'

In a report from Bosnia, David Rieff said, To the Serbs. the Muslims are no longer human. . . . Muslim prisonem, lying on the ground in rows, awaing interrogaon, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van. This theme of dehumanization recurred when Rieff said:
A Muslim man in Bosansi Penovac . . , [was] forced to bite o& the penin of a

fellowMuslim. . . . If you say that e man is not human, but the man looka like
you and the only way to identifi this devil is to make him drop his Oouscrs -

Muslim men are circumciacd and Scrb nien are not -it ia probably onlya short
strip, ps)'chologica1ly, to cutting off his prick. . . . There haa nevcr been a cam

paign ofethnic cleansing from which sesual sadism has gene miasing.

The moral to be drawn from Rieffs stones ii that Serbian murderers and
! rapists do not think of thernselves as violating human rights, For they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but to Multas. They are not being inhuman, but rather are discriminating betsveen true humans and pseudo-humans. They are making the same sort ofdisnction the Crusaders wade between humans and infidel dogs, and Black Muslims make between humans and blue-eyed devils. The founder of my univemity was able both to own slaves and to think it seIf-evdent that all men were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. This was because he had convinced himself that the consciousness of blacks, like that of anmate, participates more of sensaon than of reflection."' Like the Serbs, Mr.Jefferson did not think of hirnself as violating Emmett rights.
i David Rie&, Lctter from Bosnia, Nriii Porsr, Novcmbcr s 5. iqqe, 8e--q$. e Their griefs ate transienu Those numbcrleaa afllictiqns, which render it doubtful whether heaven has gwen life to us in mercy or iti wrath, are lees felL, and sooner forgottcn with

t68

MORALPRO GRESS

HUMAN RIGHTS

i 6g

Serbs take themselves to be acting in the interests of true humanity by purif)'ing the world of peeudo-humanity. In this respect, their self-image re sembles thiit of moral philosophers who hope to cleanse the worlcl of prejudice and supemtition. This cleansing will permit us to rise above our animality by becoming, for the first time, wholly rational and thus wholly human. Serbs, moralists, Jefferson, an Black Muslims all use the term men to mean people like us." They all think that the line between humane and anmate is not simply the line between featherless bipeds and the rest. Rather, this line droides some featherless bipeds from others: there are ani mats walking about in humanoid form. We and those like ua are paradigm cases of humanity, but thoec too different from ue in behavior or custom are, at best, borderline cases. As Clifford Geertz puts it, Mens most importunate claims to humaniiy are cast in the accents of group pride." We here iii the sale, rich emocracies feel about Serbian torturers and rapists as they feel about their Muslim victims: they are more like anmate than like us. But we are not doing anything to help the Muslim women who arcbeing gang-raped or the Mualim men who are being castrated, any more than we did anytbing in the ig3os when the Nazis were amusing themaelvea by torturingJewa. Here in the sale countries vve find ourselvea saying thinga like Chat's how things have always been in the Balkans," suggesting that, unlike us, those people are used to being raped and castrated. The contempt ne always fet-l for loseT5 - .WS UL HH 1 93 5, Muslime now -combines with our diagust at the winnem' behavior to produce the eemiconscious at titude: a pox on both your houses." We think of Serbs or Nazis as anmate, because ravenous beasts of prey are anmate. We think of Muslims or Jewa being herded into concentration camps as anmate, because cattle are anmate. Neither aort of animal is very much like us, an1 there aeems no point in human beings getng involved in quarrels between animals. The human-animal distinction, however, is only one of three main ways in xshich we paradigmac humans disnguish oumelves from borderline cases. A second is by invoking the distinction between adults and children. Ignorant and supersous people, we say, are like children; they will attain true humaniiy only if raised up by proper education. If they seem incapable
there. In general, their cxisteace appears to parcipate more of sensaiion than reflection. To this muatbc ascriticd their disposition to sleep when absiirtd rrom iheir diversions, and unemploycd in labor. An animal whoae body is at rest, and who cloes not reflect must be dir posed io slcep qf course. Thomas jefferson, Notes on Virgini:i," Writiiigs, ed. Andrew A

of sllCh education, that shows that they are not really the same kind of being as we educable people are. Blacks, the whites in the United States and m South Africa used to sal, are like children; that is wliy it is appropriate to address black males, ofwhatever age, as boy." Women, men used to say, are permaneny childlike; that is why it is appropriate to spend no money on

.,
) ,., '.,

their educaon and to refuse there access to power.

