Human Rights
A Very Bad Idea
Interview of Raymond Geuss by Lawrence Hamilton for
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
RAYMOND GEUSS, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, is
one of the world’s most distinguished political philosophers. His recent books
include Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton), Outside Ethics (Princeton),
Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton) and History and Illusion in Politics
(Cambridge). This interview took place in his house in Cambridge, U.K., on
Wednesday 13 March 2013.
Lawrence Hamilton: The ‘first question, Raymond, is the most basic, and
it’s in two parts. First, what are human rights? Second, in History and Illusion
in Politics (CUP 2001) you speak of human rights as a kind of ‘puffery’ or
‘white magic’. Why?
Raymond Geuss:Well, to start with, I think the notion of a right is correctly
described in a lot of the philosophical literature as the notion of an individual
trump that a person holds. The political process and various legal processes
operate in different ways and according to various principles: we have negotiations,
hearings, forms of arbitration; we have legal cases, we have parliamentary
debates, in which diverse proposals and different claims are discussed
and some decision is reached. In the ideal case perhaps even some reconciliation
of different views and claims is reached or even some kind of consensus.
The notion of a right is the notion of someone having a recognised power to
intervene, restrict discussion and break the political process down. I can stop
the consideration of any course of action by playing my trump card. You’re
deciding whether or not to build a highway through my property, and you talk
about the pros and the cons, the utility and the possible disadvantages, but, if
it is my land, I can play my trump card, which is my rights-based claim ‘it’s
my private property’. Similarly, if the government want to incarcerate me simply
on suspicion, I can appeal to my right not to be imprisoned without a
public trial. Before the recent War on Terror that was a ‘right’ people were
Theoria, Issue 135, Vol. 60, No. 2 (June 2013): 83-103
doi:10.3167/th.2013.6013505 • ISSN 0040-5817 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5816 (Online)
supposed to have, and by appeal to it they were supposed to be able to stop the
government from doing this kind of action. So the notion of a right is the
notion of a trump in that sense.
The term ‘human’ can mean two different things in discussion of rights. A
‘human right’ can either mean a right for humans, so a human right to housing
is a right humans have to shelter of a particular kind and quality, as opposed,
say, to a right that farm animals or domestic pets have to a particular kind of
shelter. In a second sense, a ‘human right’ can mean a right that is supposed to
arise out of, or be in some ways grounded in, our mere humanity. The idea is
that some rights people have depend on specific positive political decisions,
but others depend simply on the fact that people are human beings, not on any
particular decision by any political body. For instance, in some countries certain
members of the clergy of particular religious groups might have been
given the right to exemption from particular forms of taxation because the
political authorities there have decided for whatever reason that this is a good
idea. This means that the authorities in question have set up a mechanism to
monitor taxation, collect taxes from members of some groups, but not from
the clergy, resolve disputes about whether a given person is or is not entitled
to the exemption, etc. In other countries these exemptions might not hold
because the authorities in those countries have made a different decision. The
right to an exemption in the first case is a (mere) ‘positive’ right. Those who
believe in ‘human rights based on our humanity alone’ think that in addition
to such cases, there are also other cases in which people have ‘rights’ independently
of any specific political decision or the existence of any effective
mechanism of enforcement. So there are two different senses of a human right:
a right for people, in the way in which an animal right is a right for animals, or
a human right is a right that purportedly arises out of our humanity alone and
not from the political process.
When thinking about human rights it is really important to see whether
these human rights are thought of as positive legal rights or as natural or innate
rights. That is, are the rights that individual human beings have construed as
powers or warrants that are given to them by the political process and by the
juridical process, given to them in a particular political system as part of that
system, or are they construed as something outside the political system, that
are given to them by God or by nature or by their human nature? In the second
case, they would be something outside the political process which intervenes
in that process.
When I talk about rights as ‘white magic’ or ‘puffery’, what I primarily
mean is the second conception, that is the concept of human rights as natural
or innate or as given prior to any kind of political process. There my simple
idea is that this notion is incoherent. We can perfectly well make sense of your
having a right, if this means that the political process operates in such a way
that the political authorities will enforce a certain claim that you make. That is
a perfectly coherent conception but this conception makes sense only if you’ve
84 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
got a political agency, which has granted the right, an agency that will interpret
cases and determine when the right has been violated, and an agency that will
enforce the right. So if you have all of those things in place then you have a
clear idea of a right, but in most of the interesting cases, people want to speak
of ‘human rights’ precisely in cases in which these conditions are assumed
not to hold. I have an (innate) ‘human right’ not to be tortured, although the
local political regime does not recognise or fully enforce that right. So a ‘natural
(or innate) human right’ or one based on our mere humanity is modelled
on the idea of a positive right, but it is applied in a context in which all the real
content of that idea is absent, where the context for using the concept of ‘right’
is not present. The content of a concept is given by the existence of an interpreting
and enforcing mechanism. To speak of innate human rights, however,
is to say you’ve got a right, but there is no such enforcement mechanism. That
is why I think there is something inherently difficult, unclear or even incoherent
about the notion of an innate or natural human right. I say it is puffery
because you could imagine that there was an enforcement mechanism, namely
suppose you thought that I had magical powers and could harm you simply by
thinking something. Suppose that everybody in my society thought that I was
a powerful magician. I could cause you to fall ill simply by thinking about you
in an especially malevolent way (and perhaps performing certain rites). I am,
however, not a magician, I can’t harm you by projecting mental rays at you –
but if everyone believed that I could, there would be something self-reinforcing
about that belief, because then the idea that if you touched my property
you would be in big trouble, would have some kind of basis. You at any rate
would live in a state of uncomfortable anticipation of something I might do to
you; if your neighbours came to know what you had done, they might begin to
avoid you, etc.
