Human Rights Talk Is Usually Meaningless

by Mats Meeus

“We must respect bodily integrity!” is one of those statements you can’t really challenge without sounding like a Nazi. Bodily integrity, you see, is a human right, and human rights are universal (and equal, fundamental, inalienable — the authors of the declaration didn’t skimp on qualifiers). Human rights have their enemies, but that’s what we have Amnesty International for, right? And when righteous indignation does not prove sufficient, one can always slap on some sanctions and do a drone strike. But something scary is happening. Allegations of human rights violations are finding their way out of the Middle East and into our television studios, and with them something scarier still has landed: human rights discourse.

The core strategy in human rights discourse — whether intentional or not — is derailing practical discussions with hopelessly abstract platitudes. Let’s say you’re discussing measures to deal with the rising COVID caseload. Might a (partial, indirect) vaccine mandate be in order? There are some very serious, practical objections to taking this step: it might increase political polarization, cause civil unrest or become untenable in the future due to new variants, to name a few.

This is not, however, the kind of objection you will hear. The most common reaction to if- fy-sounding ideas like vaccine mandates is to bring up human rights. By mentioning bodily integrity during a discussion about vaccine mandates, you can turn a conversation about very real people who are dying very real deaths into a fun language game about terms made up by a bunch of UN delegates seventy years ago. This conversation will almost inevitably dissolve into meaninglessness, because there is only one acceptable response to “we must respect bodily integrity” — “yes, of course.” article continues on page 9

That’s because we should respect bodily integrity. World War Two was bad! The crux of the issue lies in two words: fundamental and inalienable. Because human rights are fundamental and inalienable, we tend to treat them as terminal values and refuse to assign an explicit worth to them, although implicitly that’s practically all we do. Take the curfew that was imposed last winter: it was arguably the most drastic curtailment of human rights since the war. Nevertheless, the government thought it was the only way to prevent overflowing hospitals and thousands more deaths.

That means that the government assigned a certain price — a specific number of hospital admissions and deaths — to the right to free assembly, which the curfew violated. If you thought the curfew was imposed too soon, your price for free assembly is higher than the government’s, and if you thought it was imposed too late, your price is lower. Everyone who’s ever thought about COVID policy has implicit prices for human rights and civil liberties; the problem is that we never talk about them.

Suppose “we must respect bodily integrity” was said during a discussion about vaccine mandates, which, if implemented successfully, would probably end the pandemic in this country. If the pandemic was over, less people would die from COVID, less people would die from suicide and less people would have their livelihoods destroyed by lockdown measures. And the only thing we would have to sacrifice is an abstract value!

So we can bring this maddeningly abstract statement down to earth with a very simple response: “yes, I agree. How many deaths, precisely, is it worth to you?” This is the fundamental question: we all agree that bodily integrity is important, but most of us also agree that, at some point, the pile of bodies becomes a bit too high. When is that point? Where is the cutoff? Because of the way human rights are sold to us