Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues Michael Ignatieff *

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1 Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues Michael Ignatieff * It is touching, meaningful, and important to me being here. I look across the room and see friends, I see students I have taught, I see professors from whom I have learned. It means a great deal to me to be welcomed back as a Fellow at the Munk School, and it means that I am a bad penny I m going to keep coming back. I am trying out something new today, and some of its conclusions will bother you, but they also bother me. My subject is human rights, global ethics and the ordinary virtues. I guess the headline is, Have human rights international human rights since the Second World War become consolidated as global ethics? And, specifically, have they begun to inform or structure the ordinary virtues? That is, the virtues that we all use every day to live a moral life. This is not the standard question about human rights. The standard question about human rights is about how human rights have transformed the conduct of states. When we measure the product and progress of human rights, we ask about how many states have ratified human rights instruments, and we ask how widely these instruments are observed by states. I am asking a different question, which is a question about how it has worked its way into our moral instincts and reflexes. And that, as you will soon see, is a pertinent, but extremely difficult question to answer. And so I am taking a step into the unknown, but I am guided by a great woman. Eleanor Roosevelt who, as you know, presided over the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 said something which has become a very famous sentence about human rights. She apparently gave this remark extemporaneously in 1958, and it goes like this: Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places close to home; so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighborhood he lives in, the school or colleges he attends, the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. * Michael Ignatieff is a writer, teacher and former politician. On 1 August, 2016 he became President and Rector of the Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and this text is drawn from his inaugural lecture there on September 23, Journal of International Law and International Relations Vol 13 No. 1, pages 1-9. ISSN:

2 2 Journal of International Law and International Relations The test of whether human rights have become a global ethic is not, she s saying, state practice. The test is us. The test is what it has done to our moral apparatus, instincts, and moral reflexes. And her presumption is and it s an important one that unless human rights anchors itself in the ordinary virtues, they are not going to have purchase on state practice. That is, unless law is anchored in opinion, and opinion, particularly democratic opinion, is pushing states to act, then human rights will be one of those forms of official hypocrisy that do not actually structure the conduct of states. That leads to the questions that drove my research for three years: was Eleanor, or her vision, right? Have human rights become anchored in these places close to the human heart, or not? Have they become a global ethic in that sense of influencing ordinary human conduct? And then I began to see that I had a choice here. Have human rights become simply the discourse of public policy elites that is, government officials, presidents, NGOs, Amnesty human rights, the students I taught at the Kennedy School, the students I taught at the Munk School? Or, have they become more widely implanted? And how do we even ask that question appropriately? How do you go about finding answers? What influences have human rights had in shaping ordinary virtues? By ordinary virtues, I mean obvious things: trust, tolerance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and resilience. These are not the only ordinary virtues we could talk about, but they were the ones that I ended up talking about in this piece of field research. And then my final question has a policy implication. If human rights have not penetrated the ordinary virtues, what are the public policy implications? The public policy implications might be large if human rights are simply an empty public discourse without traction. As an ex-politician I am concerned with the issue of traction: what arguments and languages have emotional resonance with political audiences. So those are my questions, and I had the great good fortune to have three years of my life paid for by a wonderful organization called the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York, which coincidentally, was celebrating its hundredth anniversary. It was founded by Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world. He set up a thing called The Church Peace Union to foster world peace by dialogue between the world s religions. Needless to say, that did not turn out too well. He founded The Church Peace Union in February 1914 and by August 1914 all his dreams of world peace through dialogue between religions were swept away by the bloodiest conflict up to that point. The Carnegie Council wanted to celebrate this rather somber centennial, and I suggested they should look at whether human rights have become a global ethic, and whether they have begun to impact the ordinary virtues. The Council has global ethicists around the world 50 of them so we had local informants who could convene groups of people experts and academics in a range of fields, jurists, lawyers to talk to us. Our method was