When it comes to women, however, there are simples ways of excluding there from true humanity: for example, using man" as a synonym of hviman being." As feminista have poinied out, such usages reinforce the average mates ihankfuliiess that he was not bom a woman, as well as lris fear of

. Clanse the territory confirme Catharifle MacKnnons claire that, for most men, being a woman does net count as one way of being human. Being a

the Ultimate degraaiioti: feminizaon. The extent and depth of the larter fear are evidenced by the particularsort ofsexual sadism Reffdescribes. His point that such sadism is never abseiit from attempts to purfy the species or

' nonmale is the third main way of beng nonhuman. Philosophem have tried io help straighten out this confusion by specifying what is special about featherless bipeds, explaining what is essential to beitig human. Plato suggested tiat there is a big difference lietween us and

anmate, a dfference worthy of respect and cultivation. He thought that hu

man beings have a special added ingredient that puts there in a different

ontological category than brutes. Respect for this ingredient provides a reason for people to be nice to each other. Anti-Platonsts like Nietzsche reply
that attempts to get people to stop murdering, raping, and castratiiig one

'' another are, in the long run, doomed to failure - for the real truth abour

Lipscomb and Albert Eltery Brrgh $ Clifford Geertz, Thick Description, Books, i gi ), z z.

fJi Ziitrrprrtninii of julius (New' York: Basic

.J, human nature is that we are a uniquely nasty and darigerous kind of animal. When coritemporary admirers of Plato claire that all featherless bipeds eveii the stupid and childlike, even the women, everi the sodomizecl hax'e the same inalienable rights, admirers of Nietzsche reply that the very idea ,,, ofinalienable truman rights" is, like the idea of a special added ingredient, .. a laughably feeble attempt by the weaker members of the specics to fend on : , the stronger members. ad de ei in no ou ur r as sb be ee en nw wa th ha at th ha ad dv va an nc ce e t te el ll le ec ct tu ua al la ei it t, ,o on ne ei im mp po or rtta a rn ia ti in nt .' A As sI Is se ee and Plato benveen century is the steady decline in interesa in this quarrel Nietzsche about what we are really like. There is a growing willingness to ncglect the question What is our nature? and to substitute the question Mat can we make of ourselves? We are much lees inclined tiran our ancestors were to take theories ofhuman nature" seriously, much tess incliried to take ontology or history or ethology as a guide to life. We are mitch lees

.;

, inclined to pose the ontological questioix What nrz we?" because we have

MORAL PROGRES S

HUMAN Rf CIHTS

come to lee that the main leuon of both history and arithropology s our extraordinary malleabiliry. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, provean, self-shaping animal rather than as the racional animal or the cruel animal. One of the shapes we have receny assumed is that of a human rights culture. I borrow the term human rights culmre" from the Argentinean jurist and philosopher Eduardo Rabossi. li ar aii:le called Human Rights Naturalized" Rabossi argues that philosophers should think Of this cultura as a new, welcome lact of the post-Holocaust world. Rabossi wants there to stop trying to get behind or beneath this fact, stop tryirig to detect and defend its so-called philosophical presuppositiCtflS. OT1 Rabossi s view, phlosophers like Alan Gewrth are wrong to argue that human rights cannot depend upon historical facis. My basic point, Rabossi says, is that the world has change, that the human righte phenomenon rendem human rights foundationalism outmoded and irrelevante" Human rights foundationalism is the continuing attempt by quasiclaire Platonisis to win, at last, a final viCtoJ over their opponents. Rabossis it is my and important; trtie that this attempt is outinodsd seems io me both Rabrmis i dDfend, aTt upon, principal topic in this essay. I shall eularge claire that the question of whether human beings really lzruc the rights enUmerated in the Helsinki Declaracion is notworth raising. th particular, Ishall defend the claire that nothing relevant to moral choice separates human bengs from animals except historically contingent facis of the world, C'i l11liL
facts.

a ill-founded if not backe up by knowledge of a distinctivcly hurrian attrbute. But it is not clear why respect for human trinity- our sense that the dioerences between Serb and Muslim, Christian and infidel, gal and straight, mate and female should not iiatter - musr presuppose the existenc:e of any such attribxite. Traditionally, the name of the shared huirian attribute that supposedly grounds" morality s rationality. Gultural relativism is associated with irraonalsm because it denies the existence of morally relevant traiiscultural facts. To agree with Rabossi one must, indecd, be irraonalist in that sense. But one need not be irrationalist in the sense of ceasing to make one's web of belief as coherent, and as perspcuously structured, as possible. Philosophers like myself, who think of rationaliiy as simply the attempt at tsuch coherence, agree with Rabossi that foundaonali t pr Jects are moded. We see our task as a matter of making our own culture the hartman rights culture - more self-conscious and more powerful, rather than of demonstrating its superiority to other cultures by an appeal to somethirig
transcultural.

