The moral universalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges us to recognize the humanity of others and the reality of their suffering. If that doctrine sounds naive in today’s world, it is because we have allowed malignant spoilers to smother this foundational intuition.
VIENNA – Seventy-five years ago this week, United Nations member states meeting in Paris adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was not a binding law, only a statement of principle. But it was the first declaration to embed an ancient moral ideal of human equality into the new architecture of international law established in response to the genocidal nationalism that had left so much of the world in ruins after World War II.
This new moral universalism asked us to turn our backs on our instinctive partiality for members of our own tribe. It asked us to look past salient differences – race, creed, gender, class, national origin, language – and contemplate our shared humanity. But many at the time wondered whether we were capable of such a radical experiment. As Hannah Arendt observed in 1948, “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”
The defenseless prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau had discovered that their claims as human beings – to pity and decency, let alone to rights – meant nothing to their tormentors. Only if such defenseless people had a state to protect them, Arendt argued, would they be safe. The universal human being in all of us would have “the right to have rights” only if we all enjoyed the protections of citizenship.
VIENNA – Seventy-five years ago this week, United Nations member states meeting in Paris adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was not a binding law, only a statement of principle. But it was the first declaration to embed an ancient moral ideal of human equality into the new architecture of international law established in response to the genocidal nationalism that had left so much of the world in ruins after World War II.
This new moral universalism asked us to turn our backs on our instinctive partiality for members of our own tribe. It asked us to look past salient differences – race, creed, gender, class, national origin, language – and contemplate our shared humanity. But many at the time wondered whether we were capable of such a radical experiment. As Hannah Arendt observed in 1948, “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”
The defenseless prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau had discovered that their claims as human beings – to pity and decency, let alone to rights – meant nothing to their tormentors. Only if such defenseless people had a state to protect them, Arendt argued, would they be safe. The universal human being in all of us would have “the right to have rights” only if we all enjoyed the protections of citizenship.