HUMAN RIGHTS | Defending human dignity
19 November 2008
Inventing Human Rights: An Empathetic Understanding
Lynn Hunt
Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Beijing University, Utrecht and Amsterdam Universities, and the University of Ulster, Coleraine. Hunt was president of the American Historical Association in 2002 and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Her books include The New Cultural History (1989); The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (1996); Inventing Human Rights (2007); and Measuring Time, Making History (2008).
Before societies, nations, and peoples could recognize and defend the fundamental rights of others, individuals had to develop an internal empathy for the individuality and even the bodily integrity of others. Artistic developments in 18th-century France and elsewhere in Europe helped to spark an understanding of and political commitment to human rights as we know them today.
Human Rights Defined
Human rights require three interlocking qualities: Rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone), and universal (applicable everywhere). All humans everywhere in the world must possess them equally and only because of their status as human beings. Human rights become meaningful, however, only when they gain political content. They are not the rights of humans in a state of nature; they are the rights of humans in society. They are guaranteed by secular laws and constitutions (even if we sometimes call human rights “sacred”), and they require active participation from those who hold them. Rights are not granted; they are claimed.
The equality, universality, and naturalness of rights first gained direct political expression in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. While the English Bill of Rights of 1689 had referred to “ancient rights and liberties,” it did not declare them equal, universal, or natural. In contrast, the Declaration of Independence insisted that “all Men are created equal” and that all of them possess “unalienable rights.” Similarly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Not French men, not white men, not Catholics, but “men,” which then as now means not just males but all members of the human race. In other words, some time between 1689 and 1776, rights that had been viewed most often as belonging only to particular people — freeborn English men, for example — were transformed into human rights, universal natural rights, what the French called “the rights of man.”
The American and French declarations each claimed to identify rights inherent to the state of being a human being. As Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopts a more legalistic tone but makes essentially the same claim: “WHEREAS 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, …” In this formulation, “whereas” means “it being the fact that,” and the rights that follow accordingly are givens, or, in Jeffersonian terms, self-evident.
This claim, crucial if human rights are truly universal, gives rise to a paradox: If equality of rights is so self-evident, then why did this assertion have to made and why was it made only in specific times and places? How can human rights be universal if they are not universally recognized? Can they be “self-evident” when scholars have argued for more than 200 years about Jefferson’s precise meaning? Debate will continue forever because Jefferson never explained his reasoning — and if he had, there still would be the objection that an assertion requiring justification is not self-evident.
Human rights are difficult to pin down because their inherent claim of self-evidence relies ultimately on an emotional appeal — effective only if it strikes a chord within each person. We thus know that a human right is at issue when we feel horrified by its violation. In 1755, the influential French Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot deemed natural right a term “so familiar that there is almost no one who would not be convinced inside himself that the thing is obviously known to him. This interior feeling is common both to the philosopher and to the man who has not reflected at all.” Diderot had put his finger on the most important quality of human rights: a widely shared “interior feeling.” Human rights are not just a doctrine formulated in documents. They rest on a disposition toward other people and a set of convictions about what people are like.
A New View of the Individual
Human rights are grounded in new assumptions about individual autonomy. Before they could possess human rights, people first had to be perceived as separate individuals capable of exercising independent moral judgment. Becoming members of a political community grounded in those independent moral judgments required of individuals the capacity to empathize with others. Everyone would have rights only if everyone could be seen as in some fundamental way alike. Equality was not just an abstract concept or a political slogan. It had to be internalized in some fashion.
While today we take for granted these ideas of autonomy, equality, and human rights, they only began to gain influence in the 18th century. Until then, all “people” were not imagined morally autonomous, a state that required both the ability to reason and the independence to decide for oneself. Children and the insane were understood to lack the former, although they might some day gain or regain the power of reason. Like children, slaves, servants, the propertyless, and women all lacked the required independence. Children, servants, the propertyless, and perhaps even slaves might one day become autonomous: by growing up, by leaving service, by acquiring property, or by purchasing their freedom. Women alone seemed not to have any of these options because they were defined as inherently dependent on either their fathers or their husbands. If the proponents of universal, equal, and natural human rights automatically excluded some categories of people, it was primarily because they viewed them as less than fully capable of moral autonomy.
