JOHN TIRMAN: So
we're going to begin. I'm John Tirman. Welcome to this
session on philosophy. Why is there philosophy
at the Center for International Studies? Well, we'll find out. On behalf of the
center, welcome. Our co-sponsors are the MIT
Bookstore, MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. And I want to remind
you that there are books of Anat's book
for sale out near the food. In typical format, today's
event will conclude with a Q&A. And we want you to ask one brief
question, or briefly stated. And use a microphone, because
we are recording this session. So just be mindful of that. It's an honor today to
welcome our longtime friend and colleague, Anat
Biletzki, to discuss her new book, Philosophy
of Human Rights, a Systematic Introduction. Not just any introduction,
it's a systematic introduction. So that's going to be special. She is the Albert Schweitzer
Professor of Philosophy at Quinnipiac University. She's a research affiliate
here at the center. And she is co-director of the
Human Rights and Technology Fellowship Program. Her publications include
Talking Wolves, Thomas Hobbs on the Language of Politics
and the Politics of Language and (Over)Interpreting
Wittgenstein. Did I say that correctly? Wittgenstein. She served as
chairperson of B'tzelem the Israeli Information
Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
from 2001 to 2006, and was nominated among the
1,000 women for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She'll be followed
by two discussants. The first IS our own Sally
Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department
of Linguistics and Philosophy, and Serena Parekh, Associate
Professor of Philosophy and director of the
Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program at
Northeastern University. And last, but not least,
moderating the discussion will be Ken Oye,
who is Professor of Political Science
here at MIT and Professor of Data Systems and Society
in the School of Engineering, director of the program
on Emerging Technologies. So that's a lot to take in. And again, we'll have Q&A after. And we'll begin with Anat. [APPLAUSE] ANAT BILETZKI: Hello, thank you. It's so wonderful to be here. I first came to MIT
in general, and CIS, in particular, which was
so out of line for anyone doing philosophy, at
least in those years-- many years ago-- to
work on human rights. And John has been
with me, or I've been with him, and
Michel, and other people, and Ken-- people who have
been working with, ever since. And particularly,
on human rights. So it's been a smooth
trajectory all along. And in that sense,
this book is a finale-- maybe, a beginning
of something new, but finale for those years. Let me just dive right in. It is called a
Systematic Introduction. I think today, I'll be
anything but systematic. I am going to merely talk
about three points that went into making this book. One started it, one
almost put a halt on it, and the third has been
following me all along. They're called philosophy,
critique, and Israel-Palestine. You can guess what is what. Philosophy-- so the
first question is, of course, why does one want to
do philosophy of human rights? Human rights is
usually addressed in academia, of course,
either in political science or in the law schools,
not much in philosophy. Philosophy has been much
later getting on board, and much less of it
on board than the work the law schools
do on human rights or the political scientists. So I just felt this urge,
as I do about everything, to problematize it-- not to philosophize it, but
to problematize human rights, since I had been doing
human rights on the ground, so to speak, for many,
many, many years. So that was the
impetus for doing Philosophy of Human
Rights, but what does it mean to do philosophy? And this is not Philosophy 101
to tell you what is philosophy. For me, it means asking
conceptual questions analytically and critically. Those are the three things-- conceptual, analytic,
and critical. So the point is,
of course, what are the concepts that invigorate
us when we do human rights. There is, of course, human-- what is the human? There is, of course,
the concept of rights. There is always dignity,
dignity, dignity. And I'll return to that,
talk of equality, of liberty. There are usual suspects--
conceptual suspects-- that go into any discussion
of human rights. And I thought that's
what I would do. Just, in some
organized fashion, go through a lot of concepts that
have to do with human rights. Theory-- is there theory here? And Sally, I hope, will
come to that later. There is a feeling, in
some philosophical circles, that if you present a theory-- a philosophical theory--
you then go to the ground and apply that theory. That is not what I do
when I do philosophy. That is not how I
think of philosophy. But the question was,
how can I systematically present theories
of human rights-- not "a theory," but
"theories" of human rights. And that was, I think, the
thought I had originally. Here I am presenting
theories of human rights, and let's see what
to do with them. That didn't work. And I'll get to the
reason why it didn't work when I talk about critique. It didn't work just telling
the theory of human rights and then applying it. The other way
worked much better, which was investigating what
is going on in human rights now through a conceptual
perspective, thinking of what is going on now
through a philosophizing of it. And that was what I tried to do. Talk about refugee rights--
the question was, of course, who and what is a refugee? Women's rights-- what
is gender equality? Disability was a real hard one. How do you even start
talking conceptually about that issue of disability? So I was working from the
ground up, so to speak, trying to figure out the
analysis of these concepts that we all use, we
all think through, when we do human rights. At some point, I became
very skeptical thinking about these, as perhaps
not legitimately in the human rights arena. Maybe it's not
really human rights. And there was
always that practice holding me to the ground. What we do when we do human
rights, those of us who are parts of the organizations. And I had the good luck to
be a part of the tragedy of human rights in Israel. So that was the
