Human Rights A Very Bad Idea

 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