Ari Kohen's interest is the normative foundation for the very idea of human rights: “some feature or quality in human beings from which our rights spring” (p. 109). His interest is not in specific rights or in strategies for spreading them. He demonstrates the failure of several high-profile attempts to ground the idea of human rights as “based on universal ideas about the inviolability of the human person,” one embraceable by “deeply religious and deeply non-religious people alike” and by “both Western and non-Western cultures and communities” (p. 5).
Kohen rejects Michael Perry's theological grounding because “organized religion has done a particularly poor job of translating these concepts into action,” indeed has been “antithetical to the concept of human rights” (p. 9). Moreover, in a pluralistic world, “most people do not hold the same religious worldview and many hold worldviews that would not fit within Perry's definition” (p. 36). Kohen then turns to Alan Gewirth's effort to ground the human-rights idea, but now on nontheological grounds: Because humans “have a meta-desire not to contradict ourselves” (p. 9), behavior that can be justified without self-contradiction would be universally acceptable, which would include human rights. But, Kohen points out, someone who regards his victim as “somehow less of an agent … than he himself” (p. 56) can commit abuse without self-contradiction. Next up is Ronald Dworkin's notion of nonreligious sacredness: By shaping their lives, humans “create” themselves. Kohen rejects this idea as simply incoherent (p. 84). The final two foci provide him with elements for his own position. In evolutionary biology (on Steven Pinker's account), Kohen isolates the individual's inherent dignity as a “feature of higher-brain activity” (p. 10). Now we are getting somewhere: The human capacity to conceive of itself as a “self” is a gene-based evolutionary strategy for better, cleverer brains. The capacity to think of oneself as a self “accounts for my having dignity and being a person” (p. 108), whereby the dignity that grounds the idea of human rights is prior to personhood (p. 88). Finally, the author reads Richard Rorty against the grain to discover a kind of normative universalism created as an imagined global community: Each person's sense of solidarity is capable of encompassing all persons “because of the similarities we all share,” similarities “not found so much as they are created” (p. 128).
Kohen concludes with his own attempt at a foundation without supernatural support: the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” understood in terms of Rorty (the declaration as a solidarity created, not found), John Rawls (a declaration based on overlapping consensus), and Jürgen Habermas (a declaration legitimated by the universal validity of decisions achieved procedurally). It “represent[s] a political consensus of overlapping ideas from cultures and communities around the world” (p. 134). The “process by which it was drafted and the deliberations surrounding the subsequent human rights instruments represent the best possible proof of the universal applicability of the rights that they espouse” (p. 134) because, says Kohen—speaking of the tiny, unrepresentative elites that drafted and ratified this document in 1948—“everyone was able to agree upon and endorse a common foundation: the dignity of the human person” (p. 12). This argument is surely defeated by the absence of input, or consultation, with the billions of persons in whose names the self-selected elites spoke and acted. Most international human-rights instruments proclaim the individual's “dignity,” but they do so simply as political fiat, as an assertion without the normative underpinnings that might persuade at least the intellectuals of the world. And, of course, the prestige of a world body (like force or money) is not a rational argument. Finally, Kohen's argument from consensus, even of unrepresentative elites, is challenged by the fact that the status of a country as a member of the UN, or as a signatory of human-rights documents, does not predict whether or not it observes the human rights of its citizens. Moreover, the declaration understands human rights primarily as civil and political rights, in distinction from economic, social, and cultural ones. They are culturally particular in any number of ways, for example, privileging the individual over the family as society's primary unit; rights over duties as the basis of interpersonal relationships; legalism over reconciliation, repentance, or education as the basis for dealing with deviance; secularism over religion as the modus vivendi of public life. The document is not the work of cultural consensus that the author takes it to be.
Kohen's account certainly succeeds in its main effort: to demonstrate the implausibility of religion as a universal basis for the human-rights idea. Perry's belief in the God of the Christian gospels is a self-serving “universalism” for a world rich in very diverse conceptions of the supernatural. In fact, his belief excludes many persons, persons of other faiths as well as persons of no faith. (On a related note of possible cultural parochialism, given that Kohen does not think that the dignity foundation of human-rights is peculiarly Western, how is it that his book focuses on contemporary American theorists?)
As a foundation, Kohen replaces religion with the conviction that humans do not need the supernatural to guide their behavior by moral norms and values. But he should have abandoned more than theology. Instead, he holds onto metaphysics and normative universalism because he still believes that we humans cannot behave well without (secular) philosophical grounds for that behavior. He remains unpersuaded by Rorty's claim, for example, that it is “adequate to use our common history as proof of the practical advantage of individual self-creation and ‘bourgeois’ freedoms rather than demand that all people are born with this type of entitlement” (p. 114).
But what if individuals can enjoy specific human rights without needing those rights to be grounded normatively in a tidy, coherent, reasoned way? In any case, that is where we humans are: Specific human rights are championed, even enjoyed here and there in the world today, even as foundational efforts are persuasive only to those who already share them (or to those who can be persuaded only because they already share the corresponding presuppositions). The justification to others of what we take to be the foundation of the human-rights ideas eventually reaches an impasse beyond which no argument can take us. Here, the debate is moved forward not by answers but by questions, new perspectives, and thoughtful reconsiderations of older ones. In this Kohen excels. Reading his discussion of other authors is like sitting in the classroom of a gifted teacher, listening to clear, fair-minded, even generous critiques of complex arguments delivered in a style both pleasant and engaging.