map that I thought I would draw when I started. And then critique came about. How do I criticize? And critique for me
is not criticism. They are different. Again, philosophers
use the word critique in very interesting ways. But I have to admit
that at that point, when I tried to think about
critique, I stopped writing. I could no longer figure out
what I was presenting here. And that brought
about a long hiatus-- not a stop, but a long hiatus. And I still don't know
if what I have managed to present as a critique makes
sense or any sort of organized systematic sense. Let's face it. Human rights theory and theories
are a child of liberalism writ large. People who talk
human rights usually, 99% percent of the
time, talk liberalism. And certain issues in
human rights or issues in political philosophy-- that long conflict between
equality and liberty-- well, liberalism won out. A certain liberalism won out. And liberty took
over human rights, much more than equality. Individual versus group--
the individual won out. Human rights are human
rights of individuals. Here and there, you hear
talk about group rights. But they're usually quietened. Proper disclosure,
I am not a liberal. So critiquing human
rights seriously means critiquing liberalism. And I was worried
about being caught up in this anti-liberalism
that is so tempting. The question was, how do
we look at human rights differently while
critiquing liberalism? Are we still speaking
about human rights? And the one chapter,
not a long chapter in here, that's called
Philosophical Critique of Human Rights is the one
where I brought in the heroes and heroines
of some of our lives-- those of us who live philosophy. I'll just mention the names. We start with Karl
Marx, of course. We go through Michel Foucault,
Emmanuel Levinas, Etienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, and
always, always, always, Hannah Arendt. I hope those names just
ring certain bells. They are definitely not a
part of any systematic work. They're a part of
trying to unearth what is going on here when
you talk about human rights, not through liberalism. So as I say, that's the part
that took a long time writing. And then I landed back on the
comforting zones of criticism-- not critique-- arising
from very conventional political philosophy,
even people in the law. And there you've got the
current contemporary active philosophical criticism
of human rights. I'm speaking of Alan Buchanan,
or Joseph Rasa, or Charles Bates, or Michael
Ignatieff, even, who are always talking about the
law and politics writ large-- some great idea of
political theory. There are people like
Marianne Glendon, who thinks that we are overdoing
it in the way we talk about rights, and
David Kennedy who has an amazing line that
says, "We have met the empire, and it is us-- us, being the human rightists." And every time I
see that sentence, I think, where are
you coming from? And when, last, have you
been within human rights? And then, of course, there are
the very wonderful thinkers, starting with Makau Matua,
Stephen Hopgood, Conor Gearty, and Samuel Moines,
who bring us back to Wittgenstein's rough ground. They want us to do human
rights as politics writ small-- as activism. So that type of criticism got me
back on the ground, yet again. And then there is
Israel-Palestine. And I have mentioned,
I keep trying to stress that this was
a book on the philosophy of human rights. And that didn't
mean taking a theory and applying it to
any place or any time, let alone Israel-Palestine. But it did mean, for me,
making it relevant to real life and to my real
human rights life. There are very few illustrations
in the book, very few examples. It's a book of philosophy. There are not many case studies. Except in the case
of Israel-Palestine, there are two case studies. One has to do with the
Palestinian refugees, which is the ultimate story
of refugee rights. The other with that
thing in Israel called the security wall,
sometimes called the separation wall, sometimes called
the separation fence, sometimes called all
sorts of other things. And the way someone calls that
wall places them immediately in a certain political place. So those are two case studies
that I couldn't stay away from. And they seem, I think, out
of place for the systematicity again. But they were things
that I had to say there. As I said, I had the luck
of being in those places at that time. What I want to do
to put all of this together is, to read from
the book the very beginning, and the preface, and the
very end, and the epilogue. And I hope that what I read
will somehow put together the philosophy, the
critique, and of course, Israel-Palestine. This is the very beginning,
almost page number two. "My particular local
Israeli-Palestinian human rights setting consisted,
during these past decades, of the human rights
organization, B'tzelem, the Israeli Information
Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. The name of the organization,
its provenance, and development is a story in its own
right, and uncannily reflects some of the
very questions that must be dealt with in a
philosophy of human rights. B'tzelem, literally,
means 'in the image of.' It is a partial quote
from the book of Genesis. And this is the quote. 'So god
created man in his own image, in the image of God created
he him.'" By the way, he just created man that way. He created man and woman. But he only created
man in his image. But we'll leave that for
another conversation. "In Hebrew, the
four English words, 'in the image of' are voiced
by only one word-- b'tzelem-- in the image of God,
becoming b'tzelem Elohim. The interpretation of that
verse and of the idea that man was created in the image of
God has, since antiquity, supplied religious
and secular thinkers with a panoply of conceptual
challenges regarding the human being's
likeness to God-- free will, power,
behavior, exceptionalism, and corporeality, et cetera. But the modern, explicit reading
of the term b'tzelem calls it to serve as a
synonym for dignity. The human essence,
touted by the claim that we're created
in God's images is precisely our
inherent dignity. And it is the claim of
such essential dignity that initiates, for both