'

This claire is somemes called cultural relativism" by those who indignantly reject ir One reason they rject it is that such relavism Seemfi to there incompable with the lact that our human rights culmre is morally se peror to other cultures. I quite agree that ours is morally superior, but l do not think thllt this siiperiority counts in fl VOT Of the existence of a universal human nature. lt wolild Oiily do so if se asiimed that a claire of moral superiority entails a claire to superior knowledge assumed that s(1Ch l CBifll
q See Eduardo Rabossi. La teoria de los derechos humanos natnfalizada, Itri'ie
f'4fudo:f Gori3iucflftz4lsf (Mlldfd) , Gto. Ijdfllld 8ure wh) he dos HAC. El. bO5Si lllh) pflflil(

I am not that he doea not wish to question the idea of a National foundation of mnrality.
this idea still wade a kind of sense, but makcs sense no longer. That, at any rate, is <y os vievs. Kant wrtitc in a period when the only altrmative to religion acemed IO be something like science. In such :i perod, inventing :s pseudo-acience called the aystem Of If I4Ccl4 dental philosophy"- Getting the stage for the show-siopping clmax in which end (iulls HIGH ii3 o obligation qut of a transcendental hat -might plaushly acem the only by c'f other. (ifieSl3 mil th and the the hedonisis on one side my from
liH tlt t1 lfl *-8 llt time of K.t1t -

M0fUh *

Ii 5

9'

'

We think that the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize ovir culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situatioii8. The summary is effected by formulang a generalization from which these intuitions can be deduced, with the help of noncontroversial lemmas. That generalization is not supposed to ground our intuitions, but rather to summarize theni.)ohn Rawls's Difference Principle and the U.S, Supreme Goiirts construction, in recent decades, of a constitutional right to prix'acy are examples of this kind of summary. We see the point of formu1:itirig such summarizing generalizations as increasing the predictability. and thus the power and efficiency, of our institutions, thereby hegh tening the sense of shared moral identicy that brings us together in a moral community. Foundationalist philosophers, such as Pluto, Aquinas, and kent, have hoped to provide independent support for such summarizing generalizaons. They would like to infer these generalizations from further premises, premisas capable of being know to be true inependeiitly of the trutli of the moral intuitions that have been summarized. Such premises nrr sup posed to justify our intiiions, by providing premises from ivhich the con tent of those intuions can be dediiced. 1 sliall lump all such premises together under the label ctaims to knowledge about fue nature of humo beings." In this broad sense, claims to know that osir moral intciitions are recollectioris of the Form of the Good, Or that w'e are the diso bedient cliildren of a loving Cod, or that human beings dioer from other kinds of animal by having dignity rather than were value are all claims about truman na-

MORAL PROGRESO

for mellish genes or merely erupons of the will to power. To claire such knowledge is to claire to know something thag though not itself a moral intuition, can rorrrrt moral intuions. lt is essential to this idea of moral knowledge that a whole community might come to tiiom that west of its most salient intuitions about the right thing to do were wrong. But novi suppose we ash: is there this sort of Knowledge? What kiiid of questiori is i/io# On the traditional view, it is a philosophical question, be longing to a branch ofepistemology known as metaethics. But on the pragmast view I favor, it is a questioii of efFiciency: a queson about how best to gmb hold of history - how best to bring about the utopa slietched by the Enlightenmenc If the acvies of those who attempt to achieve this sort of knowledge seem of little use in actualizing this utopa, that is a reason to think there is no such knowledge. If it seems that most of the work ofchanging morat intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelirigs rather than by increasing our knowledge, that is a reason to think there is no knowledge of the sort that philosophem like Plato, Aquirias, and Kant hoped to geC This pragmatist argument against the Platonist has the same form as an argument for cutting oo payment to the priests who perform piirportedl/ war-winning eacrifices -an argumerit which says that all.the real work ofwinning the war seems to be done by generals and adrrirals, ixot to mentioii foot soldiem. This argument does not say: since there seem to be no gods, there is probably no nee to support the prieets. lt says instead: since there is aJ> We parently no need to support the priests, there probably are no gods. pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human rights cul mre seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stones, to the conclusion that there is probably no knowledge of the sort Plato envisaged. We go on to argue that since no useful work seems to be done by insisting on a purportedly aliistorical human nature, there probably is no such nature, or at least nothng in that nature that is relevarit to our moral choices. In ehort, my doubts about the effectiveness of appeals to moral knowL edge are doubts about causal efficacy, not about epistemic smtus. My doubts hVe nothing to dowith 2tYt7'i3ie ilieoreiical quesiions disciissed under the heading ofmetaethics": questions about the relation betwecn facts and values, or between reason and passion, or between the cognitivo and the noncognitive, or between clescriptive statements an accion-guiding staiements. Nor do they have anything to do with questions about realism and anrealism, The difference beiween the moral realist and the moral animealst seems to pragmatists a differeiice that makes no practical difference.