3 Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues 3 to go to a particular place and hold global ethical dialogues over many days with local experts, and then go on site visits, which is something that is a little non-standard academic. The site visits took us to favelas, illegal settlements, gang leaders in South Central Los Angeles; we talked to a lot of people, and got out of the academic bubble. In some sense, the knowledge production was explosive and difficult to understand, and the result is a book manuscript which I have just finished. We began in Rio, in June Those of you who know the recent history of Brazil know that was the period Rio exploded with a million people on the streets. This is the comedy of academic scholarship: you go there to have a sober-sighted, global site-visit on corruption and public trust, and in the middle of your discussions, a million people take to the streets to protest corruption. We decided it would be better to be outside in the street with those demonstrators rather than sitting inside in academic discussions. For a week we spent time with young people, the new middle class of Brazil, flooding through the streets, talking to them about what they understand by corruption, and the extent to which rights talk figures in their understanding of corruption as a problem. We next went to South Central Los Angeles, where we were trying to think about multicultural tolerance in global cities experiencing mass immigration. What is the moral character that guides and structures toleration among ethnic groups? South Central Los Angeles was a black-white site of conflict in By 2015, Los Angeles has become one of the most thoroughly Hispanic cities in the United States. This is an urban community that has gone from one racial dispensation to another in 50 years, often in situations of explosive violence. It was a place to think hard about how tolerance is maintained and fractured in an urban setting. We did the same thing in Jackson Heights, Queens. We chose Jackson Heights, Queens, because it is the most diverse census track in the United States. 150 ethnic groups collaborating, working together, competing, fighting for space in Queens, New York. And again, the issue was, what is the role of rights talk in creating the fabric of tolerance that makes multi-ethnic cities work? A question you could equally ask, needless to say, in the city we re currently in right now. We then went to place where I ve spent a good deal of my professional career, in the Former-Yugoslavia, talking to victims and perpetrators about reconciliation. If reconciliation and forgiveness are ordinary virtues, what is the function and role of rights-talk in structuring the dialogue of forgiveness? We then went to South Africa, and chanced upon an informal settlement by the side of the road. An informal settlement is a place that has no heating, no light, no water, and no policing with a thousand or more people living there. Our questions in relation to the residents of this settlement focuses on how rights talk, or rights entitlement, frame their demands, their ways of expressing and understanding their exclusion from South African society.

4 4 Journal of International Law and International Relations The team also went to Mandalay, where I met a racist Buddhist extremist who really would not mind if every Muslim in Burma was exterminated. We talked not only to nice herbivorian, grass-eating liberals, but also to people who hate everything that liberal tolerance stands for. And he certainly hated everything that liberal tolerance stands for. We finally went to Fukushima in Japan. We were in Namie Town, which had been evacuated for four years after the Fukushima disaster, because we wanted to look at the role of rights talk and the understanding of rights equality in structuring the virtue of resilience. How does rights talk reconfigure people s life when they have gone through sudden, devastating trauma? How do you rebuild a life and how do you think of life when you have that radical challenge to resilience? These were all the places we went, and a summary of our method. But what were our conclusions? I think the first thing is to go back to Eleanor Roosevelt. Part of our conclusion was that the global rights revolution has changed moral assumptions everywhere. It is not human rights narrowly conceived that has done this, not the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the Conventions and their ratification by states. What has changed the moral assumptions of ordinary people are not the human rights documents themselves but the global rights revolution of which they are a part. The self-determination revolution is the first and most important element of this revolution. It is hard for us to grasp the fundamental importance of the post-colonial revolutions after Not just in changing the geography of states, not just in moving us from a world of 45 nation states to 195, but changing the moral dispensation in which we think of human life. In 1945, white people like me did believe that we had a right to rule non-white people, based on disreputable justifications because we were better-educated, more thoughtful, or British that were foundational to the understanding between races then. And of all the things that are true about the 21 st Century, we are in a post-imperial world. Many of you will say, no, no, you re going too fast, what about the Americans, what about the Russians, what about the Chinese? But no people rule others by right. No languages justify the imperial exercise of power, one race over another. Human rights were part of that revolution, and they were borne along by the self-determination revolution, but of all the things that have changed the moral climate of our times, that still is the most important. Accompanying the self-determination revolution has been the democratic revolution. The sense is that democratic popular sovereignty is the default setting for political legitimacy. This is true of only 65 to 70 per cent of the world, there has been a resurgence of authoritarian justifications for popular rule. But even so, it seems to me the idea that the people are the sovereign has changed the moral climate in which human beings relate to each other in profound ways. And the third element of the struggle is, in a sense, more domestic, but the domestic has gone global. I am a child of the Civil Rights

