3 - The crisis of legalism

Summary

A reason why I was keen in chapter 2 to get under the skin of human rights and to develop an ethical base for the subject that could survive scrutiny was that I feared that without such a foundation the subject would be all the more vulnerable to other challenges, other threats to its survival. In this and the next chapter I look at two such hazards, each in its own way a consequence of the success that, as I have already recognised, the subject undoubtedly enjoys today. In chapter 4, I will look at how the term ‘human rights’ has come to be abused by the powerful, as a means of legitimising the exploitation both of peoples and of the world's natural resources. In that chapter, I will ask what can we do to protect ‘human rights’ from being captured by those who would use it in this way to mask other, more brutal projects, such as colonial-style militarism or the abuse of persons within their power. This chapter takes a different tack. When I was talking in the last chapter about rooting the human rights idea in an active sense of compassion, I raised then the danger that this approach, laudatory though it is, would not translate well into the political sphere, and that as a result human rights as a subject would never outgrow its individual-oriented, person-focused origins.