ture. So are such counterclaims as that human beings are merely vehicles

Further, such metaethical questioris presuppose the PlatoniC distinction bctween inquiry that aires at efficient problm solvii3g and inquiry that aires at a goal callcd truth for its own sake. That distinc iron collaj3sc6 if O1I1h followe Dewey in thinking of all inquiry -in physics as well as cthics -:is prc-

tical problem sotvng or if one follow5 Peirce in seeing mery belicf es actionguiding 5 Even alter the priests have been pensioned off, howes'er, the memorias of certain priests muy still be cherished by the corrimunity espccially the meanones of their prophecies. We remain profoundly grateful to philosophers like Plato and Kant, not because they discovered truths but becausc they prophesied cosmopolitan utopias -utopias most ofwhosc details they mal nave gotten wrong, but utopias we might never have struggled to mach had wc not heard their prophecies. As long as our abilty to linox and in particular to discuss the question What is man?" seemed the most important fhing about us human beings, people like Plato and Kant accompanied utoian prophecies with claims to know something deep anl important sornething atout the parts of Hie soul or the transcendental status of the common moral conDarwall, The present state of meiacthical discussion is admirably sumniarized by Stephen Plntos ojhical Trends, e E'ihics: 8nme Fin ncle Railton, howard and Peter Allan Gibbard, ). 5-9 's compre hensive and judic ious articJe takes for ndicating the objectiviry of rrioialiiy" ( i zy), that grantcd that there is a problem about there is an interesting iuesiion as to whether eihics is cognitive" or noncognitive, that we IO d PP'CS ( 4 1. need to figure out wliether we h ve a cogiiitive capRCL)" ei4x" who sliare the authors' Williams, they conclude that they' are [nicfi] tzrczss wn (i83), They make and its prospecto" its preconditions undcrstaiitl morality, own desire io little effort to come to terms with iuggestions that there mal be no aliisiorical entiiy called
morality to be uridcrstood. The final p ragraph of the temporal)' the pen ultimatc paragraph makes clear that, with or without such assists, con inetaeihics mcives ahead, and positiofis gairi in complexiiy aritl sophisticalioii. Though te on It is insuuctive, I think, to compara this article with Annette Bairr's Sonrie afid that th ese walters cafi be dealt with ahistorically. When these authors consider historicist writers such as Alasdair l\lac(ntyre avicl icrnard

history. But helpful if moral phlosophers knew spme more anihropology ir psychology or

rticlc docs suggcst that it niipht Mc

the Way We Moca) Philosopheis Live Now" (loinl 6/, no. i o4). 49 i). There Baier why iuggesis iat moral philosophers slinuld at least occasionally. like Socrates, corisidcr to ask, the rest of scciety should not mcrely tolera te but subsidize our activaty, She goes on a li the large proporcional increase of professional philnsopliers and metal pliilosophers may good thing, morally spealiingl Evcn if it scarcely amounts to a plague of gadllies, it amount to a nuisance of owls. The kind of metaphilospphical and historical self-consciouv al neai and aelf-d'aubt displayed i;iy Baier seoms to me badly needed, bin it is conspicuuusly r1 To in w hint htcal the Fhilaso issue of centennial u[ e ient in Philos@fry in Ri the in'in de Sicle Etlxics" appears). The cnntrbutors Lo this issue are convinced that creasing sophisticaiion of a philosophical subdiscipline is cnpugh to demonstrate its social ulity and are entirelj unimpressed by murmur of decadent scholasiicism."

M ORALPRO GRESS man called the seuse of moral obligation" which has nothing to do with

H GMA N RTGHTS

love, fri:ndship, trust, or social solidarity. As long as we believe flint, people like Rabossi are going to have a tough me convincing us that human rights foundationalism is an outmoded projecL To overcome this idea of a sui generis sense of moral obligaon, itwould help to etop answering the question What makes us different from other anmate?" by sa ug.We caw Inox and they can merelyfeel.We should substute de can feel jor enc/i other to a much greater extent than they can.
This substitution would let us diSentarigll2 hriSt5 6t1QQ9SOFL lht UN 1f101

be like Thrasyrnachus and Callicles. By insisting that he cou1i reeducate people wlxo had matured without acq uiring appropriate moral sentimen is by invoking a higher power tlian sentment, the power of reason, Plato got

moral philosophy off on the wrong fooC He le1 moral philosohers to concentrate on the rather rare figure of the psychopath, the person who has no concern for any human being other than hirnself. Moral philosopliy has systematically neglected the much more coinmon base: the person whose treatment of a rather narrow range of featherless bipeds is morally im peccable, but v;h o remains indiffcrent to the suffeing of tliosc oi3tside this range, the ones he thinks of as pseudo-humans. Plato set things cip so tac moral philosophers tliirik they iiave failed untess they conviice the raticinal egotst that he should not be an egotist convince him by telling him about lris true, unfortunately neglected sclf. Bvtc the raonal egotist is not the problem. The problem is the gallant and honorable Serb who sees Muslms as circumcised dogs. lt is the brave .solder and good comrade who loves and is loved b' lris mares, but who thnks ofwomeii as dangerous, malevolent whores and bitches. Plato thought that the ray to get people to Ie nicer to cach otlier was to point out xvhat they all had in common rationality. But it does tilde good to point out, to the people I have just described, that man Mvislims and women are good at matliematics or engiiieerin;orjurisprudence. Reseniful young Nazi ioughs were quite aware that manyJews wei e clcver and learnccl, but this only added to the pleasure they took in beating suchjeivs. Nor does it do much 6 Od to get sucli people to rcad Kant and gree that one should not treat raonal agents simply as means. For everytliing turias on wlio counts as a fellow human being, as a raon:il agent in the only i element sense the seuse in w'liich ramon:it agency is syionymous with rricmbershii in ourmoral communit)'. For niost white people, until very recently, most black people clid not so count. For most Christians, until th scveiiteentli Ccntury or so, most heatheri did not so count. For the Nazis,,Jews did not count. For most malcs iii coun tries in wliich the average annual incoine is tess tlian two thousnd potinds, most females still do not so count. Whenevcr tribal and national rivaliics by come importaria, members of rival txibes ancl nations will not so count. K:ints

