Historical Origins of Human Rights

1
Historical Origins of Human Rights

• Lecture 4
• The Sentimental Revolution
• January 29, 2007

2
Outline

• conceptual possibility of human rights
• the rise of pity
• treating emotions historically
• the civilizing process
• the religious imperative to do good
• the secularization of pity
• philosophical revolution
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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outline contd

• the politics of pity
• diffusion
• the rise of philanthropy
• conclusion
• the pain of compassion
• subjects and objects

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concepts and limits

• a story of the intellectual origins of the
  concepts of humanity and rights does surprisingly
  little to explain the rise of human rights as
  theyre now defined
• new rights, beginning with rights against torture
  and slavery
• the culture of their attempted enforcement 
• the creation of humanitarianism as the ethic of
  individuals and the principle of collective
  movements

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concepts plus emotions

• today the sentimental revolution
• a revolution of human emotion, the way people
  feel towards one another
• most important factor in the rise of modern human
  rights?

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the rise of pity

• Moral weeping is the sign of so noble a passion,
  that it may be questioned whether those are
  properly men, who never weep upon any occasion.
  What can be more nobly human than to have a
  tender sentimental feeling of our own and others
  sic misfortune? (Anonymous, 1755).
• Nature hath implanted in our breast a love of
  others, a sense of duty to them, a moral
  instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly
  to feel and to succor others distresses
  (Thomas Jefferson, 1814).

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treating emotions historically

• the malleability of the emotions in history
• the role of biology
• constructionism
• importance of external world/external cues to
  internal states
• Hannah Arendt History tells us that it is by no
  means a matter of course for the spectacle of
  misery to move men to pity. In the eighteenth
  century, this age old indifference was about to
  disappear.

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deep background the civilizing process

• Norbert Elias (1897-1990)
• The Civilizing Process (1939)
• the idea of civilization and civilized
  nations central to origins of humanitarianism
  and human rights culture
• decline in public tolerance of violence
• Universal Declaration all humans endowed with
  conscience barbaric acts shock the
  conscience alliance of civilization and
  conscience
• one idea progressive moralization

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Eliass alternative story culture shift

• The question of why peoples behavior and
  emotions change is really the same as the
  question of why their forms of living change.
• contrast between medieval (feudal) and early
  modern manners
• from rude to civilized manners
• nobles from knights to courtiers, then
  propagation of values through the population
• no more spitting in public, utensils (esp. forks)
  at table, blowing nose with hands and openly as
  opposed to in handkerchief with head turned,
  living more and more isolated from the source of
  their food (e.g., meat, once brought out whole to
  the table, began to be prepared behind the scenes
  and brought out cut), new attitudes towards
  nudity (none in public and the origins of pajamas
  and nightdresses in private)

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Elias, contd

• most important, feudal elites welcomed found
  pleasurable the infliction of pain on others
  on animals, on prisoners, on women
• They must be understood not as something
  negative, as a lack of civilization or of
  knowledge (as it is easy to support from our
  standpoint), but as something that fitted the
  needs of these people and that seemed meaningful
  and necessary to them in exactly this form.
• Elias on the emotion of aggression (and not
  simply the practice of brutality)
• questions where did it go? what replaced it?

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from a negative toa positive story

• the civilizing process, at least as Elias
  understood it, is still a negative story about
  the decline of rude manners and violent behaviors
• how did pity fill the void?

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origins of pity in religious imperative to do good

• the English story latitudinarianism
• anti-Puritanical stress on good works
• stress practice over theory
• replaces not simply warriors ethic of violence
  and honor central to Eliass account -- but
  also Puritan ethic of ascetic disengagement from
  transformation of the world
• key centrality of feeling to good works
• anti-Stoic The doctrine of the Stoicks allowed
  the good man to help, but forbad him to Pity and
  Compassionate the Needy. But we learn to do both
  from the Example and the Precepts of our Lord.
  Our Alms must be the Off-spring of our Charity
  and Kindness and if we were allowed to be void
  of Pity and Compassion, tis to be feared our
  relief would be but small. He is most likely to
  help his Neighbour that hath a great sense of his
  Misery. And Christianity hath provided better for
  the Poor than the Philosophy of the Stoicks
  (Richard Kidder).