5 Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues 5 Revolution. When I was an undergraduate at this university, in 1965, the ground underneath my feet was swept away in Selma, Alabama. There is just no other way to describe how foundational that was to my understanding of race, and to the understanding of anybody who went through that experience in the 1960s. Then, feminism. Then, the fight for gay equality. All of these things have been foundational to how we interact with each other as human beings. And rights talk has been central to all of that. And what it has created, it seems to me, is a global norm of equality of voice. Notice, it is not equality of opportunity. Notice, it is not equality of results. It is just the claim that every single human being has a right to speak and be heard, and that there are no legitimate grounds to exclude anyone from the right to speak or be heard, by gender, race class, et cetera. That norm is foundational to the modern world. It is the global ethic of the 21 st century. And the fact that it is violated constantly, the fact that it is not observed constantly, does not change that enormous importance of the norm as a source of continuing challenge to all those seeking to shut voice down. So far, this is the world that Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to create. But here is where the story gets more complicated. And here is where I make a turn that some of you might not agree with, and some of you may find downright troubling. The triumph of the norm of equality of voice has been contemporaneous with a re-questioning of human rights universalism. This was one of the discoveries of this journey that was most unexpected to me, because you would have thought that equality would go with a re-affirmation of human universalism. The universalism I am talking about is fundamental to human rights. That is, there is no other, there is only us our human identity trumps all our differences. Otherness, to the degree that otherness exists, is a historical artifact created by borders, history, and power, but otherness the fact that I am male and white and you are black and female is morally irrelevant to how we should connect to each other. This has been the engine room of human rights universalism since Duties of common humanity trump competing moral claims of political community. And here, I am hoping to get to my specific example, asylum and protection claims to strangers trump the claims of citizens. What was really interesting to me surprising, sometimes shocking about all these dialogues across the world, was that I began to see that there was a competing language out there, which I m calling the ordinary virtue perspective. These are the virtues of ordinary life and ordinary people. And by ordinary people I don t mean someone different from myself. I do not mean someone different from you. I mean us. Side by side, with a normative commitment to equality of voice, sits a very different moral system that is not easily squared with human rights principles, because these virtues privilege the local over the universal; the citizen over the stranger; and the community over the cosmopolitan.

6 6 Journal of International Law and International Relations When I sat with people in Zama Zama, that illegal settlement on the edge of the road near Pretoria, when I was in one of Rio s favelas, and asked people how they reason morally, and whether they thought of their home as a jungle, they all said, No, we are trying to create a moral community here. We are trying, even if it is only a couple of houses together, we are trying to hold this world together as a moral community. I must trust my neighbor; I must trust my friend or my life becomes insupportable to me. So, moral life, the creation of moral order, was central to every community we met. But what was the language they used to create that moral community? It was this language of ordinary virtue. It was contextual, it was specific, it was local, it was non-universal. Nobody framed their obligations to others in terms of abstract universal obligations to human beings. The loyalty of people in Zama Zama was to people in Zama Zama. That was the frontier and limit of the world, just as in Santa Marta Favela on the hillside above Brazil, the framework within moral judgement is made in Santa Marta. It is the whole universe for these folks. And this is a commitment to moral community that does not generalize or universalize, one that is highly particularized. Don t talk about trust in general, talk about trust for this individual in this circumstance or under these conditions. That is as much moral community as we can create, that is the only thing that we can imagine. But what this leads to is an easy sense among human rights defenders, and I am one, that in some sense human rights derives from natural moral intuitions, that human rights flow from the ordinary virtues. The interesting thing is they do not. Human rights are a thought experiment designed to constrain local partiality to one s own community and universalize moral solidarity towards strangers. Human rights do not flow from ordinary virtues, in some sense, ordinary virtues and human rights are in conflict. One is a universal language, the other is particular language. One is a global language, the other is a local language. One does not derive from the other. If you look at things like difference, when you talk to people about race or gender or class, what was primary was difference, not universality. Nobody wanted to talk about what Marx called our species-being. The human beings they wanted to talk about were gendered. They had skin colors. They had ages, they had races, they had classes, and you take them one by one. To the degree that you can build tolerance, to the degree that you can build trust, to the degree that you can build reconciliation, to the degree that you can build forgiveness, you do so not on the basis of moral universals, but on contextual, conditional, local judgements that are highly specific. I heard the phrase, what you have to understand is, a thousand times. What you have to understand, they kept saying to me, was our world. Not a world of abstract universals, but Our World. Let me try and explain to you how this world coheres, how we make judgements here. In this ordinary virtues perspective, otherness is not a constructed artifact. It is primary. It is primal.