ters more than knowledge from the neo-Platonic suggesion that knowledge of the truth will make us free. For as long as we think there is an ahistorical power that makes for righteousness -a power called truth or rationality we will not be able to put foiindationalism behind us. The test, and probably the only, argument for putrig foundationalism behind us is the one I have already suggested: it would be mora efficient to do so, because it w'ou1c11etus concentrate our energies on manipulating sentimeflts, On Sentimental educaon. That sort ofeducaon gets people ofdifferent kinds suBicieny well acquainted with one another that th,py are lees tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quiisi-human. The goal of this sort of manipulation of sentiment is to exparid the referCFlC. of the terms our kind of people" and people like us." All l Cnn do to supplemerit this argument from increased efficiency is to offer a suggestion about how Plato managed to convince us that knowJedge of universal triiths mattered as much as he thought it did. Plato thought that the philosophers task was to answer questions like Why should l be moral? Why is it racional to be moral? Why is it in my interest to be moral? Why is it in the interesa of human beings as such to be moral?" He thought this be- cause he ihought that the bert way to deal with people like Thrasymachus and Gorgias was to demonstrate to there that they had an interesa of which they sere ufiaware, an interest in being raonal, in acquiring self-knowledge. Plato thereby saddled us with a distinction between the true and the false self. That disnction was, by the time of Cant, trarismuted into a disncon between categorical, rigid rrioral obligation and flexible, empirically determinable self-interest. Gontemporary moral philosophy is still lumbcred with this opposition between self-interestand morality, an opposition which makes it hard to realiza that my pride in being a part of the human rights culture is no more external to my self than my desire for firiancial or sexual success. It would have beer better if Plato had decided, as Aristotle was to decide, that there was nothing much to be done with people like Thrasymachus and Callicles and that the problem was how to avoid having children who would

are ect 8 Nietzsche was right io remind us iliat thesc same mon who, amongst tliemselves, cc and J strictly constrained by custtim, worship, ritual gratitude and by mutual surveillan ousy, who are so resourceful in consideraiioii, ienderness, lcv,wtty, pride and fre riciship, when once they step ou tside their circle becoine little better tiran uncaged heasu nf prey"(T/is Gmualog af Marals, trans. Francis Gelfling [Garden Guy, N.Y.: Doubleday. s 6] , 7i)

'78

MORAL PROG RESS

HUM A N RI GHTS

account ofthe respect due to ration8l agente tells lou that lou should extend

petually at risk, they have little else than pride in not being what they are

the respect you feel for the people like yourself to all featherle5s bipeds. This is an exceheiit suggestion, a good formula for secularizillQ th hrifitilEl dOCtrine of the brotherhood of iran. But it haa never been baCke V1Q bJ SO argument based on neutral premisas, and it never will be, Outside the circle of post-Enlightenment European culture, the circle of relatively sale cure people cho have heen manipulating one another s senments Por tWO

h u ndred years, most people are simply uriable to ilnderitaniJ why membership in a biological speci:s is supposed to suffic for membership in a moTal

community. Thie is not because they are insulliCiny National. lt is, typicaly, because they live in a world irv which it woul be just ton TSk.)7 - illdfl, would often be inS8riely dlflgerom to let ones sense of moral community streich beyond ones family, clan, or tribe. T et whitei to be nicer to blacks, males to female, Serbs to Muslirns, or straghts to gays, to help our spe:tes link up ilCo wha Rabossi calle a planetary community" domiiiated by a culture of human rights, it is of no use whatever to say, with Kant: notice tht What you have in comnion, your humanity, is more importanL t18,Tt thRSe uivial differences. 1or the people we are trying IO Clflvince will rejoin that they notice nothing of the EOEP people are mornlfy offended by the siiggesiion that they should treat someone who is not kin as if he were a brother, or a nigger as if he were white, or

believer, They art offended by the euggestion that they tfeat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human. When utilitarians te 11 there that all pleasures an paine felt by members of our biological species are cqually rela
vant to moral deliberaon, or when Kantia(LS HH lllelTL thi thl2 Dbility to