Yet the newfound power of empathy could work against even the longest held prejudices. In 1791, the French revolutionary government granted equal rights to Jews; in 1792, men without property were enfranchised; and in 1794, the French government officially abolished slavery. Empathy and acceptance of individual autonomy thus were skills that could be learned, and long-accepted limitations on rights could be — and were — challenged.
Autonomy and empathy are cultural practices, not just ideas, and they are therefore quite literally embodied, that is, they have physical as well as emotional dimensions. Individual autonomy hinges on an increasing sense of the separation and sacredness of human bodies: Your body is yours and my body is mine, and we both should respect the boundaries between each other’s bodies. Empathy depends on the recognition that others feel and think as we do, that our inner feelings are alike in some fundamental fashion. To be autonomous, a person must be recognized as legitimately separate and protected in his or her separation, but to have human rights, a person’s selfhood must be appreciated in some more emotional fashion. Human rights depend on both self-possession and on the recognition that all others are equally self-possessed. It is the incomplete development of the latter that gives rise to inequality and opens the door to abuse of human rights.
Autonomy and empathy did not materialize out of thin air in the 18th century; they had deep roots. Over several centuries, Europeans partially detached themselves from the webs of traditional communities and grew in legal and psychological independence. One result was a greater respect for bodily integrity, clearer lines of demarcation between individual bodies, and a growing sense of bodily decorum. Over time, people began to sleep alone or only with a spouse. They used utensils to eat and began to consider repulsive previously acceptable behavior such as throwing food on the floor or wiping bodily excretions on clothing. The absolute authority of fathers over their children was questioned.
A New Psychology
The long-term evolution of “selfhood” quickened in the second half of the 18th century, a development reflected in aspects of life from the arts to the law. Audiences started watching theatrical performances or listening to music in silence. Portraiture and genre painting challenged the dominance of the great mythological and historical canvases of academic painting. Where European painting had most often depicted the bodies of rulers and religious figures, portraits of ordinary people in London and Paris increasingly came to the fore. By the second half of the 18th century, these portraits often depicted their subjects less as types or illustrative of allegories of virtues or wealth, and instead stressed their subjects’ psychological and physiognomical individuality. The very proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual — that is, single, separate, distinctive, and original — and therefore should be depicted as such.
Eighteenth-century French literature similarly opened up its readers to a new form of empathy. The rise of the epistolary novel (comprised of letters mailed between characters) encouraged a highly charged identification with the characters and, in so doing, enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines. Newspapers similarly proliferated, making the stories of ordinary lives accessible to a wide audience.
These developments helped to instill a new psychology and, in the process, laid the foundations for a new social and political order, one in which the notions of bodily integrity and empathetic selfhood are intimately related to the development and acceptance of human rights. In both areas, changes in previously accepted views seem to happen all at once in the mid-18th century.
Consider, for example, torture. Between 1700 and 1750, most uses of the word “torture” in French referred to the difficulties a writer had in finding a felicitous expression. Torture as it was then understood — the legally authorized infliction of severe physical pain as a means of extracting confessions of guilt or names of accomplices — became a major issue after the political philosopher Montesquieu attacked the practice in his Spirit of Laws (1748). In one of his most influential passages, Montesquieu insists that “so many clever people and so many men of genius have written against this practice [judicial torture] that I dare not speak after them.” Then he goes on rather enigmatically to add, “I was going to say that it might be suitable for despotic government, where everything inspiring fear enters more into the springs of government; I was going to say that slaves among the Greeks and Romans. ... But I hear the voice of nature crying out against me.” Here, too, self-evidence — “the voice of nature crying out” — grounds the argument. After Montesquieu, Voltaire and many others, especially the Italian Cesare Beccaria, would join the campaign. By the 1780s, the abolition of torture and barbarous forms of corporal punishment had become essential articles in the new human rights doctrine.
While the modern trend has been toward further expansion of human rights — a trend advanced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other instruments of international law — our sense of who has rights and what those rights are ultimately is grounded in our informed empathy for others. The human rights revolution is by definition ongoing. By understanding how that revolution began, we can better understand and live up to its great promise.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
