This is Democracy – Episode 34: Human Rights: Past and Future

Unknown Speaker 0:05
This is Democracy,

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a podcast that explores the interracial intergenerational

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and intersection of unheard voices living in the world’s most

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influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri 0:17
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

Today we have another very special guest. We have a good friend and a great scholar and a great public intellectual Professor Michael Morgan from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Michael, so nice to have you here. The pleasure to be here. Thanks. We’re looking forward to the discussion. We’re going to be talking today about human rights, where the concept comes from how we think about human rights in the world today, and particularly the role of the United States in the promotion and protection of human rights at home and abroad. Before we turn to that topic, though, we have our scene setting poem as always, for Mr. Zachary Siri, what’s the title of your poem?

Zachary. The dream, the dream? Well, let’s hear about the dream.

Zachary Suri 1:04
Before this, there was a child there was a child who slept in the cold and as they slept in a dream too far off dream. The child did not dream that all was right that none was wrong. That night, the child did not dream that all could live in peace, there could be no war to run from with fright. The child did not dare to dream that all would laugh, and I would frown at the sky. The child did not dare dream that all could sleep as deep dream as long as they know the sleeping child that hug the mud ground drug for all that all could live into. Well, they’re all could live in dwell without the fear of being gone, that all could know the knowledge and cerebral song, dreaming that all could breathe and all could rest at night that all could hold a blanket tight, and every child there could play in the sand, that all might wonder at the stars that all might see their beauty and the beauty in themselves, that all could swim and all could walk across the oceans at a force far, the child dreamt that all might speak and voice the corners of their soul that all would not see Hayden face

In the eyes for fellow there, it drops a deep among them all that there could be a common flag that all might seek might seek that none should sleep without the rest of safety, without the slumber of contentment. And as Aristotle talked of true and truthful happiness among his Athenian hills, the child did not remove this the child doomed to freedom. The child in the right child into rights child dreamed of human rights and slept until tomorrow. That’s beautiful Zachary, what is your poem about? my poem was really about the sort of the sort of vision of a world where not it’s not necessarily fulfilling these, these huge ideas of eliminating war and all living in a utopia, but of everyone having their basic needs met, and having the ability to live to live happily in the opportunities that they need to succeed. Sounds like a nice place to live.

Jeremi Suri 2:53
Mike, where does this concept of human rights that Zachary refers to that we’re using as our title they were where does

Michael Morgan 2:58
it come from? It’s a great point question. I think the answer that, I want to just take a step back and ask, Well, what is a human right in the first place, and I love your poems accurate, in part because I think it captures

one of the ways of thinking about human rights, the idea of a dream, or I think the tournament use was a common flag.

One way to think about what a human rights a human right is, is that it’s, it’s an idea that all human beings are entitled to certain things, they get certain things, simply because they’re human. And if you think about it in that way, there’s a bunch of ideas that flow from that. So one of them is that you can never lose your human rights. You don’t have to earn your human rights. You always have them from the moment of your birth, that can’t be taken away. And no matter what password you hold, where you live with the color of your skin is the fact that you’re you’re human grant to these protections, these freedoms. And these are ideas, this idea can unite everyone, it can be a common flag for the entirety of humanity. That’s the aspiration. That’s one way of thinking about this. It’s a beautiful aspiration is a beautiful aspiration. Yeah, so we can think of human rights as as an idea. We can think of human rights as an act of imagination, because to make that claim that all human beings are fundamentally similar, and that we all share certain things in common. That can only happen if you if you undertake this act of imagination, because we can’t meet all other human beings, right? It depends on a certain amount of faith or belief or conviction. It’s not something that can be proven empirically, right? So if we ask, you know, where does this idea come from? If we look at it historically? Where does this idea come from? There’s different ways of tracing it back. The I think the the easiest place to start, is, is probably the European enlightenment, the 18th century, which is an era in which philosophers, writers were trying to think about these basic questions of what is good, what is justice? How should human societies organize themselves. And they were also responding to recent history. most prominently, probably, wars of religion, which had afflicted Europe for 200 years, religious divisions, particularly between Catholics and Protestants, but also discrimination against other minority groups. Jews, for example. And one of the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers was that if we can get beyond religious difference, or national difference, cultural difference, number one, we can see that there is something more fundamental than those transition differences are those surface differences between people, and we can grasp something really fundamental and universal. So this idea emerges, in part, I think, in reaction to the violence caused by religious division and religious discrimination. But it’s also spurred on by things like the European the quote, unquote, discovery of the New World, this discovery that there are other kinds of human beings out there living far away, living far away with radically different cultures who hadn’t even been dreamt of before, or looking in the other direction. Some of these enlightenment philosophers are thinking about China, right? Or Persia, and the differences between Europe and those cultures, those societies,