'

en gage in such deliberation i$ sufTicent for inembeuhip in the iiioral

miinty, they ar e incredulous. They rej in that these philosophers

oblivious to blata <7 bviOIiii moTill ditinciions, disnctions any decent person would draw. This rejoinder is notjust a rhe tClriCal devine, nor is it in any way irrational. lt i heartfelt. The iWiiiy of these people, the people whom we should like to convince to jem our EurOceiitYiC hllman rights cultura, is iheir sense of who they are not. Most people - especially people untoiiched by the European Enlightenment simply do not think of selves as, first an foremost, a human being. lnstead, l1/ tllRk Of
selves as being a cer nin gpodsort of human being -a SOrt deFlVlC 3) X]3C opposiiioii to a particularly bad sort, What is crucial for ther sense 1f Who they are is that

not to sustain their seIf-respect. Since the day when the teim human being was synonymous w4th member of our tribe," we have always thought of human beings in terms of pnrndigst members of the specics. Wc have contrasted us, the renl liumans, with rudimentary or perverted or deformed examplee of humanity. We Euroceniric intellectuals like to suggest that we, the paradigm humans, have ov'ercome this primitive parochalisin by using that paradigmatic human faculty, reason. So we say that ailure to concur with us is due to prejudice. Our use of these tcrms in this way mal make us ned in agreemeiit when Colin McGnn tells us, in the introductioii to his recent btiok, that learning to tell right from wrong is not as hard as learning french. The oriJ y obstacles to agreeing with his moral views, McGinr explains, are prejudice and superstiton. One can, of course, see whut McGinn mcans: if, like many of us, you teach students cho have been lrought up in the shaloiv of the Ho1ocust, brought up believing that prejudice ugainst racial or religous Si oups is a terrible thing, it is not very hard to convert there to standard libei al views zbout abortion, gay rights, and the like. You may even ;et fuere to stop cating animals. All lou have to do is to conviiice there th:it all the arguincn is on the oiher side appeal to morally irrelcvant consideiations. You do this by manipulating their sentimeuts in such a way that they imagine t emselvcs in the shoes of the despised anl oppressed. Sucli studeiits are alreacl so riice that they are eager to define thcir ible rititv in nene cliisioiiary tenue. The only people such students find un y trouble bcing nice to are Hie ones they consder irratiorial the religious fiindamentalst, the smirking raJiist, or the 5Wllggering skinliead. Producing generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other-respecting students of this sort in all parts of the worlcl isjust 'hat is iieecled i iieeG , cu that is iieeded to acliiev'e an En luh tenment iitoia. Jhc mora youngsters like this we can raise, the stronger and more global our hyman rightx culture will bccome. But it is not a good idea to encourage thcse stiiclents to label irraonal" the intolerant people they have trouble tolcrating. For tn t Platonic-Kanari epithr t suggests that with only a litHe more effort, the good and national part of these other peoples souls could have triiimphed over the bad and irrational part. lt sug,ests that we good people know something these bad people do not know and that it is probablJ' tlieir owm silly

touchab1e.just insofar ag lucy are impoverished, an 85 their lives are per-

9 Golin McGinn. forsl Li/zr y: or, How io Do ilv ILglil Thirg (London: Duckworih, i 99a ) , i G.

MORA L PROGHESS out of obedience tO HH lTlof8l laW. Bn( it is revolting to th ink that our only hope for B dCCflt society consists in softening the selfS81isJied hearts of a
lei5ltf CU$$. We Waflt moral progress to burst up from below, rather than

HUMAN RIGHTS

conditionality as an expression of resentment, ue was quite wron ; to treat

waing paeny upon condescension from the top. The residual popuIarideas of uncondional nick obligaon" posed by deep ahistorical noncoriingent forces obligation iniseems to me a most en- tirely due to our abhorrence Clf tle idea that the people on top hold the future in their handfi, that everything depende on there, that there is nothing more powerful to which we can appeal a(;ainst there.
Lik VF)'CfTle else, I too would prefef a bOttom-up way of achicving

thillk this is hOw utopa will in lact come into being. Nor d l think our preference for this ray lends any support to the idea that the Enlightenment project lies in the depths of every humaii soul. SO Why dO lS this preference make us resist the thought that sentimentalit)' lllay be th best weapon we have? I think Nietzsche gave the right aiiswer to this queson: se resist out of resentment. we rt:irrii the ida thoi w hall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of thCl WC:bak, sloWly open their dried-up litt1C hearts, fl\'e desperately hope there is somethirig stronger and more powerful that will bart the stro n; if they do i4flf do these things - if not a vengeful God. then a vellgeful aroused profetariat or, at least, a vengeful superego or, at the very lewt, the off id a majesty of Kant5 tribunal of pure practical reason. The desperate hope for a rloncontingen t and powerful llly iS, according to Nietzsche, the common Core of Plat nism, of religious insistence on divifle omnipotence, and of Kantian moral philosopIiy. Nietzsche was, l think, right on the button when he offered this diagnoSiS. Whitl ntayana called supernaturalism , th Cliifusion of ideals and power, is nd? that lies behind the Kantian Claire that it is not on[y nicei, but
lTlOFtl Tnfii7iin( to incl ade $trangem withia out mCtfidl COmmunity tlian to ex-

cluile there. If WC aQee with Nietzsche and Santayana on this point, however, we do not fliereby acquire any reason to turn our baCks on the

