Recognising Humanity and Hospitality

Preparation for Week 4 Tutorial

• Submit prep activity BEFORE scheduled tutorial time.
• Active participation in the tutorial is needed to get marks.
• Link in the Tutorial Resources folder on iLearn.

Last Week's Topics

• Introduction to aretaic (virtue) ethics.
• Aristotle’s approach to virtues, vices, and practical wisdom was considered.
• Distinction between thick and thin ethical terms was outlined.
• Practiced applying our theories to the dairy farmer’s dilemma.

Today's Agenda

• Expectations for next week’s test will be outlined.
• Origin and nature of ‘rights’ will be considered.
• Practical issues and political realities in exercising human rights will be looked at.
• Martin Luther King Jnr.’s argument for civil disobedience will be considered.
• Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to recognising the humanity of others will be introduced.

In-Class Test Information

• Scheduled in next week’s forum time.
  • A-L surnames please come at 1pm.
  • M-Z surnames please come at 2pm.
• Students on Learning Access Plans will be notified via email of alternate arrangements.
• 45 min test worth 30 marks.
  • 20 x MC questions worth 0.5 mark each (10 marks in total).
  • Short answer questions are marks variable and worth up to (20 marks) variable.
• Revision in tutorials this week.

Test Conditions

• No notes, phones or other devices permitted. Pen and student card needed.
• ESL students are allowed to use a paper translation dictionary (e.g. Mandarin – English), which will be checked by staff.
• Clarification of word meaning (if not a key term) during the test is allowed by raising a hand.
• Any use of unauthorized devices will void the test and will be considered academic misconduct.
• Deferrals need to be arranged prior to the day or with documented supporting reasons.

What is a Right?

• What does it mean to have rights?
• What are some examples of the kind of rights we have?

State of Nature

• A thought experiment by philosophers on what human life would be like without organised society, government, laws, or institutions.
• Sub-question: Do we have inherent rights? Or are rights created by society?

Rights Surrendered – Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

• Rights in a state of nature are worthless because survival is the only consideration.
• In Hobbes’s state of nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
• People should voluntarily give up their rights to a sovereign authority in exchange for protection.

Rights Regained – John Locke (1632-1704)

• Rights in a state of nature would be recognised by individuals.
• These rights included life, liberty, and private property.
• These rights are natural rights that apply to all, and it is the Government’s job to protect them.
• These rights are inalienable.
• Locke’s ideas were foundational to other declarations of human rights, e.g. the US Declaration of Independence & the French Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Where Do Rights Come From?

• Nature?
  • Hobbes reasoned that your ‘right of nature’ came from the brute facts of existence in a state of nature
  • Locke, coming from a Christian tradition believed God was the source and that God created humans as rational and therefore capable of understanding moral law
• Our shared capacity to reason?
  • Deontologists like Kant ground rights in our capacity to reason and our inherent dignity.
  • Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example.
  • This is a more secular explanation, but also has its limits
• The political systems we build?
  • By this reasoning, you have rights because you have a government who is respecting them.
  • But who is excluded?

The Problem of “Human Rights”

• Legal philosopher Tom Campbell highlights:
  • “The discourse of rights is pervasive and popular in politics, law and morality. There is scarcely any position, opinion, claim, criticism or aspiration relating to social and political life that is not asserted and affirmed using the term ‘rights.’”.
• But as historian Joanna Bourke notes:
  • “sweeping declarations of the ‘rights of man’ and then ‘human rights’ have always been less than universal.”

The Right to Have Rights

• Hannah Arendt was a political refugee fleeing Nazism; her experience of not having a passport helped form her thinking about the problematic nature of human rights.
• It seems they do require a passport from a liberal democracy to have them.
• You need to be a human, and you need to have a Government willing to defend them.
• Hence stateless people, unfortunately, are missing their rights.
• Arendt wrote about “The right to have rights”.

Adior's Story

• Adior's story tells of the network of impacts created by not having a birth certificate or an ID card.
• Autonomy, dignity, and one's basic ability to function in the world are all affected.

The Right to Have Rights (Continued)

• “The refugee crisis after World War II revealed to [Arendt] that humans can exist in a place called nowhere; they can be displaced from political community—they can be turned into abstractions.” - Stephanie DeGooyer.
• For Arendt the world needs larger international institutions like the U.N. or the E.U. or N.A.T.O. to guarantee human rights exist for humans and not just citizens.

No Solution Seems to Be Coming in the Short Term…

• Examples of current events:
  • Germany to deport thousands of asylum seekers under new agreement with Turkey.
  • Finland completes first 35 km of fence on Russian border.
  • Australia's new anti-migrant laws.
  • U.K. 'Citizenship Ban' For Refugees Faces First Legal Challenge.
  • Croatian police accused of burning asylum seekers' phones and passports.
  • Experts warn of Bill C-2 as 'anti-refugee' and 'anti-immigrant' giving Canada 'unchecked powers' like the U.S.

What If The State Refuses To Recognise Your Human Rights?

