Human Rights and the Age of Inequality -Samuel Moyn

 Human Rights and the Age of Inequality                              -Samuel Moyn

 

Some terms used in this essay:

Human Rights: Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more.

 

Croesus: According to Greek historian Herodotus, Croesus was the king of Lydia, who reigned from 585 BC until his defeat by the Persian king Cyrus in  546 BC. He was known for his wealth and charity.

 

Floor of Protection: The first level of protection in a national social protection system that includes access to essential services such as health, education, housing, water and sanitation, and others.

 

Utopia: An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.

 

Universal Declaration of Human Rights(1948): The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 that advocates the rights and freedoms of all human beings.

 

Status equality and Distributive equality: Status equality is a state of affairs in which all individuals within a specific society have equal rights, liberties, and status, possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services.

 

Distributive equality is a state of affairs in which individuals within a specific society have equal possession of goods, resources, services, and other facilities.

 

Welfarism: The principle of policies associated with a state that is committed to providing basic economic security for its citizens by protecting them from market risks associated with old age, unemployment, accidents, and sickness.

Welfarist Consensus: It is a general agreement adopted by lawful governments of the world after World War II through which social protection and services were offered to all citizens as a matter of social right.

 

Second Bill of Rights: The Second Bill of Rights or Bill of Economic Rights was proposed by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address(Address in American Congress) on Tuesday, January 11, 1944. This bill included: The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.

 

North Atlantic Consensus: The Treaty of Dunkirk, a military agreement, was signed by France and the United Kingdom on 4 March 1947, during the aftermath of World War II. It was joined by 28 other nations including 2 north-American countries-Canada and USA forming a 30 member alliance on 4 April 1949. This military alliance was named North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the agreement between the member countries for this partnership is called North Atlantic Consensus.

 

Egalitarianism: The principle that believes all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

 

Political Economy: Political economy is the study of how economic systems and political systems (e.g. law, institutions, government) are linked. It deals with the production, consumption, distribution, and management of means and resources.

 

A ceiling on inequality: Limitations and restrictions on inequality for moderation towards equality.

 

Analysis:

Samuel Moyn begins the essay with a myth of Croesus, the King of Lydia during 560 BCE, who was wonderfully rich and charitable. Moyn asks the readers to think of a modern Croesus who insists on a floor of protection, a provision of basic needs, so that people living under his kindness can escape serious poverty. He offers a kind of Utopia, an imaginary perfect place. It is the same kind of Utopia which was promised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that provides a list of basic rights that humans deserve for being human itself.

 

Moyn argues that we now live in Croesus’s world that ignores the fact that the lawful governments hardly respect basic civil rights although it is an obligation for them and this obligation will never end. Nevertheless, Croesus hates oppression, cruelty of war, exploitation in jobs, and poverty. So called “social rights" matter deeply to him. How can anyone criticize him?

 

But Moyn does. He says that both Croesus and Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the same because the concept of distributive equality is absent in both of them.  He appreciates the fact that UDHR announced status equality, which was itself a revolutionary act in such a world devastated by racism and genocide. He says that Croesus’ floor of protection is problematic and immoral because it comes together with the most massive inequality ever seen. And so are Human Rights in the current scenario, in this age of inequality, because we have been living in a situation of complete hierarchy like Croesus’ world.

 

Human rights in the age of national welfare.

The age after the end of World War II, and the cold war era between 1948 to two decades after is referred in this essay as the age of national welfare.

 

Moyn states that the history of human rights in relation to that of political economy has two stages:

i. The first one was the immediate time after World War II in 1940s

ii. The time between 1948 and two decades after it.

 

During that time human rights was a small part of universal welfarist consensus, an agreement committed by the nations to their people to provide basic social and economic security. The west agreed about this importance of socio-economic rights because of their own experiences of economic crisis (the great depression 1929-1939), and the demand of communism regarding the limitation on inequality which worked as a threat to their political system.

 

Franklin Roosevelt proposed the “Second Bill of Rights” that included socio-economic protection in the US Congress in 1944 which was a modest first step towards modern form of Human Rights. However, Roosevelt certainly missed three important facts that showed the reality of this call. First, America’s entry into NATO which proved that the US was never in favor of equality. Second, the bill promised “freedom from want”(Security and happiness) and third, it hoped this notion would be extended all around the world. But there were not any effective plans and approaches to do that.

Human rights in the 1940s was an ignored synonym for a consensus welfarism, which pushed the nations, specially the US, towards reconstruction but it did not promote socio-economic rights or a more ambitious welfarism on an international level. In this context, The Universal Declaration served as an important achievement.

 

Political economy was discussed at an international level in the 1940s because the management of the economic cycle of the individual states was in crisis due to post war scenario. So many countries, especially the west, somewhat reformed their economy in the name of welfarism, but it was never done for the sake of either a global floor of protection or keeping a limitation on inequality(global ceiling on inequality). It was done to make it as a tool to control the rest of the world. It was the reason, there was the lowest set of socio-economic guarantees in the Universal Declaration. The campaign against unequal social hierarchy and the demand for equality succeeded only partially; however the advantage of these movements was that the concept of human rights spread all over the world.

 

Even after the decolonization the new states of Global South (Latin America, Africa, and Asia) adopted the same welfarist policies which did not change the situation of human rights. Rather their inability to transplant these policies effectively increased the gap between rich and poor countries.

 

Is another human rights movement required?

The straightforward answer is - NO. Moyn doubts that a different form of human rights than the existing one can correct the lapses in it. He admires the moral significance and historical success of human rights in the struggles against political suppression and violence. However, he believes that the movements (critique of state repression, naming and shaming) are not fit for use in the socio-economic domain. In the story of Croesus, there was a statesman from Athens, Solon, who criticized Croesus so he was disregarded back. It was only Persian armies who overthrew him. In the same way, global socio-economic justice requires redistribution of means and resources under pressure from the rich to the poor.

 

The human rights movement has disapproved of state suppression and violence but it does not help to achieve distributive equality in any way. Therefore, a new political economy is required to be invented that functions over equal redistribution of means and resources. Moyn argues that the current form of human right does not require a substitute but it needs a supplement- an agent that is powerful and fearful enough to provoke redistribution.