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This chapter argues that international human rights law has come to orient itself towards teleocracy under the influence of what, borrowing from the French constitutional theorist Maurice Hauriou, it calls a “directing idea”. This directing idea is that human rights are the legal mechanism for achieving the overriding objective of improving universal well-being, and that this is to be brought about by assigning obligations to the powerful in order to make them act benevolently towards the powerless. The chapter locates this in a broader trend among international lawyers, which understands international law itself as, ultimately, a project of improving universal human welfare. The chapter then demonstrates that this directing idea is rooted in compassion, the hatred of looking on while others suffer, which imbues the human rights movement with a species of what Kundera described as “kitsch”. This causes human rights advocates to seek to give effect to their shared sense of compassion through law, which has the capacity to give effect to this feeling across time.
The introduction describes a paradox which is at the heart of the human rights movement, which is Trilling’s observation that attempts to improve conditions for others will frequently result in their coercion. It lays out the central argument of the book, which is that despite an apparent rhetorical commitment to individual empowerment and a preoccupation with rights’ supposed individualism among critics and advocates alike, rights in their modern form are better understood as a set of declaratory justifications for requiring States and other power actors to improve moral and material conditions for populations and sub-groups within them. This means that rights are hardly to be characterised as being associated with neoliberalism; they are better understood as having a structural bias towards a ‘power of care’ which attempts to specify the conditions of a good life and to deploy political and economic power in order to achieve them. The result is a managerial system which pays little if any attention to the individual and which frequently acts in opposition to individual agency.
This chapter provides a critique of the “governmentalisation of global human rights governance”. It argues that the phenomenon causes international law to have unpredictable effects for individuals; that it removes the conditions of international law from the realm of politics properly understood; and that it brings about a mode of rule which sees concern with the individual as an end in him- or herself replaced with an understanding that the individual is simply part of an abstract whole, which is the true field of action. The result is that human rights are set in opposition to the way in which freedom was conceptualised by both Oakeshott and Foucault - the necessary conditions within which self-enactment can take place, and hence the necessary conditions of a moral or ethical life. On the one hand this produces a kind of benevolent coercion - a pastoral power which is pervasive and potent for all that it is kind. But on the other it produces a distaste for the human rights movement in the very rights-holders themselves, setting them at odds with its aims and tactics, and resulting in a counter-conduct of basic refusal.
This chapter describes the modern field of international human rights practice. It portrays it, borrowing from Koskenniemi, as managerial - a solipsistic and imperialistic regime which seeks to expand into every corner of human life with the aim of realising an overarching purpose. The chapter explains the most significant legal developments making this possible, from teleological interpretation of treaty texts, to the expansion of positive obligations through the ‘respect, protect, fulfil’ framework, to the imposition of duties on non-State actors. It shows that the result is an ever-increasing range of obligations being imposed upon an ever-widening scope of actors, and a preoccupation with how to achieve compliance and hence implement the overarching purpose of the regime.
This chapter describes a series of regulatory “tactics” for the conducting of conduct with respect to improving human rights performance, and maps the contours of what it calls the “governmentalisation of global human rights governance”. It draws on the work of Miller and Rose to describe this as a phenomenon of “governing human rights at a distance”. It demonstrates that this consists of three broad and overlapping categories of tactics: auditing and other methods borrowed from financial management and accounting; the pluralisation and atomisation of governing functions; and the specification of new subjectivities. Taken together, these result in the creation of a regulatory sphere in which actors are continually enjoined to monitor themselves and others in light of human rights obligations or “responsibilities”; in which the governing of human rights is dispersed between public authorities, NGOs and other civil society actors, businesses and international organisations; and in which this entire range of actors, and even human individuals themselves, are re-conceived as being “human rights governors” in their own right.
This chapter charts in detail the development of Shklar’s arguments from the value pluralism of her early work to the value monism of her mature work. And in order to better appreciate what is at stake in this transformation I examine her changing approach to the question of paternalism, and consider this alongside current debates about the different forms of paternalism and their justification. In her early work, as a value pluralist, Shklar claims that we can be left with unresolved conflicts between the value of justice, on the one hand, and educative, perfectionist, and paternalistic commitments, on the other. In her mature work, in contrast, Shklar maintains that we may only ever restrict freedom so as to avoid cruelty and, as a result, she insists that, as a general rule, paternalistic infringements of individual liberty are always unjustified. My reading of Shklar’s work is a novel one, in part because her commentators have not recognised that over time she moves from a value pluralist to a value monist position. It is novel for the further reason that it renders explicit the following assumption: paternalistic treatment of those who lack competence is justified, and it does not violate the liberty of those treated paternalistically.
This chapter addresses the ways in which freedom is conceptualised by value pluralists and value monists. In putting cruelty first among the vices, Shklar claims to have identified the general rule for resolving moral conflicts. She also conceptualises freedom as liberty of action in accordance with this rule for the resolution of moral conflicts. Hence, for the mature Shklar, we are not free unless we are freed from oppressive practices, but also we ourselves simply are not free to be cruel to others. Montesquieu’s distinction between freedom and mere independence is central to Shklar’s mature thinking, for it explains why, for her, we are not free to do as we please. However, what we also see is that Shklar, in her early value pluralist work, fails to offer a corresponding value pluralist conception of freedom. By turning to Berlin, in particular, I believe we can make good this deficit. Also, this chapter examines the implications of adopting either a pluralist or a monist conception of freedom for our understanding of extremist violence. I argue that value pluralism can show why, simply in terms of what is prima facie wrong, policy responses to extremism that do not remove options are preferable to those that do: namely, they do not violate the freedom of extremists.
What does the work of Judith Shklar reveal to us about the proper role and limits of political theory? In particular, what are the implications of her arguments both for the way in which we should think of freedom and for the approach we should take to the resolution of moral conflicts? There is growing interest in Shklar’s arguments, in particular the so-called liberalism of fear, characteristic of her mature work. She has become an important influence for those taking a sceptical approach to political thought and also for those concerned first and foremost with the avoidance of great evils. However, this book shows that the most important factor shaping her mature work is not her scepticism but, rather, a value monist approach to both moral conflict and freedom, and that this represents a radical departure from the value pluralism (and scepticism) of her early work. This book also advances a clear line of argument in defence of value pluralism in political theory, one that builds on but moves beyond Shklar’s own early work.
Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear is a sceptical approach to political thought that also ranks the vices in a particular way, giving priority to the avoidance of cruelty. For that reason, her work is an important influence for non-moralists (political realists and non-ideal theorists) who say that liberalism is, primarily, about protecting the vulnerable from the power of those who are dominant. These theorists also want to take a novel approach to questions of justification in political thought itself. They are self-avowed in their scepticism: they call for a non-ideal, or non-utopian, form of political thought.
At the same time, we should pause to consider a very important question. Can political non-moralists also be liberals, and indeed can they be liberals of a particular stripe? Can they give priority to one value and principle and institutional arrangement over others? As we shall see, in her mature work Shklar says both that the fear of cruelty is the summum malum and that hers is a sceptical argument, one that does not appeal to anything other than actuality. However, we must ask, is there more going on here in putting forward that argument, something that indicates a perhaps surprising degree of convergence with the political moralism of, say, Rawls – a convergence that has so far remained unnoticed?