Jeremi Suri 7:18
is it fair to say, Mike, that human rights are also at the core of democratic theory? when Americans and others in all different parts of the world think about democracy, particularly in the 18th and 19th century and debate about democracy? Are those inherently debates about human rights as well?

Michael Morgan 7:37
Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think that the idea of human rights is the same thing as the idea of democracy. But I think they share a common set of assumptions or common set of ideas. So one of the key principles in both is this faith in human equality? Yes. And this commitment, yes, a human quality

Jeremi Suri 7:58
limits on the state, right, and the state, its ability or any political entities ability to infringe on human dignity and freedom and equality.

Michael Morgan 8:06
Exactly. And this gets to an actually another way of thinking about human rights of addressing the first question that I asked you what is a human right? You can think of human rights as an idea. But you could also think about human rights as a practice, yes, as a political agenda, to pursue and to implement and so on. And in this context, you’re exactly right to talk about democratic theory, the practice of democratic government, because in that context, human rights, human rights requires certain kinds of policies, it requires a certain approach to forming a government, yes, who’s included? Who gets a voice? What can the government do? What can the government do in relation to its own citizens? And also, in relation to citizens in other countries? Right,

Jeremi Suri 8:57
right. And and you’ve written a fantastic new book that we want to make sure everyone reads, called the final act, which is about a particular moment, in the debates about human rights and International Justice, and stability in order, but also beyond that, really about the struggle the United States finds itself in throughout its history, but particularly in the last century, of trying to marry its power to these concepts of human rights. And one of the things you do so on the book is you show how Americans and American allies abroad struggle with these issues. Are there particular historical lessons for us, or historical insights that come from this this struggle?

Michael Morgan 9:47
One of the lessons that emerges is that human rights is we consider that human rights is an important value. But it’s not the only value. It’s not the only thing that is worth pursuing. I think a common way of thinking about human rights is to say, well, human rights claims trumped everything else. And everything else has to be subordinate to those ideas. The difficulty with thinking about human rights in that way, though, is that it produces a very binary or black and white way of thinking about politics. And it ignores the fact that politics, any kind of politics, especially democratic politics, involves conflicts between different ideas of the good or different good things that are worth pursuing. And it’s not possible to have everything all of the time. So in the context of, say, human rights and American foreign policy, one of the things that emerges from looking at this history is that, yes, human rights have been important as an idea. And as a practice, I think there are good reasons that we can articulate for defending human rights for demanding respect for human rights and so on. But we can also see from the history that they are connected, or they are intertwined with other things that are really important to like the maintenance of international peace. And sometimes, the protection of human rights and the maintenance of peace go hand in hand, they reinforce each other.

But there are other cases in which

the protection of peace with the maintenance of peace, and the defense of human rights are at odds with each other. And that can require trade offs. Which means that we can’t think about human rights in simplistic terms that human rights is a permanent, universal good that always needs to be defended. Because sometimes there are difficult trade offs involved, right.

Jeremi Suri 12:04
And one of our students asked a question that’s directly on target with this. Cindy Abdullah asks about our selectivity and perhaps even hypocrisy with these issues. Let’s Let’s hear Cindy’s question.

Unknown Speaker 12:18
How does the us respond to charges of hypocrisy in requiring human rights to be enforced for some and not others?

Michael Morgan 12:27
It’s a terrific question.