So, what would be the point of saying that I have a right? One thing could
be that if I have a right, then God will intervene, or the state will intervene, to
protect that right. In the first case, one would have an innate right; in the second
a positive right. Either of them would be a way of giving some grounding
to that idea of a right, but another idea would be that you think that I could and
would intervene if you touched my property or tried to assault me. If I actually
had the power to harm you (magically) when you violate my rights, the question
of whether or not the state intervened might become irrelevant. But, of
course, I don’t have that power – that is, in fact, the whole point of positing
rights. If I could magically take care of myself, I wouldn’t need them. If, however,
you do presuppose that the intervention in question is state-intervention
– or the real, effective intervention of some state-like organisation – then what
you are talking about is a positive, not a natural or innate right to something.
If you assume that God will intervene, then you can introduce a clear sense of
a natural or innate right. It is what he would intervene to protect. But without
God or magic – the self-reinforcing notion that if you touch my property you
will regret it – you can have no substantive idea of a natural right.
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 85
‘White magic’, then, is the idea that I can hurt you (or, of that matter that
God will hurt you) if you violate my rights. This idea will work as a foundation
of rights, provided (but only provided) everybody believes it. It can be selfreinforcing.
But even if everybody believes it, it’s still not true – I don’t have
that magic power and neither does God – and that is the important thing to
understand here: that in politics, partly, we want to see what works; because
what people believe is in itself very important. But in politics we also want to
distinguish between the government intervening to protect my property, and
my property being protected because everyone makes a mistake about my
mental powers. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. That clarity in politics
requires looking beyond simply what will work, and understanding the mechanism
by which various things work correctly. So, even if you all believe that
I’m a witch and I can protect myself and my property and therefore I have got
a right that I can enforce, the whole structure is a misconception because it is
based on a false assumption (about my magical powers) and so you’re never
going to be able to trust it in the way you can trust something that has a different
status (such as being true).
Lawrence Hamilton: Your answer links to one or two further questions. I’m
going to take them first, focusing in particular on your example of your being
a magician and what follows from that even if everyone believes in your supposed
magical and effective powers, etc. I’d like to push you a little harder on
that. And thereafter I’ll come back to some other, related concerns. So, white
magic works best when most members of the group believe in it, as you’ve
just said …
Raymond Geuss: It doesn’t work best, it only works at all if people hold the
beliefs! That’s the point. Think about enforcement. How can enforcement
work? There are forms of natural enforcement, for instance ‘natural enforcement’
of a prohibition on drinking too much alcohol. The prohibition on drinking
too much alcohol enforces itself to some extent: you drink too much you
get sick! Nature enforces that prohibition. You take too many drugs, you get
ill. That’s one kind of enforcement.
Another kind of enforcement is the one in which society enforces some
prohibition through a specified agency, for instance, the police. Another kind
of enforcement is a self-perpetuating illusory enforcement: you all think that
if you touch my property I will harm you magically. These are different kinds
of enforcement and one must see them as very different. The natural forms of
enforcement are unproblematic. I have no problem with them. The state forms
of enforcement are also in some ways unproblematic, although we might raise
questions whether the proper formatting of that is as the enforcement of rights,
but the enforcement through consensus, as in the example in which everyone
thinks I am a witch, even though if it looks like it’s a robust form, is not
always robust, because people can change their beliefs. It is particularly not
86 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
going to be robust if it’s false. As theorists and as political actors we have to
see what works, but we also have to understand what’s real and what’s true.
Let me give a historical example. In the Late Medieval and Early Modern
periods most people in Europe believed in the Christian God, and they believed
he had specific ideas about how humans should behave, and would enforce
these ideas. So under those circumstances, appeal to (God-given, natural)
‘human rights’ might have some kind of real effectiveness. If belief was really
monolithic, no one would be willing simply to ignore violations of what were
thought to be the rights God gave humans. God might smite you in this life,
but even if he did not, he would get you after death. This, of course, did not
mean that no one ever did violate those rights, but it also does not mean they
had no effect. This structure gave politics a particular shape. If you were a
powerful monarch you might be able to find or hire some clerics to give ‘interpretations’
of what God commanded (or what you were doing politically) that
made it seem compatible with Divine Law, but you would be unlikely to try to
claim that you simply didn’t care at all about whether what you did was religiously
acceptable. Given the state of belief and the institutions that existed,
that would have been a short road to political suicide. Or perhaps you could
have got away with that, but only if you were very powerful and very clever
indeed. So under those circumstances ‘human rights’ had some basis, but their
basis was not in God (who doesn’t exist) or nature, but in the existing structure
of institutions and beliefs, and the distribution of power.
Lawrence Hamilton: In a sense that’s an answer to the second question.
White magic works best when most members of the group believe in it but not
on those who don’t. What do you mean by this? Isn’t there also the possibility
of simply extending this to human rights? What do you mean by this with
respect to human rights in particular? In other words, can I believe, can I
choose to believe, that human rights as they’re defined do not actually exist in
reality, such that they no longer ‘work on me’?
Raymond Geuss: They don’t, or at any rate they might not, ‘work on you’
because the international regime of human rights, even the regime set up by
the United Nations, has no appropriate teeth. Part of the basic motivation for
‘human rights’ is that they are supposed to be outside or beyond politics; they
are something to which you can appeal when politics goes wrong. However,
what actually happens in the international regime of human rights even as it is
defined by the United Nations is that the powerful countries use claims about
rights to further their interests. They act to enforce rights when that is in their
interests, and they try to prevent action when it is not in their interests. So you
don’t have a universal, much less a completely equitable, enforcement regime,
but one that is just as subject to the vagaries of politics as anything else. If the
United Nations had an army, and the army was effective, then the United
Nations might be able to enforce its own agenda of human rights, but even
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 87
that would not get you out of the realm of politics and positive rights because
then the United Nations would be something like a super-state and those rights
they enforced would be positive (not merely natural) rights. In fact, as you
know, what happens is that the United Nations passes resolution after resolution
about human rights, human rights violations in one place or another, and
they are acted on only if the United States and the Western powers find it in
their interest to do so. So, they invade Iraq when it suits them; they didn’t
invade Iraq, actually, when it didn’t suit them. The human rights record was
the same in both cases: Saddam Hussein was ‘violating human rights’ for
decades, the West had no interest in dealing with that at all. Then, when Saddam
began to show too much independence, suddenly the U.S. seemed to
acquire an interest in his human rights record, so suddenly, instead of continuing
to give him arms to fight against the Iranians they invade his country!