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the secularization of the ethic of pity

• Man only of all Creatures under Heaven, God has
  given this quality, to be affected with the Grief
  and with the Joy of those of his own kind and to
  feel the Evils which others feel, that we may be
  universally disposed to help and relieve one
  another (Richard Claggett, 1686).
• nature hath made our neighbours misery our
  pain (Isaac Barrow)
• from function of Gods command to love (cf. 1
  Corinthians 13) to function of who we are
• secularization of the ethic of pity meant
  naturalization presenting it as innate in human
  nature
• the major conceptual and practical dilemma they
  wanted to make people compassionate, but they
  were forced by their theory to contend that
  people already were so

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a philosophical revolution

• pivotal figure Anthony Ashley Cooper, (Third)
  Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
• Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
  (1711)
• from reason to passion
• opposing Hobbess passionate man with another
  passionate man -- the man of feeling
• obvious everyday examples of natural affection,
  parental kindness, zeal for posterity, concern
  for the propagation and nurture of the young,
  love of fellowship and company, compassion,
  mutual succour, and the rest of this kind.
• perverted affections unnatural and inhuman
  delight in beholding torments, and in viewing
  distress, calamity, blood, massacre and
  destruction. To delight in the torture and pain
  of other creatures indifferently, natives or
  foreigners, of our own or of another species,
  kindred or no kindred, known or unknown to feed
  as it were on death, and be entertained by dying
  agonies is wholly and absolutely unnatural, as
  it is horrid and miserable.
• Norman Fiering The cluster of English words
  cognate to human that refer essentially to
  compassion as a trait, such as humane,
  humanitarian, humanity, have their firmest
  philosophical origins in Shaftesburys work.

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Shaftesburys followers

• moral sense theory
• Francis Hutcheson, Scottish Enlightenment
• David Hume Let us suppose such a person ever so
  selfish let private interest have ingrossed ever
  so much his attention yet in instances, where
  that is not concerned, he must unavoidably feel
  some propensity to the good of mankind, and make
  it an object of choice, if everything else be
  equal. Would any man, who is walking along, tread
  as willingly on anothers gouty toes, whom he has
  no quarrel with, as on the hard flint and
  pavement? There is some particle of the dove,
  kneaded into our frame, along with the elements
  of the wolf and serpent (Enquiry Concerning the
  Principles of Morals).
• Adam Smith Howsoever selfish man may be
  supposed, there are evidently some principles in
  his nature, which interest him in the fortune of
  others, and render their happiness necessary to
  him, though he derives nothing from it except the
  pleasure of seeing it (Theory of Moral
  Sentiments)

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Nietzsches response

• This overestimation of and predilection for pity
  on the part of modern philosophers is something
  new hitherto philosophers have been at one as to
  the worthlessness of pity (Genealogy of Morals,
  Intro).

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• age of reason v. age of feeling
• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754)
  savage man as characterized by an innate
  repugnance to seeing his fellow men suffer, and
  animated by pity, a disposition that is fitting
  for beings that are as weak and as subject to
  ills as we are.
• the noble savage
• suppression of the centrality of human violence
  and brutality that Hobbes or Elias would stress
• mothers and children
• feminization of culture?
• the repugnance horses have for trampling a
  living body with their hooves
• An animal does not go undisturbed past a dead
  animal of its own species. There are even some
  animals that give them a kind of sepulcher and
  the mournful lowing of cattle entering a
  slaughterhouse voices the impresses they receive
  of the horrible spectacle that strikes them.

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towards a politics of pity

• Rousseaus importance a response to the problem
  that the secularization and naturalization of
  pity left behind how to explain why (some)
  people do not pity one another? the answer
  society itself corrupts natural sympathy
• the result a politics of pity and compassion,
  the attempt to reform society to make natural
  pity rule
• individual self-understanding of the humanitarian
• a collective solution is needed to the corruption
  of pity
• the power of pity as the engine of politics
• question what form would this politics take?

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diffusion

• journalism
• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
• The Tatler and The Spectator
• novels
• origins of the novel as part of a didactic
  program of moral education
• the humanitarian narrative (Thomas Laqueur)

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the rise of philanthropy

• medieval charity giving alms, local (village)
  need, sacred obligation
• rise in urban centers, disruption of local
  responsibility, rise in vagrancy
• associational charity (on the model of emerging
  corporations)
• causes beyond poor hospitals, orphanages,
  deaf/blind, prisoners, slaves
• distant origins of NGOs in philanthropic
  association in the service of secular causes?
• modern philanthropy great sums, national
  institutions, secular ethic
• etymology charity, once a sacred obligation or
  personal quality, became a noun for an institution

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conclusion

• R.S. Crane The doctrine of the humanitarian,
  sympathetic man as something new in the world
  a doctrine, or rather a complex of doctrines,
  which a hundred years before 1750 would have been
  frowned upon, had it ever been presented to them,
  by representatives of every school of ethical or
  religious thought.

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the pain of compassion

• Nietzsche and Elias stressed that conscience,
  sympathy and pity could only come to rule
  through exercise of new kinds of powerful
  self-constraint and self-suppression following
  cultural cues, people stopped being rude
  barbarians and made themselves civilized,
  mannered men
•  The world has never lost a certain odor of
  blood and torture (not even in good old Kant the
  categorical imperative smells of cruelty) We
  modern men are the heirs of the
  conscience-vivisection and self-torture of the
  millennia (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals)

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subjects and objects

• did the objects change in the Enlightenment? were
  torture, slavery, war and other violations new?
• or did the subject or self change? wasnt it the
  way people regarded violations that changed?
• if so, isnt the important question what was
  involved in that change?