• During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jnr made an impassioned argument for when non-violent civil disobedience was a moral obligation.
• Civil disobedience is the deliberate breaking of a law on moral grounds in an effort to see change in law or government policy.
• It is a principled non-violent strategy that involves pleading guilty after an arrest in order to use the courts as a means of changing the law.
• King argued that just as we have a duty to obey just laws, we also have a duty to disobey unjust laws.

How To Tell If A Law Is Just or Unjust

• In his Letter from Birmingham Jail King employs the thought of Jewish thinker Martin Buber to criticise a policy of segregation.
• For Buber there are two ways of relating to something, either as an I-It (towards objects) or as an I-Thou (towards other people).
• Segregation is unsound as it transforms the relationship from I-Thou to I-It.
• Similarly, a law that prohibits peaceful protest against segregation treats potential protestors as obstacles rather than as persons.
• In other words, some laws legislate the violation of one’s fundamental human dignity and are therefore unjust.

Nonviolent Direct Action

• “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.”
• “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

Two Parallel Questions

• What do we (as individuals) owe each other (as individuals)?
• What do we (as a society) owe others (as humans)?

What Do We Owe Each Other? – Emmanuel Levinas

• Thinking on how we respond to the needs of others is one of the main ideas in Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics.
• Levinas himself was held captive in a concentration camp for much of WW2.
• He writes of a stray dog who visited the camps - The last Kantian in Nazi Germany

Tutorial Reading

• Aaron James Wendland has written a fantastic update of Levinas’s thought for thinking through issues of the right to have rights today.
• Where Levinas, for philosophical reasons, makes for difficult reading, Wendland brings Levinas’s key ideas to life in an accessible way.

Totalisation and Nationalism

• Totalisation is a risk that comes with identifying with those similar to ourselves, and differentiating from those who are different.
• We can be led to draw very sharp distinctions between “same” and “other.”
• This is most problematic when a supposed feature of a group is used to reduce the identity of a member to that simple trait. This is totalisation. Here are some recent problematic ones perpetuated in media:
  • Muslim = terrorist
  • Indigenous = drunkard
  • Asylum seeker = illegal (even more stark when asylum seeker is Muslim).
  • Mexican = criminal
  • Gypsy = lazy/criminal

Infinity

• People are more than the logical categories that we can apply to our judgments can deal with.
• Any judgement we might make which “totalises” our conception has a xenophobic tendency.
• Humans are irreducible to categories because of the infinity they carry within them.

Levinas and the Face

• From his essay ‘Humanism of the Other’:
  • “The nudity of the face is a stripping with no cultural ornament – an absolution – a detachment of its form in the heart of the production of a form.”
• In face-to-face encounters, for Levinas, something about the face gets in the way of our forming totalising judgements of others.
• Another person’s face shows their vulnerability.
• This forces us to recognise our shared humanity.

Hospitality

• For Levinas, recognising the vulnerability of the other makes us responsible to their wants (and visa versa).
• Consider the most vulnerable:
  • Homeless, widowed (in certain cultures), stateless, living under oppression.
• To be clear, whenever we encounter another, for Levinas, our responsibility to them is found in the way that we encounter them.
• Hospitality means forgoing some enjoyment to act fully on our identification and differentiation to others.
• Like welcoming someone into our home, we owe it to our guest to consider them, and our character is defined ourselves by how we welcome them.
• Think of speaking: in language we share our individual thoughts in general terms (for everyone). Discourse is a way of recognising the universal differences between us and acting on a dt f h it lit

How Hospitable Can You Be?

• For Levinas hospitality is an infinite responsibility.
• But you can’t give everything or deny yourself everything.
• So, we need debatable concepts like justice (or democracy), to help us limit the impossible demands of personal hospitality.
• The important point is to start from recognising the duties of hospitality, that define our character, and reduce suffering. Then get the political sphere to try and achieve that.

Summary

• The sources of rights are debatable, varied, and complex.
• There is a meaningful difference between having rights and being in a position to exercise them.
• One approach that has attempted to have one’s right to dignity ensured legally has been nonviolent direct action, as in Martin Luther King Jnr.’s argument for civil disobedience.
• Levinas’s thought offers another idea of how to overcome this problem of rights and their lack of recognition regardless of political orientation.
• For Levinas, recognising the vulnerability of others carries with it an obligation.

Fin

• DON’T FORGET to submit your Preparation Task for Week 4.
• Tutorials will give us a chance to apply some of these news concepts and make time for revision.
• Next week – we will have the Test, rather than a forum.
• Week 5 tutorials still run, we will use this time to prepare for the final assessment.
• Enjoy your week

References

• Arendt, H. (1975 [2017]) The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin.
• Bourke, J. (2013) What it Means to be Human: Reflections From 1791 to the Present. London: Virago Press.
• Gessen, M. (2018) 'The Right to Have Rights and the Plight of the Stateless.' The New Yorker [Online] https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-right-to-have-rights-and-the-plight-of-the-stateless
• King Jnr., M . L. (1963) Letter from Birmingham Jail. https://letterfromjail.com/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022) 'Locke's Political Philosophy' [Online] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/
• Wendland, A. J. (2016) 'What Do We Owe Each Other?' The New Yorker [Online] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/what-do-we-owe-each-other/?smid=tw-share