The actual politics of human rights on the international scene is the politics of
giving powerful countries the moral justification to do what they’d like to do
anyway under the specious cover of enforcing human rights. If the United
States doesn’t want to invade Iraq, whatever the United Nations says, nothing
happens. The United States does want to invade Iraq, and then suddenly it is
not just an act of military aggression, but one covered by the moral cloak of
enforcing human rights.
That is one of the things that worries me about the talk about human rights
in the international realm, that in fact, human rights in the international realm
are a legitimating cover for Western powers enforcing their interests and there
I think it would be more honest for us simply to say, ‘well, the U.S. didn’t like
Saddam Hussein at that point, so they invaded and deposed him’ rather than
saying they suddenly began enforcing a regime of human rights.
Lawrence Hamilton: I agree with that and I think that everyone on the editorial
board would as well, but, what of the slightly distinct claim that – and
we’ll come to this in a bit more detail as well in respect to particular nation
states – what of the slightly distinct claim that it might not always simply be a
tool of the powerful but also the less powerful, that it might in some instances
be utilised, because it’s a norm, illusory or otherwise, as an effective means of
political agency? So there are two parts to the question, the first part is that,
even though human rights may be an instance of white magic and puffery in
the way that you are suggesting plus the fact that they legitimate the actions of
the powerful etcetera in certain kinds of moralising ways, they’re so
entrenched in the discourse, that do you think it is realistically possible to simply
wish them away? That’s the first part; I’ll ask the second in a moment.
Raymond Geuss: All sorts of things can have positive or negative rhetorical,
or real, effects in politics. I don’t deny that in some contexts people can say
‘we are rising up, because it’s a violation of our human rights’. But you could
equally imagine the same group of people saying ‘we are rising up because
88 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
we’re human beings’, ‘we are rising up because we are children of God’, ‘we
are rising up because our needs are not being met’, ‘we are rising up because
we have had bad dreams’, ‘we are rising up because we have had good dreams’
etc. There are all sorts of different forms that the structuration of resistance
can take: it can take theological forms, it can take ethnic forms, it can take
political forms, it can take class-based forms, and so on. In certain contexts it
might be effective and useful to appeal to human rights. After all, ‘human
rights’ have no more, but also no less cognitive and normative standing than
dreams do.
As political theorists, however, it behoves us not just to look at the way
demands are actually formatted and expressed, and see whether or not they
are rhetorically effective, but to look also at the internal structure of the
demands, the specific way that demand is expressed, and the theoretical implications
of that form of expression. So we may demand education because education
is an important way of our satisfying our interests. Or we say we have a
need for it. That is a more perspicuous way of saying something important
than by speaking of ‘rights’. By calling it a right you don’t add anything to
calling it a satisfaction of a basic need or an important demand or a vital
human interest. You not only don’t add anything, rather you say the same thing
in a format that has a history and carries with it a historical legacy of additional
connotations. That legacy is not necessarily unmitigatedly good. If, on the
other hand, you talk about education as being an important thing for people,
as being a human need, this way of speaking moves you on constructively to
an interesting political discussion. If I say it is an important need that I have
an education, then you ask me ‘why is it a need?’, then I will talk about my
needs, and this will naturally lead to discussion of other aspects of my life.
That’s a political way of formulating the demand. If I say ‘it’s a right’ I’m
immediately saying it’s a trump, that is something I don’t discuss, it’s something
that’s limited, it’s something that’s rigid and determinate, it’s something
to stop the political discussion, it’s inviolable, and so on. In some contexts it
might be good to be irrational and to formulate your demands in particularly
rigid, and particularly non-negotiable ways, but it doesn’t follow from that
that would be politically the most interesting and intelligent way of understanding
what’s really going on.
Lawrence Hamilton: Even if it were possible, let’s imagine, do you think
human rights can track human interests?
Raymond Geuss: Of course they can track interests; under appropriate circumstances.
However, by immediately moving to the level of rights-discourse,
you cut off discussion of whether the circumstances are appropriate. After all,
in some circumstances theological discourse can track interests, too. When
the Catholic says ‘God wants every man to have his daily bread’, of course,
every man should have his daily bread, and the theological discourse tells us a
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 89
truth! [Laughter] I’m not claiming that it can never be the case that speaking
of rights can be connected, or can be interpreted, in a way that makes that
mode of speaking make sense. I’m also not saying that this way of speaking
can never be effective. Sometimes it is effective, sometimes not; sometimes it
does track interests, sometimes not. However, as theorists, we have not just to
decide whether there is something in a particular form of speech that’s right
and whether this way of speaking is rhetorically effective in a particular context,
we have to understand also whether what is right is perspicuously formulated,
and when I say ‘God says: give every man his daily bread’ that’s not a
perspicuous formulation of an important demand. It is a presentation of something
that is a true human interest or vital human need in theological vocabulary.
Sometimes I can give a translation, but why go down the detour of
formulating human interests through rights-talk, and then have to translate
what you’ve said back into something that makes more sense? Just talk instead
about interests, wishes, demands, needs, what we think is good for humans,
what is outrageous or intolerable, etc.