Enlightenment proJect, as Nie mche did. Nor do we acq uire any revisen to be sardonically pessiinistic about the chances of this project, in the manner ofsuch admirers of Nietzsche as Santayaria, Ortega, Heidegger, Strauss, and Foucault. FOB even III tlgh Nietzsche was quite right to see Kants insistence on un
i ft Nietzsches diagnosis is reinforced by Elizabeth Aiiscombes famous argilmen i that ailieiiis are not entitlod to|4'trennmoml ob!i on.

Ghristianity and the age of the democrac revolutions as signs of human degeneration. He and Kant, alas, shared something with each othcr that neither shared with Harriet Beecher Stowd something that lris Murdoch lios called dryncss" and Jacques Derrida has callecl "phallogocentrism. The common element in the thought of both men ir a desire for puriry. This sort of purity consiste in being not only autonomous, in command of one self, but also in having the kind of self-conscious self-sufficiency that San tre describen as the pcrfect synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself. This synthesis could be attaiiied, Sartre ponted out, only if onu coulcl rid onese If of everytliing sck), sunny, wet, sentimental, and womanish. Although this desire for virile purity links Plato to Kant, the desire to bring as many different kinds of people as possible into a cosmopolis links Kant to Stowc. Kant represente, in the history of morixl thiiikinp, :x transtional stage between the hopeless attempt to convict Thriisy machus of irraonality and the horeful attempt to see evcry new fcatherless biped wlio comes aloiig as one of us. Kant's mistake was to think that the only w to have a inodest, damped-down, nonfanatical version of Clu istiaii brotherhood alter lettirig go of the Christian faith was to revivc the there es of pr eChristian philosophical thought. He wanted to make knovvleclge of a core self n what can be done only by the connual refreshmcn t and re--creatioii of the sclf, through interaction with selvcs as un like itself as possi1lc. Kant perfornied the sort of awkward balancing act tl ut is required in tran sitional pe riods. His project meditcd bemeen a cl wg rationalist traition and a vision of a new; democratic world, the world of what 1bcssi calls the human rights phenomenon." With the advent of th i rhenomeno rt, Int's balanciiig act lios becomc outmoded and irrelcvant. \\'e are nov' in a pciocl positioii to put asicle thc last vesiiges of the idea that htimnn bein gs ar e clistinguis1ie1 by the capacity to know' ratlier thn by the capcities for fricncl ship and intcrmarriage, disiiguishcd by rigorous rationality rather tl1n by hexible sentimentaliry. If we cto so, we shall have dropped the idea that assured knowledge of a trutli about what we have in common is a pt e requisito for moral education, as+bell as the idea of specifically moral nio tix'ation. If

i 3 See jane Tompkins, Smsuliaiinl Dr.sigia. 7 i Cuurof lVorli of Alo.irun f' /9 f 8to (New York: Oxford University Ptess, i 985) , for a trealmeiit of the sentimental nuvel that cliimes with the point I am tryin(; to make here. In hur chapter on Stowe, Toinpkiris san that she is est:ing the reader to set asde some familiar caiegrics for ev'a1unting helion -

MORAL PROGRESO

HUMAN RIGHTS

tations of an intellectual epoch in which the quest for qitasi-scientific know1

edge seemed the best responde to religious exclusionism. Unfortunately, many philosophem, especially in the English-speaking ssorld, are still irying to hold on to the Platonic insistence that the principal duty of human beings is to mamut. That insistence was the lifeline to which ihilosophem in Kant and Hegel thought we had to cling."just as Gemnan the period between Kant and Hegel saw themselves as saving reason from Hume, many English-speaking phlosophers now see themselves as saving reason from Derrida. Btit with the wisdom of hindsight, and with Baiers help, we have learned to read Hume not as a daiigerously frivolous iconoclast but as the wettest, most flexible, least phallogocentric thinker of the Enlightenment. Someclay, I suspect, ouv descendants may xvish that Derridas contemporaries had been able to read him not as a frivolous iconoctast, but rather as a sentimental educator, as anotlier of "the womens moral philosophers."" If one follows Baiers advice, one will see it as the moral educators task not to answer the National egotists Cuestion Why shoultl l be moral? but

rather to answer the much more lrequently posed q uestion Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, :i person Whose habits I find disgustilg? The tradicional answer to the latter Cuestion is Because kinship and CllStom are moraly irreex'ait, irrelex'ant to the obligations im