believers and nonbelievers, the concept of human rights. Unsurprisingly then,
the NGO, B'tzelem, by name and in practice,
has also served to expose, in my mind, problems
that accompany the investigation
of human rights, their religious grounding,
their moral bases, their politicization,
and their universality, to name just an obvious few. B'tzelem was scarcely
founded in 1989 when a philosopher
friend, Adi Ophir, wrote an article in
the weekend magazine of a popular newspaper--"
it doesn't exist anymore-- "Davar, that was
called--" the article-- "Documentation as an
Act of Resistance. And it stopped many human rights
do-gooders in their tracks. In the setting of the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, despite
accepting the presupposition that human rights
organizations in that setting were intent on
exposing and fighting against the violations
of human rights that the occupation
entailed, Ophir showed how working
within the system-- that is, as a law-abiding,
normative organization-- led us into collaboration
with the powers that be. Using both conceptual
and political argument, a fear swept the rug out from
under our feet, so to speak. He put the seed of doubt into
our heretofore complacent enterprise of
liberal human rights. And now, almost 40 years later,
I hold fast to the quaking that that early criticism
evoked in us, both activists and philosophers. It is the criticism of the
liberal idea of human rights, but also of the
on-the-ground doings of its practitioners
that therefore occupies the final
chapters of this book." So that's how B'tzelem started,
right at the beginning. It was good for philosophers
because you don't want to go straight ahead. You always want to figure
out what's going on. The second last page
says the following. This is the epilogue. "We shall end with
a story, this time a real story, a real
and tragic story. It happened in 1997 in
the occupied Palestinian territories, during
the years when there seemed to be some movement
in the direction of a peace agreement." This is between Israelis
and Palestinians. "It is an ironic
happenstance that in times of relative political quiet when
the guns are not incessantly shooting and hope is in the
air, human rights organizations are welcomed into
the social fold, rather than despised
as unsolicited censure. It was in that kind of ambiance
that in a village near Hebron, a Palestinian holy city
to Muslims and Jews, a four-year-old girl was raped
by a mentally-disabled young man while the village people
were all celebrating a wedding. The little girl readily
identified the rapist. She knew him from
the neighborhood. And he was immediately
apprehended by the Palestinian
Authority, just in time, it turned
out, for he was about to be lynched by
the enraged villagers. It seemed that both the
Palestinian enforcement organs and the Palestinian
judicial system were in control. This control,
however, was elusive. Within three days,
the official figures of the Palestinian Authority-- the political pseudo
government that had been charged with
governing some parts of the occupied territories--
had incarcerated him, indicted him, tried
him, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. This seemed to hardly be a
fair and legal procedure, conversant with human rights
and lawful constraints. B'tzelem, the Israeli
Information Center, and the equally conscientious
Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Ramallah,
in a seemingly commendable cooperative human
rights project, began investigating the
events, collecting evidence, receiving witnesses'
reports, tallying up the various stories, all
with the purpose in mind of defending the young man's
human rights to due process, at the least. We do not here wish to
suggest that the young man's rights were unimportant. We do not in any way
wish to impugn them. We only wish to point to the
ignorance and blindness which accompanies certain well-meaning
activists and advocates, while they're pursuing their
quote, 'enlightened goals.' For it came to pass that
within three months, the village was in
a social shambles. The little girl's father
had divorced his wife for having failed to
watch over her daughter during the festivities. And the men who were married
to the wife's four sisters did the same, for
traditional religious reasons of family honor. The young man's family
who had watched over his, in their own respect, for
years, were the victims of tangible ostracism. Some young people who had been
responsible for keeping order throughout the wedding were
shamed into withdrawing from any public activities. Long-term relationships built
on familial and social trust were ripped apart. And all of this, as a
result of the diligence of the human rights
organizations. For these probes had
exposed what would otherwise have remained hidden. Enlightenment deplores the
darkness of hidden secrets. Enlightenment distributes
information freely. Enlightenment does this
with pure motives concerning the human condition. But enlightenment, in the guise
of human rights, in this story, brought about so many
added tragedies." And then I go into some
conceptual thinking about universalism,
relativism, and all of that. "Our tale of the
little girl near Hebron and her wretched rapist may sway
some to the side of relativism. Was it not the naive
universalism of human rights workers that brought about
the disasters of the village? Would not a more particularistic
context-sensitive approach have been better suited
to deal with that event? Perhaps, and perhaps not." And then I end with
philosophy again. "The tragic happenings of the
village near Hebron can be perhaps more effortlessly
interpreted as an instance of what John Dewey was pointing
at when he said, quote, 'The individual may be moved by
sympathy to labor for the good of others, but because
of lack of deliberation and thoughtfulness, be quite
ignorant of what their good really is and do a great deal
of harm.'" End of Dewey's quote. "Indeed, the brand of
philosophical systemetization that we have been
tracking here has often been issued as being too
alienated, too demanding, too disconnected, from the real
life of human rights work. Perhaps, precisely the right
attitude to the deep questions of human rights-- thought and activism--