Again, as political theorists we have to operate on two levels at the same
time. You have to act on the level of what is actually effective, what will get
people going, what will motivate them, what is the common discourse in
use. You have to take that seriously. But you also have to take seriously that
that’s not the final word: sometimes everyday modes of speech are correct
and enlightening and sometimes not. Being a serious political theorist means
accepting both those things, that is, accepting that you can’t simply ignore
what people say in the name of what you know is true, but you also can’t
simply always accept what people say at face-value. You can’t just accept
what they say and ignore what’s true, but you also can’t just say what’s true,
while ignoring what they think and say. You have to have both of those
aspects and you have to connect them in some appropriate way. Rights discourse
stops that or makes it more difficult and for precisely that reason: it’s
a trap, to be more exact, it is a trap because it tries to construe political situations
as apolitical.
If rights are trumps, that is, they’re supposed to stop discussion. Another
way to say that is that they’re unpolitical. They’re an attempt to shift from politics
into legalism, to give a legal model for politics. They’re also rigid, they’re
forms of rigidity. If they are supposed to hold for everyone in all situations,
they can’t by their very nature take account of the peculiarities of individual
situations. And in some sense all political situations are individual. Finally,
they are also guilty of putting different things at the same level: a right to life,
a right to education, a right to entertainment. These are not necessarily things
on the same level in human life or in politics. In politics we often have to think
about the differential importance of things, to say there’s nothing but rights,
however, levels out significant qualitative differences.
Lawrence Hamilton: In politics one needs to set priorities.
90 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
Raymond Geuss: To set priorities, to have conflicts, to override some claims
in particular cases, that’s what politics is about. Rights-discourse tries to stop
that kind of debates on those issues. So it’s an inherently apolitical way of
thinking about politics. It’s a particularly clumsy, crude and rigid attempt to
turn politics into a kind of administration or legal discussion. One can understand
why it is tempting to think about human life in that way, and why in
some context it might even be important to think about some limited matters
in this way. But it’s not the right way finally to think about politics.
Lawrence Hamilton: So, let’s take one of those examples. The one that comes
to my mind, and to lots of others, is the case of South Africa. I’m going to
jump ahead to this example and then come back to some of the more theoretical
matters later. There are actually two really nice examples, I think, about
the way in which the language of human rights under certain conditions, not
just its effectiveness, but other components of it, might be highly laudable.
First, you ask in History and Illusion in Politics that if ‘irresolvable conflict
between bearers of purported equal rights is thoroughgoing and unavoidable,
what is the point of recourse to rights?’ (p. 149) The argument is well taken,
but what of this response? Under conditions of real or potential civil conflict,
the language of human rights provides a common, otherwise absent, sense of
legal and moral norm that can form the motivational basis around which those
on the verge of conflict can cohere. Rather than suppose that human rights
only works or ‘works on us’ as a foolproof legal and moral structure – and this
comes back to your own point – is it not more realistic and helpful to see them
as a philosophically and theoretically rough-and-ready and even incoherent
tool – but the best we have – to assure arch-enemies that their interests will
not be forgotten once they give-up their weapons? South Africa just prior to
and following the release of Nelson Mandela is a fabulous case in point, in the
sense that without the language of human rights, many have argued, it would
probably have been very unlikely for two extremely opposing groups, the
National Party and the African National Congress (ANC), to cohere over some
common ground.
Raymond Geuss: I have two responses for that. One is, I don’t mean to deny
that the language of human rights might have played an important role actually
in that situation. But I invite you to think about whether the same function
might have been played by things like the common good, the common interest,
all of our needs, our collective needs, social solidarity .... Aren’t there other
ways of talking, aren’t there other possible ways of talking about societies
that are deeply divided, which would give you what you want. I admire the
aspiration to universality in the notion of human rights. I’m not objecting to
an aspiration to a certain kind of universality, but what I’m suggesting is,
there are other ways of attaining that universality. You can think about it in
terms of the common good, you can think about it in terms of a society con-
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 91
stituting an encompassing whole, you can think about it in terms of forms of
participation, of people universally participating, you can think about it in
terms of mutual vulnerability, you can think about it in terms of reciprocal
dependence. I don’t see there is anything added by the language of universal
rights or human rights, anything specifically added that could not be
expressed in those ways, and those things would have the extra advantage that
they wouldn’t commit you to a quasi-juridical framework. It would make it
clear that if a society is going to hold together it has to be because of social
and political processes that are ongoing.
Rights are not processes. Rights are trumps, they stop the process. Now in
some contexts that might be the best you can get. However politics is about
processes, and our aspiration should be to make those processes as participatory
as possible. What we have to think about is the notion of collective forms
of agency, collective powers, and collective forms of suffering. And to talk
about rights is to take attention away from these other important things, it’s to
take attention away from who the agencies will be, and how co-operation will
be structured. It’s to take our attention away from finding forms of living
together which won’t require giving trumps to people. All of those things are
part of the positive tasks of politics. Perhaps in some context the appeal to
human rights might have been useful. But I think from the fact that it was useful
in that context, it doesn’t follow that there weren’t other ways you could
think about the demands put forward, and it doesn’t follow that there were not
more productive ways to think about these demands, their origin, and the ways
in which they might be attended to and satisfied.
Lawrence Hamilton: And in the South African case as well, since the great
‘miracle’ of the relatively peaceful end to the apartheid regime, the strict and
strong human rights nature of much of our legal and political system is inhibiting
in various kinds of ways. So, post a situation in which South Africa
avoided civil war, where your politics has become highly concretised in the
form of human rights, you start to come across various problems when politics
is carried on in terms of human rights.
Raymond Geuss: My suggestion for the replacement for human rights is
politics.
[Laughter]
Good politics. Think about what good politics is. Some topics should be:
human agency, human interests, human powers, human needs – That’s one of
your big topics, Lawrence – ways of negotiating boundaries between people,
ways of producing new structures of co-operation. All of these seem to me to
be important and thinking about them seems a much more fruitful and forward-
looking way of approaching politics, than through obsession with rights.
Formatting everything through human rights has a stultifying effect on
thought and action. That’s compatible with saying in certain domains and cer-
92 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
tain times human rights might be a useful thing, that is, however, something of
very limited use or interest. Rights-obsession has a stultifying effect because
it takes attention away from these underlying processes of the formation of
collective agencies and collective satisfaction of needs and interests.
