In her last post, Dr. Orton looked at the distinction between personhood and the self, and challenged the way these ideas are used in Philosophy and Anthropology to draw a sharp distinction between Western and non-Western societies. Here, she takes a closer look at ideas about personhood and rights in the Western canon.
A Level students will find this a useful summary of some of the main topics you will need for your exams. For university-level scholars or independent researchers, we’ve included clickable links to useful literature and canonical scholarship you need to be acquainted with to get started.
Jeremy Bentham
In my last post, I argued that scholars need to acknowledge the diversity of ideas about selfhood and personhood within both Western and non-Western societies. I also promised to take a closer look at Western ideas of personhood and what this means for our ideas about rights.
I mentioned that, in moral philosophy, the concept of personhood is used to determine moral considerability, including questions such as which individuals have human rights and responsibilities. Personhood is not synonymous with being human: some people think that some or all non-human animals deserve personhood status and some people think that not all humans deserve this status.
This idea has been incredibly influential in the West and across the whole world. The idea of who has personhood is used to determine who can or should hold rights and duties according to the law. Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”
However, there is no consensus about what is needed for personhood status – nor about the seemingly ubiquitous concept of rights.
What Makes a Person?
Some Western philosophers have suggested that the criteria of personhood is rationality or self-awareness. Immanuel Kant argued for both views at various points: “rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves” and “The fact that the human being can have the representation “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth. By this he is a person.”
Problems with this include the fact that not all humans are equally rational, which might imply that Kant’s view means some humans will be excluded from moral considerability: those with an intellectual disability, dementia or those on life support, for example.
Another point is that many animals have demonstrated self-awareness to greater degrees than some humans. For instance, an elephant can recognise itself in a mirror, whereas a new-born human cannot. Certainly, rationality and self-awareness do not make humans unique among animals; in addition, some animals exhibit these traits to a greater degree than some humans.
Peter Singer criticises those who limit personhood to humans by introducing the concept of speciesism: the view “that human beings have rights just because they are members of the species homo sapiens… a form of favouritism for our own that is as unjustifiable as racism.”
For Jeremy Bentham, sentience is the basis criteria for moral considerability, which would include animals in this category: “The question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? But can they suffer?”
Natural Rights
I mentioned that the idea of personhood is often linked to the idea of human rights. This is historically a Western doctrine, developing out of the natural rights tradition of European philosophy. But even here, there is no consensus among Western philosophers.
Natural rights historically grew out of natural law theory, which itself has been around for millenia. R. W. Dyson traces the idea of natural law to its ancient Greek origins, but the version we are concerned with for the purposes of natural and human rights found prominence in England in the seventeenth century.
This branch of natural rights theory is connected with the idea of a social contract. Natural rights are those rights which we are supposed to have as human beings before government ever comes into being. People agree that their condition in this state of nature is unsatisfactory, so they transfer some of their rights to a central government in a social contract.
One example of this comes from Thomas Hobbes whose Leviathan was written in 1651 in the midst of the English Civil War. Hobbes was afraid of the disorder and violence of the civil war, and this prompted him to develop a political philosophy.
Hobbes developed a theory of human nature on the premiss that there exist appetite and aversion (human preference), which leads to preference for human life. He used this to argue that the Right of Nature is the right of self-preservation.
In the state of nature, people live in mutual fear. There is no way of ensuring that people will keep their covenants. Hobbes said that life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Hobbes’ solution is that people should transfer their Right of Nature to a sovereign authority. Any government (including democracy, which he finds weak) is better than none, but Hobbes recommends absolute government for maximum security.
Many people dislike the fact that Hobbes sacrifices individual freedom for the sake of security, and other natural rights theorists have proposed more democratic versions of natural rights theory.
John Locke
John Locke’s Two Treatise of Government argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract. It was written in 1688, possibly to justify the Glorious Revolution, in which the relative balance of power between Parliament and the monarchy was redistributed.
Locke argued, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…”
Unlike Hobbes, Locke says that legitimate government must be limited. Governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people; therefore, they should not have absolute power. Locke suggested the idea of separation of powers, specifically the legislature (law-making body) and the executive (which executes law and directs policy).
The ideas of Locke and other writers, such as the French Enlightenment writer Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, were important in the founding of some of the world’s most influential democracies. The American Constitution employs the idea of separation of powers, which was developed by Montesquieu as well as Locke.
In 1776, the US Declaration of Independence appealed to the idea of natural unalienable rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration also said that the very reason for government is to secure rights: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Moreover, the Declaration actually claims that governments are only legitimate when they protect these rights. When they do not, people have the right to abolish them: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...”
The French Revolution of 1789 endorsed Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and many British philosophers built on these ideas to extend political rights. Thomas Paine argued that every civil right grows out of a natural right and Mary Wollstonecraft defended the idea of natural rights and pointed out that these should be extended to women.