posed by the recognition of membership in the same spectre. phis has never been very convincing, since it begs the Cuestion at issi3: whetlier were species membership ir, in lact, a suflicieri t surrogate for closer kinsliip. Furthermore, that answer leaves one mide open to Nietzsches rliscorriPiting rejoirider: i/ziI universalistic notiofl, Nietzsche v4ll sneer, w'otild have crossed erhas, an intellcctual, a priest wliose self the wind of onu a slave or, both depend oir getting the rest of in t RCccpt a saesieem and l ivelihood crcd, u n arguable, uncliallcngea ble parados. sentimeiita1 Story that bfiA better sort of answer is the sort of lon g, sad, .
gins, "Becatise this is whut it is like to be in her situacion r.o be f:11 ff ITl

home, amoiig strarigers," or Because she knight become your claugh ter nlaw," or Because her mother lvoulil grieve for her." Such stones, rcpeated and varied over the ceiiturics, nave induced us, the rich, Sale, p we rliil pco plc, to tolcrate and even to cherisli powerlcss people people v'hoSt: a.p
pearance or habita or beliefs at first seenied an insult tO oiiF OiVT1 lTlG SU iClCll-

st)'listic intricacy, psychological iiibilety, epistcmological complcxicy - and io sz:e the senti-

mental novel not as an artifice of eternity answerabJe io certain formal criterio and to certain psycholtgical and pliilosopliical coiicerns, but as a political enterprise, lialfway betwceii sermon and social iheory, that both codifies aiiil altempts to mold the values of its

time ( i e6).

The contraer that Tompkins ilraws lietw'een authors like Siowe ann mate autlor.i sitch as Thorcau, Whitman and Melville, whp are cclebrated as models of iiitelleciiial daring and honesty" (iud) , parallels the cunirasi J trieil to draw' between puhlic iitility and private perfection in my Coiitiiigriizy, /isnj, ctid ofdiriiy (Caiiibridge University Press, i j6q) . I sue t/ncfr Tom i Czdiiii and Af , D ih. w equ I7 brillianl achievements, achicvemeiirs w'e sliould
not attempt to rank h ierarchically, because they scrve mitch dilferent piirposes. Arguing

tiiy, our si:use of the limite of permissible human variatioii. To people who, like Plato and Knnt, bclieve in a philosophicall) asccrt:amable truth about what it is to be a Num:in being, the good work rcmains incomplete as long as we have not ansvvered the Cuestion Yes, ba.t mm l nider a mori uliligation io her?" To people like Humc ancl 6;iicr, it is a Tlitf k Of intellcctua immaturity io raise that Cuestion. but we shall ;o on askiiip that
qiiestion as long as we agree with Plato that it is our biJ my to nou' that lTllkCl$

about which is the botter iiovel is like arguing about which is two supcricir pliilosophical treatise: Mills Ozi Lizriy or Kierkegaartls Phlasa[ilucol Fn nte.
Technically, of course, Kant denicd knowledge in ofder io mate room for weir:xl faith. 13ut

what is traiiscrnderital moral philosophy if not the assurafice that the nonconive imperativo deJivered ria the caminen moral consciousriess shows nte existencc of lact of resscn- a fact about what it is to be a human beiiig, a mticinal ageni, a being that is smcthing more ihgn a bundle of spatiotemporal determinatioiis? Kant was iiever able to explain
how the upshot of transceiidental philosophy could be Knowledge, btit he wirs riever able

to give up the attempt to claiin mitch knowledge. On the erman projcct of defeiiding rea-

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Preas, i 98j). i 5 l hase iliscuased the relaon betwcen Derrida and feminism in Deconstruction, Ideolog)' and Feminiam: A Praginatist View, f-fyw ( g9s). s i o3, und alto in my reply io t : r ssz). Richard Bernstein is, I think, baaically Alexander Nchamas in ' right iii reading Derrida as a mpralist, even though Thomas McCarthy is algo right in sal ing that deconstrucon" is of ni poliiical use.

spn against Hume, see Fred Beiser, Sus Ante pf basan: Gcristi Phlasaphj fran hziiif to fic/ifz

pretend to be successors to the pricsts, had to pretend to 1:now somcth i llg rat1er esotcric. ltume lil his bell to)os1i i3s oct of that pr etense. Bicr, wJi o seems to me both the most original ancl the most ilSCful of contcrn porary moral philosophers, is still trying tijosh us out of it. I think Daier ann)' evelltually succecd, for she W the history of the pase two liiinreG Mears cf ir\OT2il progress on her side. These two centuries are niost easily undcrstoocl not as a period of deepeniiig understanCliiTg of the natiire of rationaliy or of moraliy, but rather as one in which there occurred all astonishingly rapid progreso of sentiments, in which it has become much ensier for us to be moved tn action by sad and sentimental stones.