1. The doctrine of human rights and democracy as a universal political perspective
Dr. Giuseppe Mario Saccone
The language and theory of human rights was developed and finds its historical roots in
the West, but has now become or is becoming, in spite of the various objections, almost
universal. It has become or is becoming almost universal in so far as it has been able to
overcome a parochial identification with the West itself.
The importance of this theory is reflected by the fact that a fundamental issue in the
history of political philosophy common to many varieties of accounts of what human
flourishing is all about is that what it means (in part or whole) to be a non-defective adult
human person is to be a moral agent who is capable (perhaps to a relatively less or greater
degree than other persons) of bringing a moral perspective to bear on our momentous and
not-so-momentous decisions. This assumption could be referred to as the thesis of human
moral worth. Aristotle, in particular, finds for such worth a sort of conventional or nomos-
based source – being enculturated into a polis. In its paradigmatic sense, full enculturation
is restricted to full citizens. Thus, the thesis of human moral worth, at least in the sense of
fullest moral worth, is not applied universally to human beings: it is withheld or restricted,
for example, in the case of ‘natural’ slaves, of women, and even of common labourers.
The tendency of much later Western moral and ethical thought has been toward the
increasing universalization of the thesis of human moral worth. In this later
thought, human moral worth has also not always been so closely tied to
enculturation or socialization into a particular moral community. This newly
discovered thesis of the universal and unconditional human moral worth going beyond the
requirement of enculturation or socialization into any supposedly model moral community
is of crucial significance. Once this universal thesis is lost or played down, what we have is
the imposition of one culture over the others with the consequent expropriation of values
which, within even the most informal sort of normative anthropology, are supposed to
belong to all cultures. Hence the risk of falling into what it is often called the Western
tendency towards the expropriation of universalist political ideals such as liberty and
democracy along with any other triumph of human civilisation. Of course this unfortunate
‘expropriation’, when occurring, it is based on crude oversimplifications following the
same pattern highlighted by the fact that the dependence of Western science on Chinese
inventions, or of mathematics on Indian and Arabic innovations, or the West Asian
preservation of the Greco-Roman heritage is routinely written out of Western history.
That some sort of global consensus is slowly emerging about the thesis of universal
human moral worth is witnessed by the fact that although the doctrine of rights in general
and of human rights in particular embodies a set of norms often subject to criticism and
various challenges, most contemporary political thinkers are nevertheless prepared to
express their ideas in terms of human rights or entitlements. This general concern for
human rights is also reflected by the fact that many countries embody a list of rights in
their constitution, proclaiming, for example, that the government will not interfere with
the free speech of its citizens, or with their freedom of travel, their sexual privacy, their
religious liberty, or their equal access to the law. These Bills of Rights (or outside the
West frequently some equivalents) reflect the importance in the international community
of the idea that there are liberties and interests so basic that every society should secure
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2. them irrespective of its traditions, history or level of economic development. It follows
that, in accordance with these general principles contained in these Bills of Rights or
Constitutions, and most importantly in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
subscribed by virtually every country, to invoke a right in legal (and political) terms is
to predicate an absolute duty on some concern for a certain individual interest, and
while the interest in question is often an interest in liberty, it might equally be an interest in
some material satisfaction. (Raz, 1986, p.166.)
There used to be a controversy in the analysis of rights about whether the concept
itself presupposed an exclusive concern with liberty. But the claim that it did has been
largely now been abandoned, and the language of rights is used to refer to any demand
that an individual interest should be protected and promoted, made from the individual’s
own point of view, and accorded decisive moral importance.
In international human rights circles, diplomats talk about three types of rights.
(see Alston, 1987, p.307.) The first type are the traditional liberties and privileges of
citizenship: religious toleration, freedom from arbitrary arrest, free speech, the right
to vote, and so on. The second type are socio-economic claims: the right to
education, housing, health care, employment and an adequate standard of living.
But even these more radical claims requiring a more interventionist state, remain
essentially individualistic in their content, inasmuch as it is the material welfare of each
man, woman, and child that is supposed to be maintained by these provisions. The third
type of rights have more to do with communities or whole peoples than with
individual persons, even though their very existence still rests on the reference to rights
of individuals. They include minority language rights, national rights to self-
determination and the right to such diffuse goods as peace, environmental integrity
and economic development.
The language of human rights was developed and finds its historical roots in the West.
However, the mostly successful interaction with various other cultures and discourses
of the twentieth century doctrine of human rights, has led in many cases to the
acceptance and incorporation of its principles within their own different discourses.
So this doctrine, and with it the language of human rights in general, has become at
least in principle, even though not in the concrete application, almost universal. As a
result, most governments recognize at least in principle, if not in fact, the rights of
free speech, religious liberty and equal access to the law. I have argued that the
reason of this partial but important success, even vis-à-vis other competing Western
discourses, is that because the language of rights attaches an unconditional worth to
the existence of each person, it can accommodate all the concerns about human need
better than the non-rights discourses. For this very reason, the language of rights can
convincingly answer the various objections of its critics such as those raised from
communitarian and utilitarian points of views.
Once the thesis of human moral worth is universally acknowledged at least in principle, if
not in practice, in terms of the above three rights, the next step is to establish the import of
these desiderata with respect to answering the more practical questions concerning who
should be making decisions directed toward the common good and how should the
content and scope of these decisions respect the thesis of human moral worth
underpinning human rights. And this is where the more politically sensitive and
controversial discourse about democracy and liberalism comes into the picture. The
inherent features of democracy are, even today, not completely agreed upon by the
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3. experts. Some political scientists argue that democracy is simply a way of making
decisions. These scholars, sometimes called process democrats, claim that there is no real
philosophy, or theory, of democracy. They believe that democracy is nothing more than an
agreement among citizens that the majority vote will carry the issues or that one branch of
government will not reach too far into the functions of another branch.
However, there is a second group of scholars that disagrees with this view and for whom
democracy is mostly a matter of principle and for whom process matters only as a result of
principle. That is to say, while certainly not uninterested in process, principle democrats
regard the ultimate philosophical goals of democracy as more important than the
procedures used to meet those goals. At the very least, principle democrats insist that a
democratic government be dedicated to improving the conditions of life for all its people
and that some mechanism exist by which the people in the society can exercise a degree of
control over their leaders and express their wishes and needs.
Principle democrats argue that democracy has a very important theoretical base. Although
the procedure of democracy is important, they believe it is secondary to the basic intent
and objectives of democracy as expressed in democratic theory. For instance, the basic
principles of modern liberal democracy include the ideas that the individual is of major
importance in the society, that each individual is basically equal to all other individuals,
and that each has certain inalienable rights such as life and liberty. In the United States – a
liberal democracy – decisions are made by voting, but there are other specific legal and
administrative procedures (the right not to be forced to incriminate oneself, the right to a
defence, the right to a trial by jury, and so forth) to safeguard people’s liberties. These
procedures are called due process of law. Accordingly, even if a majority of the people
voted to imprison someone, it could not be legally done because the process of majority
rule is subordinate to the principle of individual liberty.
Whatever view we take about the relation between process and principle, perhaps the
most basic idea in democracy is that people are essentially equal, and thus each
person has a right to have a say in who govern and how they do so. Hence, legitimate
political power comes from the people, and government, therefore, is legal only when the
governed consent. If democracy is to be regarded as the most appropriate practical means
in order to ensure that political decisions are directed toward the common good and that
the content and scope of these decisions respect the thesis of human moral worth
underpinning the doctrine of human rights, democratic governments must effectively
perform and be seen to perform such role.
In other words, in order to dispel undiscerning naivety, we should bear in mind that in the
West not less than in the Third World, democracy (i.e., government by the people) must
be more than its structural and institutional components and must be considered in terms
of its intrinsic qualities of liberal values and human rights. That is to say, what is
commonly understood as liberal democracy is a system of government which is supposed
to combine the right to representative government with the right to individual freedom,
and limitations on the invasion of this freedom by government. From the liberal point of
view, individuals are rational creatures who are entitled to the greatest possible freedom
consistent with like freedom for fellow citizens. One of the implications of this is that
liberalism strives not to prescribe any particular conception of human flourishing, but to
establish conditions in which individuals and groups can pursue human flourishing as each
defines it. This does in fact also corresponds to the essence of the doctrine of human rights
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4. in so far as a person’s good is a matter of his or her individual preferences. The great
virtue of liberalism lies thus in its unrelenting commitment to individual freedom, reasoned
debate and toleration and a significant strand within contemporary political philosophy is
devoted to the support and justification of some suitably perfected or idealized version of
the combination of bourgeois-liberal polity and free-market economy. And most
intriguingly, with regard to the importance of this relationship between bourgeois-liberal
economics and free-market economy, perhaps, there is a paradox in the fact that one
central aspect of Marx’s thought that has found increasing acceptance is the assumption
that there is some sort of necessary connection between bourgeois-liberal polity and
capitalist economics. A frequent observation concerning Marx’s critique of the duo of
bourgeois-liberalism and capitalism is that the capitalist component bears the brunt of his
criticisms, particularly the unfettered capitalism of the late nineteenth century. There have
always been non-Marxist (and ‘revisionist’ Marxist) socialist who have entertained the
ideal of the combination of a bourgeois-liberal state (characterized by its distinctive
freedoms and rights) with a more-or-less strictly politically regulated economy
(characterized by the public ownership of at least the major means of production and
distribution). Whether practicable or not such schemes certainly seem to contradict
orthodox Marxist theory. But, with what seems to be the present, increasing acceptance of
the so-called free-market economy as a natural or even necessary accoutrement of liberal
democratic government, Marx’s idea of the necessary connection between the two appears
to be winning the day. Of course, there is considerable irony here since those who now
proclaim this indissoluble union typically regard it a from a considerably more celebratory
perspective than did Marx.
At a more abstract theoretical level, contemporary liberal political philosophy has accepted
as virtual orthodoxy Marx’s diagnosis of the bifurcation of the person in the bourgeois-
liberal state into citizen and into bourgeois/private person, and the division of life in such a
state into its public, political component and into its private, associational component
(designated by Marx following from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as ‘civil society’). This
contemporary tradition has really repudiated the classical political idea (revived, in a way,
in the form of Marx’s concept of the human species-being) of a common, objective
function (ergon) or good, which it is the fundamental business of political organization to
promote for its citizens. Rather, a person’s good is a matter of his or her individual
preferences (perhaps subject to rational reflection and prioritization), and it is the
essential role of political organization to coordinate and balance the (often
competing) preferences of its citizens. The reality of the person is assumed to reside in
his or her private life, goals, preferences, associations, etc.; and it is the business of the
state (and of the human person’s role as a citizen) to serve as a means for furthering these
goals and preferences – that is, one’s individual business – subject to some constraint of
justice or equity.
In effect, a significant strand of contemporary political philosophy accepts ‘without regret’
what Marx regards as the defining antithesis of the bourgeois-liberal state: its division of
human relationships into those of the political community and of civil society and the
concomitant bifurcation of human persons within bourgeois-liberal society into the
personae of citizens (who are formally equal with one another and, in fact, formally
indistinguishable from one another) and bourgeois/private persons (who typically are not
at all equal and who are defined by their peculiar preferences, goals, and attachments).
Theorists within this tradition, of course, do not at all follow Marx in regarding this
division or split of the human person as an unsatisfactory and ‘contradictory’ state of
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5. affairs that will (and should) eventually be transcended. Rather, they tend to regard it as a
morally proper state of affairs and, at least in the case of some theorists, as the natural
historical terminus of human political development.
Marx is seldom given credit for this piece of conceptual apparatus, although it is quite
central to contemporary liberal political thought. A version of the distinction is found
earlier in Rousseau and Hegel. I believe that it is fair to say that contemporary liberal
political theory follows Rousseau in attempting to rationalize and balance the roles of
citizen and bourgeois/private person, rather than following Marx in seeing this distinction
as human moral problem – that is, as a human ‘limitation’ that history will inevitably
overcome.
Much of contemporary political philosophy begins with the liberal postulate that a
fundamental function of the state is to guarantee to its citizens some favoured set of
liberties and rights (which, it is often assumed, should be equally distributed). This
postulate is typically conjoined with a liberal-democratic or Rousseauian principle of
political legitimacy: the legitimacy of the state (and the legitimacy of at least its most
fundamental actions) depends on some form of agreement or consent of its citizens. A
further fundamental assumption that is frequently made is that the state’s business is to
facilitate (in some just, equitable way) its citizens’ getting what they want, rather than to
make those citizens good or virtuous – according to some formally or politically
recognized conception of human goodness or flourishing, that is, some conception of an
objective human function or ergon. A final assumption common to the tradition but
perhaps slightly more controversial is that enabling citizens to get what they want entails
protecting their economic freedom. Doing so will include the guarantee of some form of
private property, the right to choose (and to change) the way one make’s one’s living, the
right to practice any legitimate form of business, trade, or profession, etc.
John Rawls can be regarded as the primary representative of contemporary liberal political
theory. His theory of justice not only condemns racial, sexual and religious discrimination,
but also rejects many forms of social and economic inequality. Rawls’ egalitarian form of
liberalism has had a profound effect upon political philosophy generally, and has made a
significant contribution to both the modern liberal and social democratic political
traditions. Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) proposed a theory of justice that is based
upon the maintenance of two principles:
1 Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a
similar liberty for others.
2 Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the
greatest benefit of the least advantaged; and (b) attached to positions and offices open to
all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
The first principle reflects a traditional liberal commitment to formal equality, the second,
the so-called ‘difference principle’ points towards a significant measure of social equality.
By no means, however, does this justify absolute social equality. Rawls fully recognizes
the importance of material inequality as an economic incentive. Nevertheless, he makes an
important presumption in favour of equality in that he insists that material inequalities are
only justifiable when they work to the advantage of the less well-off. This is a position
compatible with a market economy in which wealth is redistributed through the tax and
welfare system up to the point that this becomes a disincentive to enterprise and so
disadvantages even the poor.
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6. A fundamental assumption underlying Rawls’ principle of justice derives from both
classical liberal sources and his more contemporary egalitarianism. This assumption has
two components. (A) One is the supposition that the principles of justice are morally
normative principles, the moral force of which should be universally compelling. (B) The
other component is his supposition that these principles of justice need not presuppose
what Rawls calls a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ or ‘comprehensive conception of the good’ –
some richly normative religious, moral, or philosophical conception of human nature,
purpose, and destiny. This is because Rawls assumes that a fundamental and in- eliminable
feature of contemporary constitutional democracies is a ‘diversity of opposing and
irreconcilable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’ (where ‘moral doctrines’ has
the sense of ‘moral conceptions of the good’). Such diversity suggests that, as a practical
political matter, consensus or universal assent with respect to fundamental political issues
will be difficult or impossible to achieve if it must be achieved on the basis of agreement
that is dependent upon comprehensive conceptions of the good. This predicament makes
quite attractive the idea of some rational basis of public, political morality that is
independent of any comprehensive conception of the human good.
That there might exist such a basis of political morality is suggested by the moral
philosophy of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, which certainly
influenced Rawls political philosophy. Kant holds that practical rationality can and should
determine the foundation of morality without appeal to any ‘ultimate premises’ that are
factual or empirical claims about human desires or happiness or about distinctively human
good. Kant famously finds the basis of morality in a principle of universalizability, the
‘categorical imperative’ which instruct us to act only on those ‘maxims’ or descriptions of
our action that we could consistently will to be universally accepted and followed. (See,
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Judgement, especially Part I, Book I, Chapter I)
The concept of universalizability figures as largely in Rawls’ attempt to devise non-
teleological principles of political morality (i.e., justice as fairness) as does in Kant’s
attempt to specify a non-teleological basis of morality in general. For the purpose of this
talk at least, I do not see the various criticism that have been made against Rawls as totally
doing away with this principle of universalizability.
To sum up the political implications of this principle, there is a still controversial but
increasingly dominant tendency to see the political embodiment of this principle of
universalizability in what are assumed to be the ideal features of the liberal democratic
systems. In practise, the features of a liberal democratic system in terms of its intrinsic
qualities of liberal values and human rights must include:
1 Representative institutions based on majority rule,
2 Free and fair elections;
3 A choice of political parties;
4 Accountability of the government to the electorate;
5 Freedom of expression, assembly, and individual rights, guaranteed by an independent
judiciary;
6 Limitations on the power of government guaranteed by the existence of a free and
vibrant civil society which includes free and independent mass-media, N.G.O., etc.
Only, in the late 1940s most Western countries became in their structural and institutional
components, full-fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. (But, in terms of
intrinsic qualities and rights, the process is still ongoing.) Thus, if the notion of democracy
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7. can be read primarily in terms of classical European political philosophy, the equivalent
ideas in developing countries to be solidly grounded will also have to be located in the
various local great and little traditions, as well as in the imported schemes of the first
generation of leaders after decolonization. Then, secondly, in terms of institutional
vehicles (the ways in which ideas generally affirmed are expressed in concrete and
practical institutional machineries) the notion of democracy comes in varieties with
American-style representative democracy (separation of powers, open debate and
conflicting interest groups – all theorized typically via notions of political-liberal pluralism)
and European social-democracy (with a more clearly dispersed pattern of power, open
debate and an active and involved citizenry). But in the Third World, democracy will
have to be expressed either through (or in some cases against) institutional vehicles
which typically revolve around elite-ordered developmental states often oriented to
the pragmatic pursuit of material advance.
Of course, this is not to deny that some post Cold War missions by Western powers to
spread democracy can be seen partly as a pose, given the fact that in some countries free
and fair elections would be seen by those same Western powers as their worst nightmare.
