal. It is based on a respect for the "dignity" of human beings (p. 30) that calls on us to provide others the same freedom that we would want for ourselves. When this vision of human rights is embraced, it generates a "moral magic" (p. 19), which forces us to aid those who are discriminated against and deprived of liberty, through "acts of compassion" (p. 140). This notion of human rights as being an internal, almost spiritual motivator leads Gearty to decry "legalism." The formalistic enforcement of human rights through the creation of legal structures and judicial oversight turns what should be a personal ethic, directing us to work for the betterment of others, into a conservative tool of elites (p. 69-70). When human rights is implemented through existing social structures, those who might affect change by...