Vulnerability and Human Rights

Essays on Human Rights

by Bryan S. Turner

The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars―followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing―has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

160 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2006

Reviews

[Celeste · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bryan S. Turner attempts in this book to establish a basis for the universality of human rights in vulnerability as the common ontological condition of humanity. Arguing against cultural relativism as epistemological disinterest and ethical detachment, Turner argues that sociologists ought to normatively about human rights, rather than simply descriptively. He then goes on to discuss a few kinds of rights in greater depth.

Lofty goals, which I appreciate, and an underlying argument that I wanted to agree with. However, Turner tries to do too much and fails to really support his arguments. His discussion of cultural relativism is dismissive and fails to engage with the issues that relativists struggle with.

Personally, I am an emotional universalist but an intellectual relativist: in that my instincts and emotions insist that there must be a thing called 'human rights' and some things that are just wrong, but the more I try to justify those feelings the more I realize that while most people would agree with those general statements, the particulars of what those rights should be or what, ultimately, is just wrong are defined differently in different places and different times. This is especially true since 'cultural rights,' that is the idea that people have a right to their culture, or put differently, that minority cultures in particular have a right to survive, are now recognized in international human rights documents. But the survival of cultures often is interpreted as requiring the curtailment of other rights of people (usually women) within those cultures. But I digress. The point is, that cultural relativism, far from being "ethical detachment" is in fact deeply ethically committed. It is committed to respecting other ways of thinking and being, to respecting the vast complexing of issues like rights and avoiding intellectual colonialism. Relativism can be taken to an extreme, and by focusing on those extreme examples Turner is able to dismiss relativistic arguments out of hand. But he doesn't actually address any the real concerns.

Ultimately, I think my emotions are right--that is that 'human rights' are meaningful and that there can be a universal standard for defining them. One of these days, I hope to convince my rational side. I had hoped Bryan Turner's book would help me do that. Alas, it could not.

I would be less offended by his dismissal of relativism if his argument was not Eurocentric in other ways. He writes "Colonialism, often considered to be an aspect of a civilizing mission to bring an Enlightenment culture to primitive cultures, and yet colonialism and slavery involved extraordinary brutality." (p.15) Colonialism and slavery did not "involve" brutality, they were inherently brutal by definition in part because of the condescension involved in the concept of a civilizing mission. You can't take the brutality away and still have colonialism left standing somehow more pure.

Like much of human rights discourse, he describes human rights violations as "out there" rather than within the 'civilized' West. Human rights violations, according to Turner, happen when states collapse. Thus he refers to Yugoslavia and Darfur and Cambodia as sites of human rights violations, particularly through war and ethnic cleansing. Clearly these are terrible human rights violations. But he fails to mention the fact that the United States has the highest per capita prison rate in the world, or the gross human rights violations committed by the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, except as an after thought in the last few pages of the book. He thus does not see human rights violations as things often committed by the state even when the state is powerful, stable, and democratic.