And I think the the difficulty that the question really gets that is the, the problem of taking these ideas and turning them into reality, because human rights, it’s an idea, but it’s also a practice, it’s also a politics. How do you go from one to the other, there’s never gonna be an easy way to do that, there’s never gonna be a perfect way to do that. And so because of the trade offs involved, because human rights is not the only good thing that’s available, or that’s necessary, those trade off always going to be, they’re going to be inescapable. As long as there is a politics as long as we have international societies of states and so on, there’s always going to be those trade offs. Can the US be accused of hypocrisy? Or maybe we should say inconsistency, right, in pursuing human rights and advocating for human rights? I think the answer is yes. It’s obviously Yes. There has been a selectivity in the kinds of human rights abuses that the United States emphasizes, criticizes. And also those which it prefers to ignore or maybe in some cases, perpetrates. So that that inconsistency is it’s it’s there, it’s glaring. This raises the question, as some people suggest, some people have also asked, should the United States therefore not talking about human rights? Should other liberal democratic societies not talking about human rights? Or to put it differently? Is is absolute consistency necessary? In order to talk about these things? I think the answer has to be no. Because if you if you set that as the bar, perfect moral consistency, then discussion of human rights becomes impossible. Right?

Jeremi Suri 14:25
Right.

Michael Morgan 14:27
So one of the reasons why this subject I think is so important, but also so difficult, and so fraught, is that we’re living in the world of imperfection, where we have a perfect idea that we try to bring into an imperfect world. I love that way of describing the dilemma.

Jeremi Suri 14:43
This is something Reinhold Niebuhr and other philosophers and theologians have struggled with for a while for decades and centuries. And so how do we judge them? How do we judge when we have found ways to make compromises that are still compromises that are imperfect? But do enough for human rights? And how do we judge when we’ve gone too far in abandoning human rights for other goods? What’s our standard, as historians at least and thinking about that? It’s an

Michael Morgan 15:18
absolutely fundamental question. I think we make these trade offs all the time, or we, we live with these trade offs, even in ways that we’re not always aware of. We live with them in domestic politics, and we live with them in international politics. So for example, in domestic politics, in the American context, there is no civil right. That is absolute. Even something like freedom of speech, has limits on it. There are laws about libel and slander, for example, there are laws of copyright. There are laws regarding national security, restrict what people can say. So even with something as sacrosanct, let’s say is freedom of speech. We accept that there are trade offs involved, there’s a balance that’s required between competing goods, competing values. The same thing is true in international politics. So to get back to your question, how do we think about these things? How do we judge them? I think that’s the frame that we need to use to think about them not as either doing absolute good, or doing absolute wrong, but as compromises and as trade offs, right. So in thinking about, one of the things that makes this so painful is that when you think about questions like human rights abuses, how can we say that that is that those would ever be tolerable, right.

And yet it as someone like neighbor would point out,

sometimes their their opinions cases in which there aren’t great alternatives. And if you think about the world from the perspective of a policymaker, even in a liberal democracy, the choices that they face are not between the perfect solution and an imperfect solution, but between two imperfect solutions based on different compromises and different training. And

Jeremi Suri 17:20
one of the things you do so well, and your scholarship in your book, the final act and and other things you’ve written, is actually trace how people think about these issues. And I think it is fair to judge, not simply the the compromise. But the what went into the compromise. Did decision makers think through did citizens who voted for a particular outcome? Did they think through the Human Rights trade offs? Or were they willfully ignorant, which would reveal a certain moral shallowness at certain moments? Zachary, did you want to come in on this?

Zachary Suri 17:54
Yeah, I was wondering, how do we determine what our human rights like? I’ve heard people say that things that I don’t think our human rights and I’ve never really been defined as human rights, like owning a gun, are to them human rights? How do we determine what our basic needs for human beings?