Lawrence Hamilton: In a place like South Africa where executive and legislative
power, even if formally represented, leaves a lot to be desired both in
terms of representation and good government what really is the problem of
each of us insisting on his or her own rights without the mediation of lawyers?
There may be an element of wishful thinking here, as in a politics so bound up
with rights, we cannot effectively do so without legal representatives, but even
if at some point in the process the bureaucratic services of lawyers are needed,
is not the process of claiming and exercising rights an important form of political
agency for modern citizens? If we did away with it, what form of political
agency might we have beside that provided by periodic elections?
Raymond Geuss: That’s exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to say! What
that says is, look, we’ve got two forms of political activity: appeal to human
rights and elections. What I’m trying to say, however, is if you think about
politics as appealing to human rights and participating in elections, you’ve
got a remarkably thinned out and impoverished notion of what politics is supposed
to be about. If you say what politics should be, is, we elect people and
we claim our rights, you’ve lost the game already. Elections are very crude
and very rudimentary forms of political activity.
A country that’s in a healthy state should have all sorts of forms of political
agency that are not mediated through the election of formal representatives.
There should be a wide variety of different associations and ways of doing
politics. To give priority to claiming rights gives us the completely wrong attitude
toward ourselves, other political agencies and the state because it basically
prioritises us as passive clients of the nanny-state. This idea of a
‘nanny-state’ is a conservative invention, but what is wrong with it is the tacit
(and utterly implausible form of) atomistic individualism that stands behind it
and the irrational suspicion of any form of collective organisation. It does,
however, contain the germ of a correct perception about the deleterious effects
of the potential passivity of modern populations. If all we do is vote, and then
shout for mama whenever someone treads on our toes, saying ‘This is my
land; I claim this right, I claim that right, I claim the other right’, that is a
really very narrow way of thinking about what politics can do and be. And if
you take that as your central way of thinking about politics you’re going to
have a tremendously distorted and impoverished form of politics.
Lawrence Hamilton: What of the liberal concern, though, about the capacities
and virtue of political representatives, which emerge even in quite secure and
common situations generally, but seem to be worse in a place like South Africa,
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 93
where you’d want some kind of mechanism of control over your representatives.
The liberal argument, as you know, is that rights are the best form we
know of for controlling the powers and actions of representatives and the state?
Raymond Geuss:Well, if you think that that’s the best way of controlling the
representatives and the actions of the state you’re not actually going to be
motivated to look for new forms of control, and you’re going to have with that
all of the problems that I think I’ve tried to mention about rights. For instance,
different rights that belong to different domains and have different priorities
will be put on the same level. You’re going to have people struggling to get
something to eat, and people with property rights, and the right of the land
owner to his land is going to put on the same level as the right of the poor individual
who is starving.
So, yes, it is important to have protections for people – protections in certain
limited domains – and it might be appropriate for those protections to
take the form of rights, but that’s different from saying that the basic structure
of the society and politics should be thought of through rights. Rights will be
very particular, limited sorts of things which will be put in force in the context
of a larger framework and larger scheme of politics, and if you’re really interested
in politics in the most important sense you’ll be interested in the big
scheme, you won’t be interested in the tiny mechanisms that are put in to protect
individuals against certain abuses.
Lawrence Hamilton: And in such situations – again it’s not unique to South
Africa it’s just starkly manifest in a place like South Africa – where something
like what you’ve just described, as you know from my own work, is a very
serious problem, where a very distorted history generates situations in which
an existing right to land comes up against a right of access to land, and it’s
very difficult to resolve the dispute in terms of rights. But what of a situation
in which the notion of human rights and human rights in general have come to
underpin the legal system of the nation state? In these situations, therefore,
human rights in the objective sense, in your objective sense, have become
human rights in the subjective sense. In these circumstances do you think it’s
a good idea to try and undo these achievements? And, relatedly, returning to
an earlier point, why not acknowledge human rights as ideological constructs
and just try and foster good ones, or better ones?
Raymond Geuss: I don’t see that there’s any particular necessity to dismantle
the existing constitutional arrangements concerning rights. Maybe we should
just ignore them. In any case I’m trying to talk to other people who are interested
in understanding society in some non-trivial way, not just in operating or
tinkering with the existing mechanisms of government. The existing political
mechanism in Britain has all sorts of parts that we wouldn’t take seriously if
they were not historically already entrenched.
94 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
Now it might be the case that we continue on with various practices even
when we have seen through the purported rationale for these practices. For
example, in court it used to be the case you swore on the Bible to tell the truth.
Now as an atheist you don’t need to swear, but you also don’t even need to
object to being required to swear on the Bible to tell the truth, because you
interpreted that as merely meaning ‘I now assert in a solemn way that I am
going to tell the truth’. If people want to call that ‘swearing to God’, let them.
I feel no need to oppose that even if I think God doesn’t exist. So I don’t think
you have to be a purist and go through all the legal codes to get rid of all the
references to rights. However, as a political philosopher you have to think
about what rights-discourse actually means and I think if you begin to think
about that you’ll begin to be more impressed by the limitations of that way of
thinking about things. What was the second question again?
Lawrence Hamilton: The second question is: why not simply view human
rights as ideological constructs and foster good ones? Why assume that it must
be the ‘bad guys’, as it were, that are always going to be the ones constructing
and abusing rights and human rights, why can’t human rights be in the hands
of the ‘good guys’?
Raymond Geuss:Well, that very way of putting it seems to me to be grist for
my mill, because what you’re saying is the regime of human rights in itself is
neither good nor bad. What’s good or bad is the people who are using it for
one purpose rather than another, and it seems to me that’s another way of saying
something, which, if you think about it seriously, will be likely to move
you in my direction.