is the Dewey-an approach. Call it the pragmatic
personal approach. One should inculcate and
teach human rights vocabulary. One should insist on
its internalization. One should estimate
real-life situations. One should address real
motivations and interests of politicians. And one should never lose sight
of the human contexts in which we fight for human rights." Thank you. [APPLAUSE] I am now supposed to call
Serena to the podium. And again, proper disclosure-- Serena, and Sally, and I have
been working on these things together for many years. SERENA PAREKH: Thank you, Anat. It's so great to see what a
fantastic turn out there is. If anyone is sitting at the
back and wants to take a seat, there are a couple
of seats up front. It won't disturb me. So let me begin by
congratulating Anat on a truly excellent book. It's incredibly rich, spans
so many different kinds of scholarship, and is
engaged with both the practice and the struggles for
human rights on the ground, in addition to covering
an expansive philosophical literature. It's incredible. So what I like to
do in my comments is simply to point out a few
of the features of the book that I thought were particularly
insightful and interesting, and then suggest
a couple of areas that we might extend
Anat's argument. So the first part
of my comments is called How philosophy
can help us to understand how to make
human rights work better. As someone who's been teaching
an introductory Philosophy of Human Rights course off
and on for the past 15 years, I can say that the
idea of another book on the philosophy of human
rights filled me with dread. I have come to groan whenever
another book comes out, claiming to have a new
theory of human rights, or to have solved the
philosophical paradoxes of human rights-- paradoxes, I should point out,
that are often only of interest to philosophers,
and are generally irrelevant to the
actual struggles by people to realize
their human rights. So it was with much relief
that I read Anat's book and found that she
doesn't just engage with these intellectual puzzles
for the sake of engaging with puzzles, but
with a genuine concern for developing our
understanding of the topic so that both scholars
and activists can move human rights forward. She engages with the way that
philosophical tensions actually impact the practice
of human rights, and the ways that we make
claims for and advocate for human rights. Take her discussion of
women's rights, as an example. It's widely accepted that
women's rights around the world are in dire straits. And the sheer extent of
the human rights violations against women mean that, in
effect, they are not women. Let me read part of a quote
from Catharine McKinnon that Anat quotes
to illustrate this. "If women were
human, would we be cash cropped from
Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we be worked without
pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't
enough, or when money men tire of us? Would we be allowed
to work for pay, be made to work at
the most menial jobs, and exploited at barely
starvation levels? If women were human, would
we have so little voice in public deliberations and
in government in countries where we lived? There are many other examples
that could be mentioned here." The problem, of course,
is not only the extent of women's human
rights violations, but also how governments
respond to them. Very often, these
violations are treated as secondary and less important
to the real human rights issues, usually understood
to be ones that affect men. Recently, a 7-year-old
girl was killed in Mexico, sparking a series of protests
by women who took to the streets and defaced public buildings
in response to what they took to be an insufficient
response by the government. Seven-year-old Fatima was one
of the 10 women killed every day in Mexico. The government responded by
asking the protesters not to paint on the walls
and to be patient. As one activist put
it, the government is more concerned with
preserving monuments than saving women's lives. And this is the
crux of the problem. Given how extensive women's
human rights violations are and the indifference
they are often met with, how should we advocate
for women's human rights? The solution in the latter
part of the 20th century was to claim that
quote, "women's rights are human rights." And while the slogan
was much used, it's unclear that it
was very effective. And while there are
many reasons for this, Anat helps us to understand
how the philosophical tension at the heart of the slogan
may have contributed to this. So this is the
paradox at the heart of claiming that women's
rights are human rights. This is Anat's point. "It seems that, to accept
that the group of women are not a part of
the group human, and therefore need
different rights. It accepts the kind
of misogynistic logic that work to actually
deny women rights." In Anat's words,
"The more rights are specified as
women's rights, the more they reinforce the definition
of women as different, both legally and in
ordinary language. Yet without doing that,
that is, without stressing that women's rights are
different from what is usually assumed to be human
rights, women's rights do not get sufficient attention. The more a right is
accepted as gender neutral, the more it will enhance
the structural deep-seated privilege of men. Both approaches seem to
undermine women's ability to claim their human rights." What I found helpful
about Anat's approach and her way of
articulating this problem is that it was not done
merely as an academic exercise or to discredit human
rights as illogical-- as others have done,
as Anat mentioned. Anat's goal in pointing
out this tension is to help us to get to the
heart of why we haven't made more progress, intellectually
or practically, on women's human rights. The divide, as I had
previously understood it, was with universal
human rights that focused on the rights needed in
the public sphere, the rights to vote and to run for
office, for example, that are often associated with men. While the rights that
are important to women are the rights that have to
do with the private realm-- the right to be free from
domestic violence, for example. Anat's way of framing the