Michael Morgan 18:12
Great question. I think you put your finger on one of the fundamental questions here. And it’s a question that doesn’t get discussed enough. Because I think the ambiguity in the term human rights, what does that what does that mean? leads to a lot of conflict and a lot of confusion. It’s easy for just about anyone to say, Yeah, I support human rights. Who’s gonna say they don’t? The difficulty comes when you ask the follow up question. What’s a human right? How do you draw a distinction between something that is a human right? And something that’s not? To think about this philosophy philosophically? Or historically, there’s, there’s been two traditions for answering this question. One is the tradition that we could call the natural law tradition, or the naturalist tradition. The other ones is what we would call the positive law tradition of the positive is tradition. So natural law, folks would say, there are these things called human rights that are inherent and come from human nature. And no matter what human beings do, they are always in existence, those rights will persist forever. If people are ignorant of those rights, if they don’t know that they exist, the rights still exist, despite that ignorance, if they are violated, they still exist, no matter what governments say, no matter what individual human being, say, those rights persist, because they are tied in a natural way to our human nature, they are eternal, and universal. On the other side of the debate, the positivist approach would say, human rights only come from human beings. They come through legislation, they come through declarations, it’s not that the declarations, recognize things that already exist, it’s that the declarations bring the rights into being. So in the absence of legislation, and the absence of the declarations, you have no human rights. These approaches, obviously, our intention with each other, and they have each one has its strengths and its weaknesses, because from the natural law perspective, which I think is the dominant assumption behind the idea that all human beings have certain inalienable rights by virtue of being human, that’s a classic natural law idea. The problem with that comes when you ask the question that you just post, well, how do you know what those rights are?

How do you enumerate them?

The answer, and this is something that philosophers have been wrestling with at least since the Enlightenment as well. You just know. Voltaire writes about this in, in the enlightened he says that, that there are certain rights that you you simply understand that you have, they’re just obvious to all human beings, they’re inscribed on their hearts, and their universal. That’s still a it’s a powerful idea. But it’s a slippery definition. Sure. Now, the downside of the other side of the positivist approach is to say the downside is that well, if it’s not articulated by a government, it doesn’t exist. And this can lead very easily to a relativistic approach. Sure. To say that well, because government x doesn’t recognize certain human rights, its citizens, therefore, don’t have them. Right. So those ideas, I think there’s there’s a tension between those two approaches. And when we talk about human rights, I think we often slip between those two approaches, without always being aware of it. And in the context of, say, the US Constitution, and the American tradition of rights. Both of those ways of thinking are present their subterranean the positivist tradition in the naturalist tradition, way that people aren’t always conscious of.

Jeremi Suri 22:03
Right, right, and that the positivist tradition is likely to be more historically contingent. Right? The naturalist tradition is likely to be more constrained, right? Because there’s a claim of timelessness absolutely does.

Unknown Speaker 22:17
Absolutely.

Jeremi Suri 22:18
So. So that leads us to another student question that we have. This is from Ted Anderson. And he asks, building on this these tensions? When is the time that human rights become actionable for the use of violence? When can we intervene? And this is something Michael, you’ve written a lot about human humanitarian interventions? When can states or entities use violence to either stop genocide or protect a group? Let’s, let’s hear Adams question.

Michael Morgan 22:47
Should democratic governments try to protect the human rights of all citizens in the world? If so, when should democratic governments get involved with foreign countries? And when is it a bad idea?

Jeremi Suri 22:59
Tiny question. Yeah.

Michael Morgan 23:01
I think the true but difficult answer is that it’s impossible to generalize.

One of the

one of the other ways in which human rights are articulated is that these are things that when they are abused, when they are violated, they those violations produce an automatic emotional reaction in every human being. That the the response to the abuses. It’s pre rational, it’s emotional, it’s something that we feel it’s not something necessarily that we think it’s something that we feel. This is, I think, one of the facts that makes this debate so charged and so difficult, because when you read accounts of human rights abuses, when you see pictures of the victims of human rights, it’s hard not to have a strong emotional response to them. And the almost automatic reaction is to say this is unacceptable. We have to do something, we have to do something. And in crisis after crisis, and any one of us could cite any number of examples, just from the last 10 years, whether it’s Sudan, China, Libya, Syria, the list goes on and on and kind of a depressing way. Does the inevitable responses do something? The question is, well, what do you do in these cases? And I think that’s something that can, the answer can only be arrived at on a, on a case by case basis after weighing, not what is the perfect solution. But what is possible.