It will be likely that you’ll be motivated to say that what’s important is not,
as it were, the form of the scheme of rights, but the political process within
which it is embedded, and that’s what I’ve been trying to encourage people to
do: to look at the political process within which ‘rights’ are embedded and
then to ask whether it’s good to restrict that political process through a regime
of rights or not. And if you begin to think about it that way, you’re already
thinking about it differently from the way in which traditional human rights
people thought about it. They thought ‘These are rights, they’re rooted in
human nature, they belong to all people; once you get them set out and embedded,
you don’t have to worry, as it were, about who’s going to enforce them or
what the political processes are’.
Lawrence Hamilton: And, what would you say to a believer, who believes
not just in God, but that God imbued us as humans with natural or human
rights?
Raymond Geuss: That’s a perfectly coherent view. Perfectly coherent, I think,
but false. However, if you believe that there is a God, and you believe that that
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 95
God is interested in human beings, and if you believe that that God has a particular
purpose for human beings, then you have good reasons to believe in
human rights as part of that divine purpose. I just happen to think that those
assumptions are false!
Lawrence Hamilton: And if you have a society in which the majority of people
still believe that, then what?
Raymond Geuss: Then I come back to my other point about witchcraft and
the example of the Early Modern period. If you have a society where everyone
believes in God and believes these rights have been given by God – then as a
political theorist you have to have a double perspective on that society. You
have to look at that society as it actually operates, the way it operates through
the beliefs of the people, the way in which the beliefs of the people animate
the social system and the system of rights, and then also you have to take a
perspective outside that of the society and look at what’s going on in the society
from your own point of view. Finally you have to try to put those two
things together synoptically; I don’t think that’s impossible. I can talk about a
society within which everyone believes in God and I can then analyse why in
that society some set of rights will work as a good way of organising it without
committing myself to the existence of that God or of these rights.
Lawrence Hamilton: So, in that case, you’re not going to be able to provide
a motivation, an alternative motivational structure?
Raymond Geuss: Now we’re moving to another question, not a question
about the justification of rights, or about what reality these rights have. Rather
we’re moving to the question raised by the example of a society in which I am
thought to be a witchdoctor. Everyone thinks I have these powers. In that society
what new motivations could I give to people? It is a very important question,
how you give people motivation for things. But note, if you start by
saying ‘I’m going to give people new motivations for things’ why do you then
stop and say ‘I’m not going to give them new motivations to be politically participatory’
or new motivations to think about and try to pursue the common
interest, or new motivations to invent new collective forms of agency? It seems
a bit tame at that point to say ‘I’m merely going to give them new motivations
to instantiate a regime of rights’. The project of giving people new motivations
seems potentially more ambitious than simply appealing to rights … Another
way of putting what I’m trying to say is that thinking about the society in
terms of rights is not thinking about giving people new motivations. It’s thinking
about maintaining the status quo and structures associated with that status
quo and, at best, trying to bend these in a progressive way. What one should
actually be doing is trying to give people new forms of motivation. You’ll say,
of course – and it is quite correct – that that task is really hard. My reply to
96 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
that is that politics is really hard, and the real question is what the aspirations
for your politics are. Do you have low aspirations for your politics, or high
aspirations? To accept the regime of rights as the existing framework is to
have low aspirations.
Politics should have a higher aspiration than that, and part of the aspiration
might be to give people motivations that are independent of the language of
rights. So, if you create new forms of cooperation, these new forms of cooperation
will give people new forms of motivations which won’t be connected
necessarily with the rights discourse.
Lawrence Hamilton: That’s really fascinating, but just playing Devil’s advocate
here, and imagining the rights activist responding to that, and there’s a
great deal of literature on this, might you not be guilty of making too strict a
distinction? There’s a lot of history, not just in a place like South Africa, but
worldwide, on the fact that human rights discourse does generate a great deal
of participation in politics, it does generate a sense of the collective, it does
generate a sense of political agency in various forms that didn’t exist prior to
the prevalence of the notion of human rights.
Raymond Geuss: I’m sorry Lawrence, I don’t quite know how to respond to
that question because you seem to be saying something that is clearly true but
I don’t see why it’s a problem for me.
All sorts of things can give people motivations, appeals to Islam can give
people motivation, appeals to Christianity, appeals to the class struggle,
appeals to Reason. There are all sorts of things that can give people motivation.
Rights discourse in the right context can give them motivation too. I’m not
denying that we should try to give people motivation.
I’m saying two things: First, it’s a bad idea to give them motivation in terms
of rights. Whatever motivation they can be given through rights discourse could
be given to them through something else which is less obfuscating and mystifying,
such as appeal to their collective interest, appeal to their needs, appeal to
various sorts of things. Second, we should actually be trying to appeal to those
other things because that will get us a better kind of politics, it will get us a politics
that’s more active, where the people are active and engaged, less rigid, and
less tied to legalistic forms of acting. How can we find ways of making people
active and not reduce politics to their simply demanding rights?
Lawrence Hamilton: And the language of rights is inhibitive of that process?
Raymond Geuss: Rights by their very nature must be crude. They can’t be
subtle or highly differentiated because they’re legal functions. They have to
be relatively undifferentiated and rough-hewn, but politics should be about
making people more differentiated. It shouldn’t be about just making blocklike
demands, such as: ‘protect my property’, it should be about thinking about
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 97
what in this city is the right rate of investment in education, in health; how we
should structure new forms of urban development; where we should build
schools and hospitals. You can’t reduce that to mere demands for rights.
Legal structures have to be coarse-grained because they have to refer to
processes that are verifiably repeatable and that are subject to public scrutiny.
Political process should try to be more differentiated than that and politics
should be about something more than merely claiming rights. Politics, as I
have said, should aim at activating people.
Lawrence Hamilton: Needless to say I share the…
Raymond Geuss: The goal.