paradox of human rights, actually illuminates
why just focusing on the public-private
divide is not sufficient and why re-conceptualizing
women's human rights might be necessary
in order to realize human rights in practice. I left thinking
that I really needed to think more deeply
about what this means for the future of
women's human rights. Now, in the spirit of
pushing the conversation, let me suggest a few ways
that Anat's argument might be extended, and some
elements of human rights that I would like to have
seen developed more deeply. To be sure, I'm not
critiquing Anat's book for not talking about all the
things that I find interesting. Given the wide array
of topics covered and the sheer scope of
scholarship discussed, such criticism would
be petty, at best. So I just want to
suggest some ways that we could extend her argument. While I particularly liked
Anat's chapter on the burning human rights issues of women's
rights, disability rights, and refugees, I would
have liked to see a more explicit engagement
with human rights in the US. There's a couple of
reasons for this. First, many readers are likely
to be located in the US, and are eager to understand
how human rights could be used to think about
our political challenges. Second, and perhaps
more importantly, I think that many students,
and many people more broadly, think that human
rights are something that other countries
have a problem with, but that we, with our
Constitution and Bill of Rights, don't really need. I would have liked to
see more of an emphasis on the failure of
the US to ratify many of the central pieces
of international human rights law that are widely
accepted by other countries, including the Convention on
the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified
by every country except for us and Somalia. It would have been
interesting to see her discussion of
economic rights, for example, tied to poverty
and homelessness in the US. The report on poverty in
the US, written last summer by the UN Special Rapporteur
on Poverty, Philip Alston, was discounted, unsurprisingly,
by current officials, and many in the US. Nikki Haley, the
ambassador of the time, said that the UN should focus
on countries in Africa that do so much worse things. And I think this is all
too common an assumption. And many of the
issues and problems Anat discusses in her book,
do readily apply to the US. But perhaps, connecting Anat's
ideas to human rights in the US is something that teachers
can encourage their students to do in the classroom. Finally, what will students
take from Anat's book? I read it as someone who teaches
an introduction to human rights class, and had my
students in mind. In my experience, students'
attitudes about human rights fall on a spectrum. On the one hand,
students start out genuinely hopeful about the
potential for human rights to achieve a kind of
progressive social justice they hope to see in the
world, around women's rights, LGBT rights, refugee
rights, and among others. And they often
grow disillusioned when they realize the challenges
associated with human rights and the "one step
forward, two steps back" nature of human rights progress. And I appreciate that,
at several points, Anat is attentive to the
hopelessness that sometimes emerges when students
begin to study and critique human rights. On the other hand,
some are inherently skeptical about human
rights, and worry that it's ineffective without a
coercive enforcement mechanism. Or they fear that its
political power will lead it to be abused by leaders. Some are old enough to remember
the way the Iraq invasion was justified on human rights
grounds, at least for a time. What should students
take from Anat's book? Or to put it in Anat's
words, "After thinking about all the
philosophical theories and on-the-ground
problems, we must ask, where do we go from here?" And I think the answer she
gives speaks to another strength of Anat's books. Her answer is,
embrace the political. But what exactly does this mean? Her discussion of the political
is woven throughout her book. Anat urges us to
think of politics more broadly than
the usual way we think about it, meaning
institutional policies or legal approaches. As Anat mentioned, as
activism or in the sense of Hannah Arendt acting with
other people, collectively. Anat encourages us to make
a distinction between Human Rights, with capital
letters, and human rights with lowercase letters,
a distinction that is lost when you are speaking. This is a distinction I had
never considered before, but one I think she is
absolutely right about. Capitalized, Human Rights refers
to the institutional exercise of power. That is, organized institutional
bodies, law, courts, organizations that raise
money, write reports, run international campaigns,
lobby governments, and in Hopgood's
phrase, "claim to speak with a singular authority in the
name of humanity as a whole." Lowercase human
rights politics refers to the down-to-earth,
informal, activist version of human rights. Local and transnational
networks of activists who bring publicity to
abuses in communities and try to exert pressure
on governments and the UN for action. They use fewer formal
mechanisms and tend to use the language of human
rights in a more flexible way. Anat's point is that a lot
of the problems students encounter with human rights-- the disillusionment with
institutional mechanisms, the potential for
abuse of power-- are mostly concerns with
capitalized Human Rights politics. When we look on-the-ground work
of human rights activism being done by individuals and in
communities to further deepen human rights, we see
that human rights work is a lot less problematic. And I love this distinction. I think it's a
really helpful way to help students understand how
the language of human rights can change things and the
importance of individual action and activity. It's a point that I think
Hannah Arendt would have really appreciated, since it reflects
the power of natality, the power that we,
as individuals, have to work collectively
to change the world. It gives us a way
to think about how our own actions can be effective
to further human rights. But I worry that
in 2020, students will not find this
idea convincing, and fear that this review relies
too much on a tacit assumption that the arc of history
always bends toward justice. Too often today, we see people
using lowercase human rights methods to mobilize
against rights, such as trans rights, women's
reproductive freedoms, and refugee rights. That is, they are using
the on-the-ground politics to push back against
human rights, or at least in favor of their own
interpretation of human rights, such as the right to
life, the right to bear arms, and the right for,
say, a white supremacist to march and speak in public. And I think it's
important to acknowledge that the lowercase human rights
methods can cut both ways. But perhaps, then,
that is right, that this kind of
political engagement is as good as it gets. And it's on-the-ground
struggle for human rights that is the core
of how we should engage with human rights. Anat's book, then, is extremely
helpful in this endeavor. Though now repetitive, let
me close with the final words from Anat's book that
summarize the attitude she hopes her book will
inculcate in readers, and an attitude,
I think, would be great to have for people
engaging with these struggles around human rights. She writes, "Perhaps,
precisely the right attitude to the deep questions
of human rights thought and activism is
the Dewey-an approach. Call it the pragmatic
personal approach. One should inculcate and
teach human rights vocabulary. One should insist on
its internalization. One should estimate
real-life situations. One should address real
motivations and interests of politicians. And one should never lose sight
of the human context in which we fight for human rights." Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SALLY HASLANGER: Everybody,
nice to see you all here. So you're going to hear some
common themes in what Anat talked about, and
Serena talked about, and even some of
the same quotes. So sorry for repetition. So the book is amazing. It's insightful, encompassing,
and beautifully written. There are three things I
especially love about it. First, It's not a
defense of a position. So as Serena was saying,
it's not like, OK, this is my theory
of human rights. It's a practice of questioning. As she says, quote, "The focus
on questioning emphasizes the pluralistic, non-dogmatic,
never-ending nature of philosophy," unquote. Anat's questioning
approaches the topic from multiple angles-- conceptual, analytical,
historical, legal, practical, and critical. And the goal is to get
a sense of the problems, an understanding of the terrain,
and not to solve the tensions, but to acknowledge
them and to give us resources for navigating them. So if you think about it, this
is a kind of pragmatist theme, I think, comes from-- if you want to get
from point A to point B and you don't know what
the terrain is like, you're going to
be much worse off. So if you've got
this book, you've got a sense of the terrain,
and you can navigate it. But that doesn't
presuppose we're all going in the same
direction, all trying to get to the same place, or
all coming from the same place. Second, Anat brings to
the discussion, not only her philosophical training,
but her activist experience, and her deep
commitment to justice. She recognizes that the
issues are political, and they never cease
to be represented as such throughout the book. And third, although
Anat believes in philosophical
inquiry and that we should "teach and
inculcate human rights vocabulary and insist on
internalization," in the end, actually in the
epilogue, she questions whether systematic philosophical
approach can be relied on, and whether it might
lead us to do great harm that we might avoid
only by drawing on a sensibility that emerges
in the face of human tragedy. Her brilliance, her deep
values, and her humanity are vividly demonstrated
throughout the book. So I'm not going to
offer a criticism of the book, of the
arguments, or the questions, or how she's going about it. What I'd like to do is enter
into a dialogue with her on behalf of some of
the peoples that she's discussing in the book. It's not really a dialogue. There's more of
us than just two. But there's a kind
of conversation, at certain points in the
book, about the critiques of human rights
from philosophers. So I'm going to talk
a bit about that on behalf of some of the people
that she's characterizing, specifically Marx
Foucault, Joan Scott, Wendy Brown, and a bit less, in
this particular piece, Arendt. And I'm going to try and
extend her engagement with these authors. So according to this
critique, there's something overly
individualistic, overly atomistic,
overly abstract, about the focus on human rights. As Anat says, "This is not to
deny that human rights have a conceptual worth or even
a political value, yet perhaps on this
approach," she says, "rights that exist
in the legal domain, and may, at the same time,
alleviate extreme suffering, do not really address the
essential point at hand." So I think it's worth
trying to articulate what this "essential
problem at hand" might be, if it's not relieving
the extreme suffering. Anat rightly
characterizes the critics is pointing to a paradox in
the logic of human rights. So what is that paradox? There are a variety. Serena pointed to some. And I've pointed to some. So this is one of
the many paradoxes. So Anat suggests, at
base, human rights discourse has a
self-contradictory attitude towards men as both autonomous
and a member of society. You might say, well, what's
so contradictory about that? You can be autonomous
and in society. There is no
self-contradiction there. We do it all the time, right? There's nothing
weird about that. But she also goes on to
suggest that insisting on women's rights is
not a way to free women, but quote, "encircles women
inside a legal semantic fence that is continuing to speak
in neutral universal rights jargon, permits traditional
social hierarchical presuppositions to
continue as before." But what is this semantic
fence that is enclosing me? And why isn't claiming
my rights a way to break through the fence? So these are
characterizations that Anat gives of her interlocutors. And so I'm going to try and
not play devil's advocate. As they often say, the devil
doesn't need an advocate. The devil has plenty. But I'm going to try and
sort of spell this out about what this
paradox might be. So I think all of these
authors are presupposing a view of human life as a social life. It is life within society
within a social structure. To exist within a
social structure is, however, to be shaped
by it, to be disciplined, in Foucault's view, interpolated
on Althusser's view. So the idea is that
we are not fully human until we're called
into or disciplined into a kind of social position. Our consciousness, our
identities, our awareness-- all of this-- is only possible
within a social frame. So the shaping isn't
just repressive, and constraining,
and controlling, it is also enabling,
empowering, and productive, for it makes any particular form
of concrete agency possible. You're not going to be
just a pure human being. We're not pure humans,
we are men and women. We have race and ethnicity,
a class, and such. Jack Balkan makes
this point very nicely in his book, Cultural Software. He says, "People
become people only when they enter
into culture, which is to say, only when
culture enters into them and becomes them, when
they're programmed with and hence constituted by
tools of understanding created by a culture at a
certain point in history. Through existence in history,
which is existence in culture, people obtain and
incorporate cultural tools. And these become as much a part
of them as their arms and legs. Yet of course, we
are shaped to be what is required for the system
to continue more or less as it is. And under unjust
conditions, we are shaped to reproduce
the injustice." This is how social
reproduction works. We are shaped to reproduce
the structure that is already there. If the structure is
already there is unjust, we are shaped to
reproduce that injustice. "Human rights discourse demands
rights for individuals existing within society-- men and women,
whites and nonwhites, disabled and able-bodied,
straight and queer, Israelis and Palestinians. But these individuals
have been constituted as such within a system that
prioritized certain interests over others, certain forms
of life over others." Do I have a right not to
be constituted as a woman? Do I have a right not to have
been constituted as white? Who is this "I" that
bears this right? I am Sally, a white woman,
a professor at MIT-- all of these sorts of things. And who is this "I" that
has a right not to be this, because this is who I am. Do I have a right not to be
implicated in capitalism? Do I have a right
not to be governed by the hegemony of
the nation state-- the global hegemony
of the nation state? So think of it a bit like this. We might think of
workers' rights. I think workers' rights
are tremendously important. But workers' rights
already presuppose we're under conditions of capitalism. So should we maybe step back
and say, well, yes, of course, we need workers' rights. And as Anat says, none
of this is denying that we need these rights. But isn't there
another question of, why do we need those rights? We need those rights because
we live under capitalism. And shouldn't there
be another critique that's added to that,
which is the critique that has created workers, and
created capitalists, created men and women, created white
people, and black people, and people of color. So it seems then
that either we claim that there is some abstract
human "I" who has this right-- it isn't Sally, because
Sally is a white woman living in the 21st century US. But then who is this, and how
can we respect their rights not to be what they have become? Or we can claim that the
rights are Sally's rights-- rights she has as a woman? But if you protect
me as a woman, aren't you simply
insisting that I'd be what the system demands of me? That I identify with and
enact the problematic position that I have been
constructed to fit. OK, so there, I think,
is kind of the paradox. Now, I think there are a variety
of ways around this paradox. We can speak on my
behalf without assuming that I can only exist
as a woman or only exist with a social profile. I think that's a possibility
that is a little bit occluded in this idea that I am a woman. I am-- yeah, not so much. But anyway, also, we
can say that there's been injustice in the
constitution of me as who I am and in the role that I'm in. We can say that constituting
me as such implicates me in injustice, and
that's a problem. And I think we can
claim for women, a right to refuse to be women
and to participate in other ways in
systems of domination other than as the oppressed
or as the oppressor. But I'm not interested in
getting into the details of solving this paradox. I'm really interested
in the critique, because I think Marx
and others invite us to situate the issues
of rights and history somewhat differently than
often is done by philosophers. And I think that Anat
is sympathetic to this. And this is partly
what she's doing too. The question isn't only how
we can protect the individuals that society has produced
from violations by others. You know, we're not just
trying to protect workers from violations of capitalism. Part of what we want to
do is challenge capitalism and challenge the
exploitation that capitalism enacts constantly. How can we insist that
our social systems produce individuals who aren't
shaped to be subordinate, aren't shaped to
be dominant, aren't shaped to function
within existing systems of exploitation? These, I think, are kind
of the deeper questions that the Marxians-- you know, Marx, and Foucault,
and Wendy Brown, and John Scott are trying to ask. Not to say that we don't
need to protect people once they've been constituted
to fit within these regimes. We do. But we have to be
very careful when we're undertaking
those protections, that we're not somehow
presupposing and reifying the structures that are
the source of the problem. So return to what we might
consider the essential problem at hand. It may be that we
should be concerned with the immediate wrongs
against individuals who are not being treated with dignity,
with respect, or in keeping with their rights. I believe that, I think,
that as Anat said, that Marx and all of these
people believed that. But perhaps a deeper question is
