Chapter XXIII - Denialism and Human Rights: an Afterword

Summary

‘[S]ince wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed and that peace must be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.’

In the late 1970s while teaching philosophy of law in Edinburgh I was invited to dinner where another guest was an upcoming MP. Making (heavy) conversation I asked how we could justify not helping desperate people in the world who were so much less fortunate than we were. Was it just a question of geography? If they were actually at the door starving would we not give up our superfluous goods so as to ensure their basic survival – and how could geography make a difference to our obligations? My fellow guest did not see that we had any such obligations, and my questions were no doubt put clumsily. And yet, now with the arrival of so many often desperate people from poorer countries trying to cross borders despite heavy-handed efforts to stop them, even the argument from geography falls away. Some of the same unease arises when we worry about our obligations to those who live elsewhere but on whose work in intolerable conditions we rely to supply our food, our raw materials, our clothes and even the manufacture of the computers on which we assemble our arguments. There may be some plausible arguments – other than the facts of geography – that set limits to our responsibilities to others. But until we formulate these properly we risk remaining ‘in denial’ about the possible obligations that we may have.

The organisers of the workshop whose proceedings are collected in this volume are professors at a leading centre for the study of human rights. They therefore seek to examine the role of human rights in all this. Why is it, they ask, that despite efforts to secure human rights ‘violations do still occur and injustice remains rampant’. They reply that ‘central to this problem appears to be that social, economic, cultural and political structures in societies provide for denialist defence mechanisms’.