Lawrence Hamilton: And also the desire to have the citizenry as a whole
more politically active and more understanding of the political process but
there are very many thinkers and activists – not just liberals – who will say the
crude nature of something like human rights and rights in general befits politics
because one can’t really expect that level of understanding or participation
or judgement.
Raymond Geuss: Ok, but note what you’re saying there. What you’re saying
is rights discourse is a second best. It’s at best a crude approximation. It might
be – as in the case of South Africa on the verge of civil war – that in certain
emergency situations we must use blunt instruments that do no more than
merely work. However, as political actors and as political theorists we have to
have the ability not just to think in terms of second-best solutions, we have to
allow ourselves the possibility or the hope that the citizens can be brought to
be slightly less primitive in their reaction to politics, that the citizenry can
learn to think beyond that, and that’s discouraged by the assumption that
everything has to fit in the category ‘human rights’.
Lawrence Hamilton: So, to leap to something else: would you see this as
part of a way in which you can think realistically in a utopian fashion, as it
were, and how does that link to your later argument in Politics and the Imagination
(Princeton UP 2009) regarding meridian and constellation?
Raymond Geuss: Once you leave behind the view that politics is about rights,
that might possibly open a number of doors to thinking about politics in a
number of different ways and I’ve tried to think about some particular literary
figures and some older thinkers in the tradition of philosophy who tried to
develop alternative ways of approaching some aspects of politics. Meridian
and constellation are one or two such concepts that I use. It isn’t that I think
that they’re the only ones, it’s that I think that they represent a kind of gesture
in the right direction.
98 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
Lawrence Hamilton: Can you say a little more about meridian.
Raymond Geuss: That comes from this…poet…
Lawrence Hamilton: Paul Celan.
Raymond Geuss: ... A meridian is an imaginary line connecting two places
relative to the position of the sun. Celan thought a meridian was a way of
locating oneself in the world by reference to concrete places, people and
things. That’s a different way of thinking about the world from thinking about
the world through abstract rights categories, so that’s a way of trying to make
political thinking more concrete and more realistic. What is the meridian here?
On what meridian are we standing at the moment? Who are the people that
we’re working with, who are the people who have been our traditional friends
(or, enemies), what can we do, how are we located relative to them? All of
those things are things you can think about which you can think about in ways
which seem much more illuminating if you don’t think about yourself, your
friends, your allies, your potential allies and your enemies in terms of categories
of human rights. You think about them more in terms of concrete historical
or concrete geographic relations you might have to them.
Lawrence Hamilton: So it’s not intended as an alternative mechanism for
doing politics, it’s intended as an alternative mechanism for thinking about
politics?
Raymond Geuss: Yes, yes. First one might connect it with the Gramscian
idea of the importance of forming political alliances. One might try to form
such alliances along meridians, for example. Gramsci, of course, was very
keen on this notion that politics is importantly about who we make an alliance
with and who we don’t make an alliance with. So we might use some of the
spatial and temporal metaphors to talk about which groups you will make
alliances with, what their historical relations to one another have been, what
possible consequences of making an alliance with that concrete group will be.
Lawrence Hamilton: Which would mean, given different concrete situations
outside and across nation state boundaries and the norms and normal ways in
which we’ve thought about politics, it might start to look a bit like something
in which there exist groups and interests along class lines, for example, that
we start to conceive as paramount for politics.
Raymond Geuss: For example. Yes, for example. The idea is orienting
yourself to concrete others, concrete other places, concrete other groups
rather than orienting yourself to abstract categories like ‘person’, ‘human
beings’ etc.
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 99
Lawrence Hamilton: And concrete problems associated with …
Raymond Geuss: And concrete problems associated with … exactly.
Lawrence Hamilton: Wonderful. We’ve leapt ahead to the end, so I’m just
going to come back to one or two more particular questions. You say in History
and Illusion in Politics that the status, or ‘cash value’, of rights is really just:
‘we think that it would be a good idea for there to be a reliable system of
effective power to enforce X’s claim to Y (even if there is not such a system)’.
Even if there is not such a system, you then argue, that even if most people do
come to agree on a shared conception of human rights, it still does not follow
that even shared beliefs reliably translate themselves to predictable, appropriate
action, and that is what is at issue. Why? Might not a shared conception of
human rights reliably translate into predictably appropriate action with either
positive or perverse outcomes: such as driving on the right side or on the same
side of the road, or the other example given …
Raymond Geuss: Abortion rights.
Lawrence Hamilton: Abortion rights and foetus rights: you might have a situation
in which legally it would be very easy to get an abortion but you might
have a situation in which there’s a, as you put it, a reliably large number of
people who are influenced by the notion of foetus rights.
Raymond Geuss: This seems to me to be another instance of the magician
who is purportedly able to protect his property by virtue of the people thinking
that he has magical powers. If enough people believe it, that belief will
have self-reinforcing effects and might reliably bring about certain outcomes
which might be good or might be bad; but what I insist on is that as theorists
we have to understand that that’s the nature of what’s happening. The magician’s
power is not ‘natural’; it isn’t that driving on the left or on the right is
natural. These are both social facts and I should recognise that they have been
brought into existence by people thinking and acting in a certain way, just as
I recognise that people have brought about regimes of rights. However, from
the fact that they have brought those regimes of rights into existence and
enforce them it doesn’t follow that those regimes of rights are natural or
innate or objective.
Suppose everyone in the world agreed on a budget of human rights, and we
all enforced it. Then, of course, we would be enforcing a regime of rights. I’m
not denying that. That would be foolish; but what I’m denying is that even if
we universally agreed on a budget of human rights and we enforced them,
they would not (thereby) be natural, objective, innate, rooted in our mere
humanity, etc. Rather they would be rights that we gave to people and
enforced; they wouldn’t be rights that were out there naturally. Just as if we all
100 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
agreed to drive on the left, we drive on the left because we’ve all agreed to do
it. Not because it’s natural to drive on the left.
