I have always seen belief in human rights as akin to religious belief. No amount of argument will persuade someone of the human rights faith that they are wrong; and no amount of argument can persuade a human rights non-believer that they are wrong. The belief, in both cases, (or the non-belief) is not rational. It is based, if anything, on hope, a need to believe - on faith.

How could it be rational? What rational argument could we employ to persuade or dissuade someone? What rational argument - more to the point - might dissuade us from our belief? Can we imagine an argument that might make us say 'wow. looks like I was wrong then. x really has no human rights'.

Consider what sort of thing we are saying when we say 'human rights are universal'. First of all, we are making a statement about international law: that in theory (and very much in theory) everyone is protected to some degree by the grand declarations to which all governments give their vocal support. Very much in theory, we might be able to use the weak and faulty mechanisms of international law to protect individuals, if it turns out that their governments have failed to do so.

But human rights believers are also making a much bigger claim than this. I believe that they (we) are also making both a moral claim about how human beings should be treated and what they are entitled to; and they are grounding that moral claim in a psychological claim about human nature.

The moral claim is roughly that 'all human beings are worthy individuals and deserve to be treated like human beings'. The bit about 'deserving to be treated' is variously interpreted - incorporating 2nd and 3rd generation rights in its maximal form, and only 1st generation rights in its minimal form. But put that aside for the moment. (It is also worth saying that there are many human rights 'believers' who are 2nd and 3rd generation rights non-believers¹).

The question that a real non-believer (one who questions the whole human rights ideology) is entitled to ask is 'why on earth should I believe that all human beings are worthy individuals?'. In their minds is normally one or more of the classic 'villains' - the paedophile, the serial murderers, or Hitler, if you like.

And what sort of arguments do we generally employ to answer him/her? Why do we believe that the paedophile, serial murderers and Hitlers are still worthy individuals entitled to human treatment?

Mostly we thump the table in a Kohlberg Stage 1-type way: 'But They Are Human Beings Too; They Have Human Rights'. That obviously gets us (and the non-believers) nowhere.

Then we often appeal to their background: we explain terrible behaviour by showing the psychological reasons behind it. In other words, we effectively say: 'These are human beings who have strayed for perfectly understandable reasons. They can be put back on the path, and should be given the chance'. The non-believer can doubt either the first (psychological) part of that claim, and insist that these human beings were genetically programmed / inclined to behave as they did; s/he can doubt the second (psychological) part and insist that nothing will put them back on the right path; and s/he can doubt the third (moral) part of the claim and insist that the offender has lost the right to be treated like a human being. We can only respond by repeating those 3 claims; and the non-believer can only continue to repeat the counter-claims (each side thumping the table).

Otherwise we can use pragmatic / political arguments of the form: 'Do you want to live in a society where people are not given the chance to reform?'; or 'human error means we can never guarantee that someone is beyond reform: isn't it preferable to have a system that errs on the side of caution?' This is actually our best chance of a dialogue; but it is such a watered-down version of the believer's claim that we are often shy about using it.

The main point is that our whole belief about the moral rectitude of human rights and our certainty that 'human rights are universal', that 'human rights belong to you from birth', that 'human rights cannot be taken away from you', is based mostly, and most often, in dogma - which, like all good believers, we rarely think about or question. If we do question it, I think it boils down to various psychological claims about why people commit evil and whether it was inevitable or not; and whether there is still enough humanity in them to warrant humane treatment (even at the possible cost to society as a whole).

Yet if we are asked to justify those monumental claims about human behaviour and psychology, pretty much all we can say is that we are sure about them (few of us are professional psychologists anyway).

Just supposing the whole psychological community came out with a statement that human behaviour is 99% nature and 1% nurture and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Hitler was going to be Hitler, George Bush was going to be George Bush and Tony Bliar was going to be a congenital liar. Does that undermine our faith one tiny weeny bit?

I think we just say 'it could never happen'. But it could; we just don't want it to and don't want to believe it could. It would destroy our whole world system, our whole system of values and beliefs about human beings. So we won't believe it.

Isn't that just like faith?

Footnote:

1Actually, I am not sure that the 2nd and 3rd generation rights deniers are really human rights believers. I think they are probably better classified as state-haters (who have not properly thought through the false negative-positive rights dichotomy). But that is another discussion.

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