Liberty, equality and rights
171
of it, along the path it has gone down in its development – another develop-
ment could have generated different rights or even done without them. Given the
journey of the West through Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the
market economy and capitalism, the role acquired in it by the individual is well
understandable. Does this acknowledgement give leeway to a relativism according
to which each culture has its own system of rights and principles, which are not
transferable except by (colonial, imperial) imposition? The
answer is no, for two
reasons. First, the market economy supported by highly developed technology is
now shaping life in nearly all corners of the planet; it seems therefore only con-
sequential that the institutions born to regulate them and to shield the individual
from their misuse find universal expansion, which allows for their adaptation to
national circumstances – provided adaptation is not emasculation of the regulations
and protections deriving from fundamental rights. It can also be adaptation to new
values and requirements within the same culture, as it
happened in the West with
the critical reinterpretation of fundamental rights by theorists of the emancipa-
tion of women and later liberation movements. Second, the particular (Western)
origin of a concept or institutions does not, as such, justify a judgement of limited,
exclusively particular validity for the values and principles it entails, the merging
of origin (or genesis) and validity being a historicist error. This approach sounds as
parochial as rejecting any universal significance of Gandhi’s notion of non-violent
struggle because it originated in India. On the whole, the universal validity of
fundamental rights originated in the legal and political
cultures of the West should
neither be systematically denied nor blindly accepted, but rather rethought in the
framework of a comparison with proposals and requirements stemming from other
cultures. The diversity that can now be seen on the benches of international courts
should be complemented by a much more intense worldwide conversation among
philosophers and legal theorists.
Lastly, we have to briefly remember how to classify human or fundamental
rights, though the reader is advised to look at their list and the specifics in the legal
system best known to her/him.
For the conceptualization of politics we prefer to speak of:
• civil rights, including the right to life, the rights known as
habeas corpus and
the right to due process of law, the right to privacy, freedom
of movement,
thought, religion and conscience, free speech, the freedom of the press and the
(qualified) freedom to have property
•
political rights: freedom of association, the right to assemble, the right to peti-
tion, the right of civil disobedience and, last but not least, the right to vote
• social rights: the
rights to work, health, education, housing and protection in
their elderly years
•
among the ‘fourth generation rights’, whose list is open-ended and question-
able, let us mention the right to a clean environment.
All these rights are – it is almost needless to say – subject to a non-discrimination
clause, maintaining that they are recognised irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity,
172 Ethics and politics
religion, sexual orientation. Civil rights all imply non-interference by the state,
political rights its limited activity (mainly to convene and organise elections), social
and environmental rights require an intense and costly engagement by the state,
that is by the generality of tax payers, and imply – as we know – bureaucratic
enmeshing by public authorities – though its degree
can be limited and many
people would be worse off without this interference. They are peculiar claim rights,
which imply a proactive behaviour rather than abstention on the side of the state.
For all these reasons they are mostly seen as not generating obligations for the state
that are as binding as civil and political rights; the right to work represents a policy
indication in the direction of favouring job creation strategies, but it does not mean
that the public authority has to create a job for every unemployed citizen, who has
rather to be protected by social security from the consequences of her/his condi-
tion. Things are, however, in the midst of change as, for example, lawsuits based on
environmental rights for omitted climate policies are now becoming possible in the
US with the support
of the public trust doctrine, according to which environmen-
tal goods are held ‘in trust’ for present and future generations by the government.
This remark leads to a final point that is particularly highlighted in this author’s
own research: if it is true that lethal challenges endanger the life of present and
future generations, the proclamation of human rights is incomplete or rather lacks
foundation if they are not preceded by the recognition of the
right of humankind to
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