Rights Acquired by History
Influential as these ideas have been, they have not been uniformly endorsed by many influential schools of philosophy. Edmund Burke, who is often seen as the father of British Conservatism, argued that rights are acquired historically, not by a process of abstract reasoning about natural law.
Burke had supported the American Revolution on the grounds that the Americans were defending their traditional rights as British subjects, but opposed the French Revolution. This shocked Burke’s Liberal friends, who had expected him to support both revolutions.
Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, explaining that the French were destroying a political system that had taken centuries to evolve. This broke radically with the past, argued Burke, and the French Revolution endangered all of Europe for the sake of abstract ideas.
Edmund Burke
Burke believed that political change should be undertaken with great caution. Society should be handled like a living organism, and that traditions that have stood the test of time should be respected, and not disposed of without understanding why they had evolved in the first place.
His view of rights and the social contract was very different to the natural rights theorists: “Society is indeed a contract,” wrote Burke. “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Burke would not necessarily want to throw out all the civil rights that have been won in democratic societies since he wrote his great work. In fact, he would point out that the historical process by which these rights have been won is exactly what makes them so valuable.
Note also that Burke’s idea of an organic society is far from the “individualist” or “atomistic” view of personhood that some scholars claim to underline Western thought (click the link to read my critique of generalisations about views of personhood and the self). In Burke’s view, it is precisely our ties to other people that gives us our identity – a view that has many commonalities with the sociocentric conception of personhood usually attributed by anthropologists to non-Western societies. It is also a view that many Western conservatives share.
Nonsense upon Stilts
It is not only conservative thinkers who reject the atomistic, rights-based concept of personhood. Jeremy Bentham also famously rejected the idea of natural rights as “More confusion - more nonsense, - and the nonsense, as usual, dangerous nonsense. The words can scarcely be said to have a meaning… Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, - nonsense upon stilts.” Bentham himself preferred to build a moral and political philosophy on utilitarian grounds, meaning that we should try to build societies that maximise utility: the greatest good of the greatest number.
Another utilitarian thinker is John Stuart Mill, which may come as a surprise to those who have only encountered him as a canonical liberal philosopher. Mill famously argued for individual liberties using the harm principle: individuals should be free to do anything except harm other individuals.
What is often forgotten is that Mill was influenced by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his famous essay On Liberty applies utilitarianism to society and the state: “It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”
For instance, On Liberty defends free speech not on the grounds of natural rights, but because it is necessary for intellectual and social progress: after all, silenced opinion may contain some element of the truth. Far from basing his argument for democracy on the natural right to autonomy, Mill argued that democracy was justified because it to foster self-development and individuality.
This benefits society as a whole because it leads to pluralism, the co-existence of competing ideas. Pluralism allows us to scrutinise ideas and pick the best ones. Put this way, Mill’s justification of individual liberties comes very close to having a socio-centric foundation!
Human Rights
Today, the doctrine of human rights is more familiar to us than the phrase “natural rights.” Following the atrocities of World War II, international discussions took place regarding the minimum standards of dignity to be afforded to all human beings, later crystalised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As the name suggests, human rights are often seen to be universal: the assumption is that human rights transcend ideological and cultural differences. There is a growing body of human rights international law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention of Human Rights.
However, the doctrine is not without its critics, not least those who argue that ‘universal human rights’ are used by Western powers to justify humanitarian intervention for their own gain.
Immanuel Kant
Others argue that the doctrine of human rights is culturally biased towards Western liberalism. In International Relations, Postcolonial theorists and others argue that human rights are based upon liberal assumptions about the importance of individualism, which are not applicable to non-western cultures and countries.
The Bangkok Declaration holds that “Asian values” emphasise economic and cultural rights over civil and political rights; the Cairo Declaration claimed that moral principles, derive from divine, rather than human, authority, so the UN Declaration is invalid where it conflicts with the values and principles outlined in Shari’a law.
In both Western and non-Western countries, it has been pointed out that the human rights doctrine undermines sovereignty, the independence and autonomy of nation-states.
There is a long tradition of natural and human rights philosophy in Western intellectual history, but as we have seen, this is not universally endorsed within the West or outside it. Nor are all Western theories underpinned by individualist ideas of the person. There are many noble and philosophically robust arguments that justify these views, but they are not a given.
Of course, I haven’t even touched on many other major Western political philosophies that refute the idea of individual, natural or human rights; I’ve written today about only a small selection of the cannon. My purpose was to show that “Western individualism” is not a comprehensive description of Western thought, nor are “Western ideas of personhood” monolithic.
The most serious omission is that I have not touched on vernacular debates about rights and personhood: what people - not just canonical philosophers - actually think, how they speak and how they live with regard to these ideas. This omission is common in academic discussion; I’d like to see it rectified as a matter of urgency.
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