Jeremi Suri 24:57
And it strikes me, Mike, and this comes out of your sky fellowship, and just an observation of our world today. That actually, many Americans and many citizens of other societies are perhaps much more aware of these trade offs. Now. There was a time it seems, a few years ago when it appeared to many Americans that we were invincible. We could do anything. And so the pursuit of moral righteousness, justified probably excessive violence on behalf of human rights, as well as other things that people had his goals. Today, there seems to be more restraint around these issues. And perhaps there’s more wisdom in that. Do you see that? And what do you see? And this is always where we like to go at the end of our podcast? What do you see, as opportunities for citizens today, to improve their thinking and improve the way our society manages these difficult trade offs?

Michael Morgan 25:57
I think there’s a danger

that the pendulum on human rights has swung too far in the other direction. If you think of it as a pendulum over the last 15 or 20 years, I think you’re right in describing it that there was a moment at which these ideas, it seemed necessary to vindicate these ideas all over the world by any means. And the United States had the means to do that. That, that way of thinking about it, I think, was too extreme in one direction. And I think we’re at a moment where there’s a danger of the pendulum going too far in the other direction of being too restrained, too. pessimistic isolation is to isolationist. Exactly. So what can citizens do in that context? I think the one answer one way to think about it is to try to modulate those swings of the pendulum to, to stay committed to the to the dream, the common flag of human rights to that vision. well written, recognizing the trade offs, and so to exercise a moderating influence, and to hold people who are making these decisions to account Yes. So saying, at a moment like this, whatever is changing in American domestic politics, whatever is changing and international politics, nonetheless, it is necessary to think about these principles and to try to uphold them in ways that are possible, even while recognizing that we may not get to that perfect vision, nonetheless, I think it’s the job of any citizen in a democracy, to hold people to account and to keep that vision before them. Right.

Jeremi Suri 27:42
Right. I think that’s a wonderful point and an optimistic point, because people can do that we have information resources, we have access to many institutions that allow us to do that, especially those of us who are fortunate to be around educational institutions. Zachary, do you think this resonates with young people, young people interested in understanding these trade offs and holding leaders accountable?

Zachary Suri 28:04
Yeah, yes, I really do think that young people are interested in this. But I do think that probably the problem is that the young people aren’t taught as much to, to, to learn about the world around them in our country, I think that if if if young people experience the world travel more and are able to, to sympathize with people around the world, in ways where they can see how they themselves are viewed, and how they view others, I think too much today is based on short snippets of other cultures, or other people instead of really getting to know things. And I think that’s something that people can really do to get involved is help people understand other cultures and other areas. And that it when we understand other areas, it makes it less likely that these things happen.

Michael Morgan 28:54
Right? Could I could I say in response that I think that’s a terrific point.

I think it’s easy for for people in this country or any other to ask, Well, how does this matter to me? Why should I care about what’s happening in? In China? This was a question that enlightened philosophers asked, why should we care about an earthquake in China?

Here’s one way to think about that.

If you accept that human rights are universal, that they are part of being human, that all people have them by virtue of being human, then by caring about and trying to defend the human rights of others, you are also simultaneously defending your own rights, by preserving that universality by preserving that unbroken fabric that spans the world. Thinking about the rights of others is a way of thinking about and defending your own rights. And so that’s why what’s happening in another country matters very much at home. And if we allow that universal commitment to slip, if it slips abroad, it can slip at home too. And so that’s why this commitment, I think, and this vigilance, sure this involvement on the part of citizens is so important,

Jeremi Suri 30:18
right? And it fundamentally requires a sense not just have a common humanity, but have common connections, we can’t escape that we are we’re not just all human beings operating in the Garden of Eden. We are actually interconnected in ways that we don’t see. Again, it appears to me that that young people have a great intuition about this because the of the electronic interconnections that they navigate every day. I think this has been a truly enlightening discussion about an enlightenment topic of human rights. And it brings forward so well, how the ideological positions that labels that we often see in our society, actually take us away from the real issues which are these difficult trade offs and compromises. Mike, thank you for your scholarship on this topic and for sharing your wisdom with us so cogently and eloquently today. And and Zachary thank you for your poem and reminding us that as we think about these compromises, we have to continue to dream as well. Thank you for joining us on this episode of This is Democracy.

Unknown Speaker 31:32
This podcast is produced by the liberal lights development studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Unknown Speaker 31:39
The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison lumpy, and you can find his music at Harrison lemke.com.

Unknown Speaker 31:46
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai