Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think human rig.docx

Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think
human rights are
sufficient for protecting vulnerable populations including
refugees illegal
immigrants, and people forced into exile? What are some of
Arendt’s reasons? Use a current event to explain your analysis.
YOU SHOULD READ THE LECTURE FIRST
For more detail
WhatsApp: +15412856343
Human Rights /
Humans as Political Beings
Lecture 2.4
Natural Rights, Civil Rights, Human Rights
So far, in this unit of the course, the notion of
“rights” has come up several times. Both Hobbes,
Locke, and Mills discuss rights in some way.

As you may recall, Hobbes defines right as a type of
liberty, the freedom to do something without
impediment. Both Hobbes and Locke believe that
humans have natural rights, that is inherent
freedoms that they are endowed with by nature. In
other words, because humans and the world are
they way they are, humans come with pre-given
rights. For Hobbes the principle right held by
humans was to do whatever it takes to survive. For
Locke it was to defend one’s property (including
one’s life).
For Hobbes, when humans enter a social contract
and form a government with laws, they give up
their natural rights. For Locke, the institution of
government provides a way of guaranteeing one’s
natural rights by codifying those rights into law. When
a sovereign power establishes rights for its citizens
and laws for protecting those rights, we get civil
rights.
Natural rights apply in the state of nature while civil
rights apply in civilization. Human rights refer to
those rights which humans hold simply because they
are human. Such rights are closer in kind to natural
rights, but are often reflected in civil rights.
The notion of human rights gets invoked frequently in
discussions of violations of human dignity and ethics.
But where do human rights come from? Are they
real? Who guarantees them? How effective are
they in protecting vulnerable people? Do
other-than-human beings have rights, too?

Amartya Sen, 1933 -
Sen was born in West Bengal India in 1933. He
received is B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Economics at
Trinity College in Cambridge, England. His research
has included topics such as social choice theory,
economic theory, ethics and political philosophy,
welfare economics, theory of measurement,
decision theory, development economics, public
health, and gender studies. His interest in global
welfare and human rights was partly inspired by his
experience of witnessing famine in India.
Sen has served on various economic advisory
boards including the American Economic
Association. He has also received numerous awards
for his work, the most prestigious of which was the
Nobel Prize in economics.
Sen currently teaches at Harvard University.
Hannah Arendt,
1906-1975
Arendt was born in Linden, Germany in 1906 to a Jewish
family. She studied under the German philosophers
Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers while at university.
She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University
of Marburg in 1926. She fled Germany to Paris in 1933
after being briefly held in a detention camp. After the
outbreak of WWII, she and her husband fled to the U.S.
Arendt’s most famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1963) was based on her reporting of the trial of

infamous Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann for the New
Yorker. It was extremely controversial partly because
she claimed that evil was “banal” and that Eichmann
wasn’t a devil but just a boring, unthinking person
incapable of seeing the world from another’s
perspective.
Arendt is considered to be one of the most influential
political thinkers of the 20th century.
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization
that was established in 1945 and currently includes
193 member nations. The U.N. has four main offices
located in New York City, Geneva, Nairobi, and
Vienna.
It was established following WWII for the purpose of
preventing further catastrophic wars and protecting
and securing the future of humanity around the
globe. The U.N. consists of 5 active bodies: The
General Assembly (for deliberation and discussion),
Security Council (for dealing with peace and security
issues), Economic and Social Council (for promoting
economic growth and cooperation), International
Court of Justice (for holding war criminals
accountable), and Secretariat (for providing studies,
info, services).
The concept of human rights was essential to the
message of the U.N.’s founding charter.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In 1948, the U.N. ratified the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR). According the the U.N. it marks a
common standard of achievements for all peoples and nations,
and sets out the fundamental human rights that
should be universally protected.
By definition, human rights, are rights/freedoms that come with
being human. If you’re human, you have human
rights. But how do we know what those rights are? The UDHR
includes 30 articles, some of which list more than
one right. These include things like the right to freely
participate in the cultural life of the community to the right
to be recognized as a person before the law to the right of
parents to seek education for their children.
Look over the list of UDHR articles and think about the
following:
● Are all of these rights natural rights?
● How did these rights get recognized as rights?
● Why do these rights, as implied by their name “human
rights,” only apply to humans?
● What is the purpose of drafting up a list of rights is then
signed and ratified by the member-nations of the
U.N.?
● Does this charter tell us how to recognize when a being is a
human?
The Need for Human Rights
The UDHR begins with several claims about the necessity of
recognizing human rights, principally that the
“recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and

inalienable rights of all members of the human family is
the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (1).
In other words, when everyone recognizes these
rights as fundamental to human life and well-being, humans as a
species can flourish in prosperity, freedom, and
peace. A recognition of universal human rights can foster
mutual respect among different people of different
nationalities, religions, ethnic backgrounds, genders, and
political affiliations.
The principles laid out by the UDHR are meant to help
countries around the world to structure their own
constitutions and laws as well a their international
relationships. It helps to establish the idea that humans are
more alike than they are different. This is especially important
because difference has been one of the leading
justifications for war, slavery, genocide, gendercide, and
colonization. Even though the member countries of the
U.N. ratified (officially consented to make valid) the UDHR,
humans rights violations occur throughout the world
all the time in the most politically and economically stable
nations (U.S., Japan, Germany, etc.) and in less stable
nations (Venezuela, Syria, Somalia).
Thus, the UDHR is an ideal to which the member nations of the
world (and especially the drafters of the
resolution) hope to aspire. As Sen explains, “The understanding
that some rights are not fully realized, and may
not be fully realizable under present circumstances...suggests
the need to work towards changing the prevailing
circumstances to make the unrealized rights realizable, and
ultimately, realized (1005).
Need for Human Rights (2)

Sen’s assessment of the need for
human rights coincides with that of the
U.N. According to Sen, “proclamations
of human rights are to be seen as
ethical demands” and “an assertion of
the importance of...the freedoms that
are identified and privileged in the
formulation of the rights in question”
(1000).
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to
systematize, recommend, and defend principles
and concepts of right human behavior.
Generally, the goal of ethics is recognized as the
effort to help humans live good lives. Good, in
this case, can refer to all sorts of notions of
“good” from the opposite of evil to correct and
right to that which is most valuable.
This means, that from Sen’s perspective, when
someone claims that something like healthcare
is a human right, that person is saying that
without unfettered (free) access to healthcare,
humans cannot live good lives. Or, if you believe
that humans should lead good lives, they should
all have access to affordable healthcare. From
this view, healthcare is a right because it is
necessary for living a good human life.
In other words, when people assert
their human rights, claim that humans
rights have been violated, or draft
legislation to protect human rights,
they are making an ethical assertion
about the value of certain freedoms

for the good of individual humans
and human society.
For Sen, human rights can be “parents of law.” That
is, ethical demands for the recognition of rights like
access to affordable healthcare, the freedom to
practice one’s religion or practice no religion, and
the freedom to get a fair trial can and should inspire
lawmakers within nations to draft laws that will
enshrine and protect such rights. Of course, this
comes with the understanding that any given
government has the welfare of its citizens as its
primary concern.
However, Sen is careful to point out that “an ethical
understanding of human rights...goes against
seeing them as legal demands” (1000). In other
words, human rights are not civil rights, that is
rights granted to be people based on the law of
their nation.
Even though a nation’s interest in protecting human
rights typically begins with protecting its own
citizens, the UDHR implies that countries must not
only take an interest in their own citizens but in all
of humanity. The U.N. is an extra-sovereign,
inter-governmental body. In other words, it has
no official sovereign power; it does not rule over
other nations like nations rule over their citizens.
Rather, it is more like an assembly, a means by
which representatives of other nations can come
together to discuss problems that extend beyond
their country’s borders (i.e. climate change, war,

famine, epidemics).
This means that the U.N. needs to convince nations
to come to the defense of humans who live in other
countries where their rights are being violated. The
framework of human rights provide a means for
countries to negotiate with one another.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt takes a
different approach to the need for human rights. Putting
the rise of human rights language into a historical perspective,
she writes, “The proclamation of human rights
was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era
where individuals were no longer secure in the
estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before
God as Christians. In other words, in the new
secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure
of these social and human rights which until then
had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by
government and constitution, but by social, spiritual,
and religious forces” (291).
In other words, before the start of French Revolution in 1789 a
person’s rights were derived from one’s belief in a
God that endowed humans with reason, intelligence, and other
abilities. Belief in God, in an authority beyond
the human realm, ensured one’s rights. God, who was objective
and all-powerful, was the ultimate judge
beneath which human authority was pale and arbitrary. But as
belief in religious powers waned and as notions
of polygenesis (the belief that there were multiple beginnings or
human origins), Darwinism, and freedom of
religion spread, the security that belief in God brought to

natural rights was undermined, leaving humans to
build a new foundation for those rights.
Inalienability of Human Rights
According to the most famous line of the U.S.
Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” In this, as in
many other documents regarding human rights,
these rights are almost always referred to as
inalienable. If something is inalienable it cannot
be given or taken away by the possessor.
The declaration that rights are inalienable is
powerful for activists who wish to improve the lives
of people around the world, but as Arendt points
out, the “inalienability” of rights isn’t so simple,
especially when they are no longer “endowed by
their Creator.”
Rather the inalienability of human rights leads to a
paradox: “Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed
to be ‘inalienable,’ irreducible to and undeducible
from other rights or laws, no authority was invoked
for their establishment; Man himself was their
source as well as their ultimate goal. No special
law, moreover, was deemed necessary to protect
them because all laws were supposed to rest upon
them” (291).
In other words, the inalienability of human rights
implies that rights spring unencumbered from the

human being itself and are thus evident to anyone
who encounters another human. Thus, human
rights should be able to stand on their own without
the support of laws. They are a symbol of one’s
total emancipation (freedom) from any restrictive
order be it government or religion.
Paradox of the Inalienability of Human Rights
For Arendt, this inalienability highlights an
important paradox in human rights discussions.
Since human rights sprang from one’s mere
humanness unrelated to government, social order,
religion, and all other types of human community,
then they referred to an entirely abstract notion of
a human being. However, humans don’t exist
abstractly, they exist in the world, amongst their
peers and families, in nations, and in cultural
communities. Human life depends on being a
member of a community, and the most common
form of community in the modern world is the
nation.
Hence, “The Rights of Man, after all, had been
defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were
supposed to be independent of all governments;
but it turned out that the moment human beings
lacked their own government and had to fall back
upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to
protect them and no institution was willing to
guarantee them” (292).
In other words, when people are deprived of
governmental protection, they also lose the rights

that were supposedly guaranteed by their very
inclusion within the human species because there
is no one willing or able to defend their rights.
Stateless and Rightless People
According to Arendt, the paradox of human rights comes to
light when we start considering the rights of stateless
people. One of the major ethical questions raised by Arendt’s
analysis of human rights is: what are the rights of
stateless people and what standing to the rightless have in the
world?
First, what does it mean to be stateless? For Arendt, a stateless
person is anyone who is a member of a group
who was “welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.
Once they [the group] had left their state they
became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human
rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth”
(267). Writing as a Jew who had fled from Germany on the eve
of WWII, it’s likely that Arendt had in mind
refugees of civil wars as the quintessential example of stateless
people.
But stateless people have also historically included many other
groups including illegal immigrants and people
who didn’t use a form of government recognized by white
Europeans. For example, the in the eyes of the
European colonists and European slave traders, Native Africans
and Native Americans were pre-civilization,
subhuman, and therefore excluded from the realm of moral
obligation. As “naturally inferior” they, like animals,
were exempt from the rights held by the “naturally superior”
white Europeans. Look back at the Mills reading for
some examples.

Stateless and Rightless
People (2)
Even though human rights were generally received
as something positive, Arendt notes that there was
never a real effort made to implement and ensure
them. The main reason for this was that civil rights
had historically tended to guarantee the rights now
associated with human rights and to change their
governments if they didn’t. However, “The Rights
of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be
unenforcable--even in countries whose
constitutions were based upon them--whenever
people appeared who were no longer citizens of
any sovereign state” (293).
Even though everyone seems to agree that the
plight of the stateless is their loss of rights, no one
can agree what to do about them.
Just think about the current Syrian refugee
crisis. Millions of people are being displaced by
the Syrian civil war, but the U.S., which is
supposedly a defender of human rights has just
put in place a ban keeping new refugees from
entering the country even though their basic
human rights aren’t being met and staying in
Syria might lead to their deaths.
Stateless and Rightless People (3)
Arendt says that the rightless suffer two primary

losses:
1. Loss of their homes, “the entire social texture
into which they were born” (293) and their
distinct place in the world
2. Loss of government protection and legal
status in all countries
Most importantly, “The calamity of the rightless is
not they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, or of equality before the law and
freedom of opinion--formulas which were designed
to solve problems within given communities--but
that they no longer belong to any community
whatsoever” (295). They are “superfluous.”
Notice that Arendt is extremely focused on the
notions of place and community in her account of
rightlessness. As I said earlier, Arendt believes
human life is fundamentally and inextricably tied to
community. Without it, our lives lack meaning,
structure, and purpose. This is why she can come
to this conclusion:
“The fundamental deprivation of human rights is
manifested first and above all in the deprivation of
a place in the world which makes opinions
significant and actions effective. Something much
more fundamental than freedom and justice...is at
stake when belonging to the community into which
one is born is no longer a matter of course and not
belonging no longer a matter of choice” (296).

Nothing but Human
Take a moment to read Arendt’s account of slavery
on page 297. Consider the following questions:
● What’s the difference between a slave and a
stateless person?
● What do slaves have that the stateless don’t?
● Based on this passage, how we summarize
Arendt’s definition of humanity?
● What is the role of community in a person’s
life?
Even slaves, whose rights have been trampled on to
the severest extent, are more secure in their rights
than the stateless. The reason: “To be a slave was
after all to have a distinctive character, a place in
society--more than the abstract nakedness of being
human and nothing but human. Not the loss of
rights, then, but the loss of a community willing
and able to guarantee those rights whatsoever, has
been the calamity which has befallen
ever-increasing numbers of people” (297).
What does Arendt mean by “nothing but
human”? By this she means the state of being
merely a being with a human body and mind. A
being born into the state of humanness. Being
nothing but human means to be an abstract
individual in a sea of other individuals without any
of the markers that distinguish one as meaningful.
One “begin[s] to belong to the human race in much
the same way as animals belong to a specific

animal species. The paradox involved in the loss of
human rights is that such loss coincides with the
instant when a person becomes a human being in
general--without a profession, without citizenship,
without an opinion, without a deed which to
identify and specify himself--and...loses all
significance” (302).
The Myth of Human Rights
For Arendt, the notion of human rights is
constructed on the myth that humans are equal
in the state of nature. In contrast to Hobbes and
Locke, Arendt doesn’t believe people are born
equal:
“Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere
existence, is not given us, but is the result of human
organization insofar as it is guided by the principle
of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal
as members of a group on the strength of our
decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal
rights” (301). Only politics can produce equality.
Because human rights are supposed to apply to
human beings equally, universally and
indiscriminately, then in theory no human should
be able to lose her rights. But humans lose their
rights all the time or, in some case, are never
granted them to begin with.
Since the idea of human rights depends on the
equality of all persons and since humans are not
equal except when there are laws and customs that
establish that equality, the idea of inalienable

human rights is fundamentally flawed.
If Arendt is correct in her analysis, should we
give up on the idea of human rights? Is it a dead,
useless concept? Or can it still be beneficial?
The Importance of Human Rights
Amartya Sen would argue that the concept of
human rights is still significant and carries
important weight in politics.
As we saw before, according to Sen, claims to
human rights are ethical claims--they help make it
know that there is an injustice occurring or that
people are suffering. Human rights become calls to
act in a way that will increase the welfare of human
beings and can act as a standard way of measuring
the wellbeing of humans around the world.
Human rights might be a myth, but they are a myth
that helps humans to communicate to one another
about the things that matter in making their lives
livable and even enjoyable and meaningful.
Determining Human Rights
Whether human rights are inalienable or something
constructed by humans as a means of helping them
to flourish in the world, the question of how do we
determine which rights are human rights still
remains.
According to Sen, human right are demands to

respect a particular freedom. Yet, “for a freedom to
count as a part of the evaluative system of human
rights, it must be important enough to justify
requiring that others be ready to...advance it”
(1001).
For a freedom to be considered a right, it must
meet two criteria:
1. Be important
2. Be interpersonal and interactive
Consider the four freedoms that Sen lists on pg.
1002. Which of these does he think meet the
criteria for being a human right? Why?
The types of freedoms protected by human rights
include process and opportunity freedoms. These
refer to the ability of persons to choose to act or not
act in particular circumstance as opposed to being
forced.
Finally, for a freedom to be considered an
acceptable right, it needs to be scrutinized by the
global community in a forum of “unobstructed
discussion.” By unobstructed discussion Sen
means a place where no one is being forced to say
something against their will, but is speaking openly
without fear of retaliation. Such public reasoning
can help lead to ethical objectivity.
Conclusions
To wrap up, there are debates about whether or not
human rights are born from human nature or

whether humans have constructed human rights as
just another myth for making sense of and ordering
the world.
As Arendt shows, the concept of humans rights has
flaws and paradoxes that reveal weaknesses in the
argument that human rights are inalienable. For
Arendt, the only way this could be the case is if
some divine being endowed us with rights.
But for Sen, even if human rights aren’t inalienable,
they are useful for holding humans around the
world to certain ethical standards that will
guarantee the well being of flourishing of humans
everywhere.
Discussion Question
Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think
human rights are
sufficient for protecting vulnerable populations including
refugees illegal
immigrants, and people forced into exile? What are some of
Arendt’s reasons? Use
a current event to explain your analysis.

Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think human rig.docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think human rig.docx

Similar to Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think human rig.docx (11)

More from jasoninnes20

More from jasoninnes20 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Based on Arendt’s analysis of human rights, do you think human rig.docx