That is to say, Western powers while they praise democracy, in fact they often endorse
autocratic rulers in the Third World.
Some criticisms of democracy
Democracy has many critics at every point on the political spectrum. It is attacked by the
far left as well as by the far right. Some of the most biting criticism, however, comes from
supporters of democracy itself.
Some critics argue that democracy is a hopelessly visionary idea based on a number of
impossible principles that can never really work because they are too idealistic. They claim
that ideas such as human equality or the actual practice of self-government are futile
dreams that can never be carried out. At best, they say it is really the elite that rules in a
‘democracy’. The fact that the general public believes it is running the system proves that
the subtleties of government are beyond the understanding of ordinary people.
Another criticism of democracy is based on the belief that the majority of the people have
only average intelligence and creativity. Therefore, a government controlled by the
majority would probably be biased in favour of the average or the mediocre. Prejudice
against the innovative, the unusual, or the excellent would dominate such a system: laws
would be passed to move the society toward the lowest common denominator. The truly
superior individuals would suffer as the ordinary people imposed their will on the country.
Summing up this position, Russell Kirk, a leading conservative, writes: ‘Aye, men are
created different; and a government which ignores this law becomes an unjust
government, for it sacrifices nobility for mediocrity; it pulls down the aspiring natures to
gratify the inferior natures. (Russell Kirk, ‘Prescription, Authority, and Ordered Freedom,’
in What Is Conservatism? ed. Frank S. Meyer. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1964, p.34. )
Democracy is also attacked as being slow and inefficient. The mechanism for decision
making is awkward, unable to make the speedy decisions necessary in a jet-propelled,
electronically powered, computer-driven society. The critics also point out that although
democracy might have been possible during a simpler era, our technology has complicated
society to such an extent that popular government is no longer possible. Ordinary people
with everyday concerns are simply not equipped to handle the complexities facing policy
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8. makers in the modern state. Our society has evolved faster than we have been able to
adjust, and one of the casualties of this development must be democracy itself.
These are just a few of the criticisms of democracy. Of course, to think of democracy as
the best possible form of government is not to make it so, but so far the experimented
alternatives to liberal democracy have, to say the least, performed worst than liberal
democracy itself. However, questioning the continued viability and usefulness of
democracy is a healthy exercise in which all citizens should engage, if for no other reason
than to better understand it and thus improve the application of it.
And I will conclude with a telling quote from the late Bertrand Russell who famously said
that: ‘Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.’
But I argue that the process by which people make this choice also embodies or perhaps
should embody a principle whereby a rational choice is made on an agreed basis of co-
operation among rational individuals which are presupposed to be morally equal. This
principle of cooperation can be universal in so far as it either recognizes or simply
presupposes the fundamental moral value of individuals as, put it in Rawls’ words, ‘self-
originating sources of valid claims’, and in a sense the universality of this principle can still
be maintained whether we interpret it more as a Kantian prescription, or simply as a
description of the underlying features of liberal democracy as the later writings of Rawls
tend to do.
References
Primary Sources
Bentham Jeremy. (1796) Anarchical Fallacies; being An Examination of The
Declarations of Rights issued during The French Revolution. Ed. John Bowring, Vol.II,
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham., 11 Vols. (1838-1843) Edimburgh. Reprinted
1962. New York: Russel & Russel, 489-534.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Judgement, trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis
and New York : The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. (1956).
Locke John. (1689) Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. (1988) Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Secondary Sources
Alston P. (1987). “A third generation of solidarity rights: progressive development or
obfuscation of international human rights law?” Netherlands International Law Review.
29, 307-365.
Bell Daniel. (1995). Communitarianism and its critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finnis John. (1980). Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gadamer Hans-Georg. (1967). “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection”.
Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. David E. Linge. (1976). Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press.
Raz J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Taylor Charles. (1985) “Atomism”. Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences:
Philosophical Papers 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 87-210.
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9. Taylor Charles. (1998) “Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights”. The East
Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Edited by Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell
(1998). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124-144.
Waldron Jeremy. (1987). Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights
of Man. London: Methuen.
Definition of Doctrine: A doctrine is a principle or belief, or a set of principles or
beliefs, which is thought by his supporters to be absolutely true and therefore the
only one acceptable.
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10. Taylor Charles. (1998) “Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights”. The East
Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Edited by Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell
(1998). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124-144.
Waldron Jeremy. (1987). Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights
of Man. London: Methuen.
Definition of Doctrine: A doctrine is a principle or belief, or a set of principles or
beliefs, which is thought by his supporters to be absolutely true and therefore the
only one acceptable.
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