similarly embodied, to respect this embodiment as a site of meaning and, ultimately, to attribute universal rights to these beings. The very fact that we are embodied is supposed to imply that a certain practice of political language—the language of human rights—is justified. While I see no reason to doubt this premise, there is good reason to be sceptical about the inference: why would a specific view on bodily existence necessitate any particular political discourse? Let’s look at the premise: ‘[m]y own relation to my body is not that of an owner to an object; and to recognise another material thing as a human body is to recognise that it is not reducible in this way to an object among others’ . It is not just that my body is absolutely mine in a sense that contrasts with ‘my car’ or ‘my shoes’—rather, it is that the whole idea of ownership is inappropriate. Rather than owning a body, I am embodied. This makes a strict dualism between soul and body à la Descartes untenable. My soul is not a ‘speaking and thinking thing’ that exists alongside my body as Descartes would have it—rather, the body is inherently the vehicle of my soul and thought. My soul is fully expressed in my body; the body is the inherent vehicle of my soul’s communication. The body is the site of meaning. At least from a Christian-Wittgensteinian perspective, we must concur with the validity of this point regarding bodily existence. But what sort of political content does this idea carry? How is this idea supposed to determine, in any way, the way we perceive human rights? Vague political or ethical content is not enough—Dr. Williams is aiming much higher; he is aiming for a ‘grounding of the discourse’ of rights and to show that ‘rights have to be more than pure assertion or […] necessary fictions to secure a maximal degree of social harmony’. Here, we ought to ask ourselves: how could anything as complex and politically heated as universal political rights follow from a thesis about how we are embodied? It’s a basic flaw of Dr. Williams’s essay that he provides no answer to this question, which makes his argument seem like speculative philosophy at its worst. It is as if the philosopher discovers a hitherto overlooked, yet necessary, fact about humans, and then concludes that certain political measures must be implemented. The basic weakness of such a speculative line of reasoning is that it ignores the inherent friction between necessary facts and historical phenomena: necessary facts are supposedly eternal or timeless, while the emergence of the discourse of universal human rights is a concrete historical phenomenon peaking in 1948 with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What we need here is, in general, an account of how the ahistorical and universal relates to the
historical and particular. What we can require, in specific, is at least a sketch of their relation in the special case of human rights—a sketch that Dr. Williams significantly omits. More important than these omissions is the fact that Dr. Williams’s argument is at odds with a very well founded distinction within philosophy: namely, the fact/value-distinction. This distinction, in its most fundamentally Humean form, states that ought cannot be derived from is. We cannot derive from the fact that such-and-such is the case that such-and-such ought to be the case. We cannot move from the fact that taxes are in fact high to the political imperative that they ought to be lower. And Dr. Williams does, indeed, make an inference of the same form: we are in fact embodied in a particular way and, hence, we ought to respect the universality of human rights. The fact/value distinction relies on the assumption that factual and moral claims are justified in radically different ways. It has, however, become fashionable to deny this assumption and the ‘moral realism’ which results from such a denial has become increasingly tenable, as is seen in the works of John McDowell in analytical philosophy and Raymond Boudon in contemporary continental philosophy². Denying the fact/value distinction does not, however, answer the question as to how any inference about human rights can be made from the fact of human embodiment. In the more liberal terms that Wittgenstein employs, which do not respect a rigid fact/value-distinction, we are still left with the question of how the norms surrounding talk about our bodies can imply anything about how we ought to talk about rights. Both are entirely different language games—why should the norms of one language-game affect those of an entirely separate discursive practice? It is important to note that Dr. Williams is indeed urging us to make a change. In our current discursive practices, it is not obviously nonsense to deny that a person has rights in the same sense that it is nonsense to deny that a person is embodied. To say that “Dr. Williams went for a walk, but unfortunately he had no body” is nonsense. This concatenation of personal pronouns or personal names and the terms designating their bodies has no ordinary use and is in violation of the very meaning of its constituent terms. Conversely, it is seems perfectly sensible to say: “Dr. Williams wants a fair trial, but unfortunately he has no rights”. Such a concatenation of personal pronouns or personal names and the concept of a right has a use. Indeed, its use is widespread: for example in identifying the cases in which the standards of the Western justice system have not been meet. We may disagree with the fact that such-and-such Philosophy 27