7 Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues 7 Human commonality is secondary-derivative; you very rarely get there. And if difference is primary, it means commonality is conditional; it is negotiated encounter by encounter. Residents in Zama Zama took it for granted that I had to listen to them in the settlement. That this white person who came from Mars or someplace called Canada, had to listen to them. That what they had to say mattered. But what we did not have in common was a common language of global ethics or common universal commitments to each other. And so, and here we get to steer this a little further. If you take the issue we talked about over and over again, about tolerance. Tolerance, in human rights talk, is a derivative of the universal identity that we all share. In the ordinary virtue perspective, tolerance is seen very differently. It is not an obligation to respect rights, it is a gift transaction. Those of you who know Richard Titmuss wonderful book, The Gift Relationship, or Marcel Mauss wonderful book on The Gift will know that rights talk and gift talk are two very different languages. Gift talk is transactional, conditional, and selective. It is non-universal. You do not give gifts to everyone, you give gifts to a select few. In rights talk, I have an obligation to all of you irrespective of your characteristics. In gift talk, it is absolutely selective and conditional. Tolerance is granted only if the stranger recognizes the citizen as the gift giver. It is withheld if the stranger insists that the toleration is a right, and that the stranger sets the terms. And so the civic toleration that results in Queens, New York or South Central Los Angeles is a transactional, conditional, contextual negotiation based on the recognition and mutual recognition of otherness. When I asked my interlocutors why they were tolerant to people, their response was not a reference to a universal obligation to be tolerant, but to take people one at a time. One of the recurrent features was the extreme moral individualism of this version of toleration. I have no obligation to tolerate people in general, but that particular person there, I know her! I have a good relationship; I know where she comes from. I know her family. Toleration is across a difference which we both acknowledge; a difference of gender, a difference of history, a difference of all kinds. And we negotiate it one by one. And it does not generalize, it does not extrapolate beyond. We thus move to my original question about the policy implications of this moral individualism, of the primacy of ordinary virtues. Some of the policy implications of this are not pretty. They are difficult. Support for refugees in Europe has collapsed after a moment of extraordinary generosity and hospitality partly, but not absolutely, because of the failure of the language of rights. When you see a coalition in favor of generosity and hospitality towards refugees, as you saw in Canada, the language that works is the language of the gift. The language of hospitality. The language of generosity. But notice the characteristics of this language. The language presumes a distance between a citizen, who has the gift, and a stranger, who receives the gift. It is not two abstract individuals meeting in outer space. The citizen has the power to

8 8 Journal of International Law and International Relations determine who gets the gift. And he or she has the power to withhold the gift. And he or she sets the term of that exchange. Whereas rights talk seeks to equalize this relationship in a way that is profoundly counter-intuitive to ordinary, democratic populations. This is not as abstract as it may seem. In Germany, the problem is the German constitution sets no upper limit to the number of people who can make a legitimate rights claim on a democratic state. And to citizens, that seems crazy because it seems axiomatic in an ordinary virtues perspective that citizens should decide who comes in. That citizens should decide who gets the gift. That citizens should decide the terms in which the gift of hospitality is extended. One of the reasons why the Canadian refugee situation has been so successful politically has been that it is essentially cast in the language of the gift and of hospitality (i.e. A Canadian family privately sponsors a refugee ). Rights talks does not come into it. What comes into it is, Come in, I, the citizen, give you the gift. And that is where you can sustain political support for refugees, but this is difficult to swallow from a rights perspective. Because what a rights perspective, quite properly, points out, is that the gift is selective, partial, discriminatory and excluding. And if you want to sustain any political consensus in favor of generous refugee settlement, and fail to use the language of the gift, fail to use the language of hospitality and generosity, it is not going to work politically. That is the gloomy conclusion, but it is not to say that human rights do not matter. It is not to suggest that human rights should be discarded. It makes much more precise what human rights is there for. It is there to counter the partiality of ordinary virtues. It is there to provide an external, rational critique of the selectivity and partiality of the gift relationship. And to insist, and force states and individuals to face up to the partiality of their hospitality and generosity. So, instead of seeing human rights as flowing from nature or our instinctive virtues, think of human rights as the rational thought experiment created after the Second World War to discipline the gift and to discipline partiality. My sense is that from a political point of view, we need to put a great deal more emphasis on the language of hospitality as a civic virtue, and defend much more strongly than we have done the sense that solidarity is always based on, it could be you, not on an abstraction about human identity, but simply, it could be you. You could be in that boat. You could be wearing the life jacket. You could have bought that defective life jacket and put it on your five-year-old child and watched them drown. That is where you create mutuality and a sustained civic contact of inclusion. I will end here with some highfalutin conclusions. To a degree that I do not think we have ever really faced up to in the human rights movement, there is a much, much deeper conflict between the language of human rights universalism and democratic sovereignty. That is, many societies are saying, We are prepared to extend some generosity to strangers at our gates, but only if our sovereignty is maintained, only if we retain control over who gets in and who does not. And

9 Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues 9 we cannot work this process on the basis of universal commitments that pay no respect to democratic sovereignty. The populist resurgence is anti-universalist and anti-capitalist on the left, and anti-universalist on the right, but both are making the claim in the language of democratic majoritarianism. And this is tough for liberals. My sense and this is where this will be controversial, some of you will simply disagree, some of you will think, this Small-L liberal has just walked off the farm but I am trying to get us to think here because we have a problem is that it looks great in Canada, but where I am living right now in Hungary, it is terrible. The language and political support for generosity to refugees has disappeared. That is what I am trying to understand, in terms of this contrast between gifts and rights. I think a progressive response cast in the language of rights universalism will fail. If Angela Merkel tries to save her political project and save generous refugee settlement in Europe by saying, Well, folks, we have a universal human obligation to an indeterminate number of human subjects in desperate need, she is going to fail. She has to conjure up another language, which is this language of the gift. Because only the language of the gift is compatible with democratic sovereignty.