Lawrence Hamilton: This brings us back neatly to the opposing view which
is that the intellectual history or the emphasis on the natural rights foundation
of human rights is misplaced. In actual fact, the important component of
human rights is their cultural-political history in which individuals out there,
citizens out there, participants out there, have been claiming, in this case in
terms of human rights, for certain goods.
Raymond Geuss: If people want to go out on the street and protest in the
name of human rights, so be it. What is important is the content of the right,
the mechanism for ascription and enforcement, and clarity about what it is
one is doing (and what one is not doing).
Lawrence Hamilton: The only objection you have is that they then claim that
to be a kind of natural right.
Raymond Geuss: I have an objection if they claim that to be natural rights. I
also have an objection to the idea that the way to think about politics finally is
through the instantiation of specific rights – whether natural or positive – and
the enforcement of specific rights, rather than in terms of broader political
processes. What I’m objecting to is the idea that politics can be universally
formatted in terms of human rights.
Lawrence Hamilton: And of course, in the West they tend to be, right? And
in other places they tend not to be.
Raymond Geuss: In some other places they don’t.
Lawrence Hamilton: Like China. So, a thought that comes to mind is, given the
world we have, might not one possible way of resolving the problem be some
kind of ideological or even military conflict between the opposing positions?
Raymond Geuss:Wars generally have less effete origins than ideological differences
of opinion; they come from a real clash of interests. So, part of my
immediate reaction to that would be to think that this worry depends on a very
idealistic theory of history, thinking of history in terms of the struggle between
ideological forces. It’s a sort of – what’s the guy’s name? Huntington – a
Clash of Civilizations thing and I’m afraid I’m too old fashioned, too Marxist
still to think that that’s the right way to approach things.
It isn’t civilisations that clash. It isn’t ideological constructions that clash.
Or, rather, they can ‘clash’ all they want, but no one needs pay too much attention.
It’s concrete agents including state agents who have interests and powers,
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 101
who conduct wars. So I wouldn’t think that it was inevitable in any way that
because the Chinese don’t have a concept of human rights, and most people in
the West have a concept of human rights, there will necessarily be a war. It
doesn’t follow from that that I don’t think there will be other difficulties and
struggles, certainly economic struggles and perhaps also military conflict, but
such conflicts will not be best construed as motivated by ideological differences.
They’ll be motivated by such things as the water supply in South-East
Asia. The control of the Himalayan area is geo-politically extremely important
because a lot of the water resources for Southern Asia arise in that area – in
Tibet – and with population pressure and changes in the climate, the border
between India and China is, I think, going to be increasingly a region of tension.
So there is a possibility of some kind of conflict between Pakistan, China
and India in that border region and that seems more likely than direct conflict
between China and the United States. But of course that doesn’t exclude the
fact that China and the United States won’t be drawn into conflict, but that it
won’t be on these ideological grounds. Now, to be sure, the Americans will
claim, once any war starts, that it’s an ideological war …
Lawrence Hamilton: They’ll claim that the human right to water…
Raymond Geuss: They may well claim that it’s about human rights just as
they claimed that the war in Iraq was about ending tyranny. But we’re not
going to be taken in by that are we? Sophisticated people that we are.
[Laughter]
Lawrence Hamilton: So perhaps all talk of rights is an inconvenient fiction.
Raymond Geuss: Crude and inconvenient.
Lawrence Hamilton: Crude and inconvenient fiction. But we … why do we
appear to need this fiction?
Raymond Geuss: That’s a very good question.
Lawrence Hamilton: You give the beginnings of an answer, it seems, in History
and Illusion in Politics, where you talk about efficiency, predictability,
security? But, might you want to say more than that? For example, I don’t want
to put words in your mouth, but one potential way of thinking about this would
be to say, and it links to your argument about Iraq, would be to say – would you
want also to argue – that human rights are primarily useful for the reproduction
of those ruling classes who currently control the state in any particular polity?
Raymond Geuss: I wish I had a good answer to that. I don’t but I’ll say what
I can. I think there are three sources for this fascination with rights. One is the
102 Raymond Geuss, interviewed by Lawrence Hamilton
capitalist economy which depends on predictable control over resources, it
depends on knowing who owns what. The model of all rights, after all, is a
property right and that’s the thing we must never forget. Rights come out of
property thinking: who controls what property? That’s the central thing. And
so you can understand that a capitalist society will be absolutely obsessed
with clarifying who owns what factors as clearly as possible, so that will be
part of the basic apparatus of thinking in such a society.
Second, there is a Foucauldian element, which is that the state wants to get
control over its citizens and so there will be complicated processes of individuating
them and keeping them under control. The relation of this to rights-discourse
is complex and obscure, but I think a connection exists.
Third, in societies in which people have actually little control politically
over what happens, individuals will have compensatory needs because they
feel powerless. They will want to think that ‘well, at least I have some domain
in which I have control, I might not be able to control what happens to my
city, what happens to my street, what happens in the hospital, what happens in
the war, but at least I have the right to something-or-other.’ Rights under this
aspect are the modern form of opiate for politically neutred populations.
So I think it’s a combination of the needs of the economy, the needs of a
modern administrative state and the psychological compensatory needs of
deracinated populations that are relatively alienated and feel themselves to be
powerless and rights-thinking is a kind of way in which they can feel good
about themselves. They can feel: although we have no control over things, at
least in this domain we’ve got these rights.
Lawrence Hamilton: Excellent. Thank you Raymond, that’s a wonderful
place to stop partly because it speaks directly to the South African situation,
that last point in particular. I think that besides the point I made earlier about
cohering sharply divided interests and histories – the importance of getting
two very divergent groups together – the function it performs in a place like
South Africa is the compensatory function you’ve just articulated. That was
fascinating, thank you!
Raymond Geuss: Good, good.
Lawrence Hamilton would like to thank François Janse van Rensburg and the
editorial board of Theoria for editorial assistance in producing this published
interview.
Human Rights: A Very Bad Idea 103
