22 - Human rights and moral agency

Summary

Introduction

To begin, let me provide an immediate opening to the chapter’s principal claims. As the anthropology of the practice of human rights demonstrates, even in terms of an explicit understanding of “progress,” it is very difficult to sustain empirically the conclusion that human rights has been a force for progress in the contemporary world. On the one hand, the postwar human rights project is intensely teleological; the movement toward a better, more advanced, more civilized future is implicit in the construction of “human rights” as the primary “symbol to all of victory over those who sought to achieve tyranny through aggressive war” (UNESCO 1949, 258–259).

To ask conceptually, that is, about whether or not human rights is progressive is to push right up against a tautology, since “human rights” and “progress” are mutually implied from the very beginning. But on the other hand, even if we were to devise a set of indicators in order to measure the impact of human rights in certain areas of concern – political freedom, torture, access to justice, etc. – we would immediately confront two problems. First, as Sally Engle Merry is documenting in her ongoing research on the use of quantitative indicators to measure human rights compliance (see, e.g., Merry 2009, 2012), there is a problematic degree of dissonance between the statistical techniques and assumptions that animate indicator research, and the multiplicity of processes that get radically condensed into “data.” She argues that the broader impact of human rights – the kind of impact, that is, that would speak to the question of “progress” – is likely to prove statistically unmeasurable for purposes of the diverse group of constituencies involved in human rights enforcement and activism.