how the social structures that produce individuals,
how individuals produce, and what they are produced
to be might be changed. These questions about
social reproduction are historically situated. Anat says, the right to act
is a right to an identity. But what identity
should be available? Or how should we take
them up or resist them? Those are questions that
can't be settled a priori. There are many different ways
to live a meaningful life with others. And what options
are realistic depend on features of our
biology and geography that change due to natural
forces and technology. So the discussion
of human rights can't help but be
ongoing and situated. Here's another
quote from Balkan. "We concrete-ize our
indeterminate value of justice by creating human institutions
and practices that attempt to enforce it and exemplify it. Hence the institutions
that people construct to exemplify justice may be
different in different eras and different lands. Human beings can also
generate ever-new examples of injustice and
oppression through their cultural constructions. In different times and
places, human beings find new ways to work evil
on their fellow creatures and to create monuments to
brutality and repulsiveness." So it's an open
question what we can be, how we can live together justly,
happily, and meaningfully. We can work to guard against
and repair the worst offenses, but we must also work
to create structures that reproduce themselves
by shaping us to be agents of justice and agents of good. Anat turns to do Dewey and a
kind of pragmatism at the end. And I think she's suggesting
that our best hope is not to rely simply on
philosophy to give us a set of rules to follow,
but also to be responsive to and critical of each
other in our humanity, in actual circumstances, and
build communities and societies with that sensibility in mind. This is how we do philosophy
on the rough ground. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] KENNETH OYE: It takes two
hands to get the microphone. This one? OK, good. So my name is Kenneth Oye. And I'm a professor in Politics
and Data Systems and an old admirer and friend
of Anat, and Sally, and a new friend of Serena's. We're going to go
to a Q&A right now. And I have a request, which
is, please identify yourselves. Give a little sense of where
you're coming from, if there is an organizational affiliation. We can talk about group and
individual identity later. But please do keep the
questions as questions, and not as extended commentaries. This is at Cambridge,
Massachusetts. We've been through
enough Q&A's all together to have noted a tendency for
45-minute questions to be post. And so we have a microphone
on that side with Michelle. I have one here. And if you would like to pose
a question to our great panel, please do raise your hand. And stand up for the
camera, speak clearly, give your social
security number, your mother's maiden name,
and your first automobile. AUDIENCE: Wow, I think
that's a hard one to follow. So my name is [INAUDIBLE]. I'm originally from Cameroon. I find this session
really intriguing. And I'm so proud
to be here today. I'm on the city council
of the city of Somerville. I'm a city councilor. I also work at MIT. And I think this topic
about human rights-- first, this is my first
staff forum attending, because just the
topic, actually, is very appealing and
very intriguing to me. And so listening
to you talking, it seems like, to
me, you've grabbed the fundamentals of what is
going on around the globe. And so my question
is, especially somebody from
Cameroon right now, there's civil unrest, just
as there is civil unrest all around the world. In Cameroon right now,
according to the United Nations statistics, more than 670,000
internally displaced residents are going on. And then there was just
an incident a few days ago where 14 children were killed,
22 we're burned in houses. So the question is, as
a politician myself-- and I've seen other
professionals. Some are sitting right here-- that have been
engaged in activism, like Ed, is somebody
I know personally who has been at the forefront of
issues that people care about. And there are multiple
dimensions of this human rights issues that we are
discussing here. But my question is, how do you-- somebody mentioned,
I think, Serena, about international
kind of activism. How do you evolve yourself to
a point where you can actually get traction and really ensure
that something is actually being done, not just like
learning this knowledge. And yet you cut out the
practicality part of it. It's really-- you know, there's
a lot of ambiguity in it. Nobody really knows
what is happening. This morning, I tweeted
about the incident in Cameroon, calling on
the French government to actually take action as to
what is happening in Cameroon. It's been going on for
more than four years. So what is your perception
or your thinking, in terms of, not just Cameroon. I'm just using Cameroon
because that's where I'm from. But around the world, do
you think that institutions like MIT, Harvard,
and other colleges, you have some branch in the
international scholars office. Somebody that tracks
some of these incidences around the world and
bringing traction to it and trying to contact, whether
it's the foreign policy, or which government, the
consulate, or whoever, to be able to give
account and holding some of these individuals
accountable so that we can live in a
good human community where people have to
live with dignity, that have to pursue their right
to life, liberty, and happiness that we all strive for. KENNETH OYE: And who would
like to take on this challenge? Anat-- I knew it would be Anat. ANAT BILETZKI: Thank you. Thank you for your question. And it brings to mind
something that Sally said and something that Serena said. So I will, in that way,
engage with them as well. There is a mantra in
the human rights-- is it human rights or in-- yeah, I think it's the human
rights community, but maybe elsewhere, also. They tell us to think
globally and act locally. And I don't even remember. I think I said in the
book, but I'm not sure-- that I would turn
that around and say, think locally and act globally. In other words, it is being
exposed to local injustice, to local suffering,
even, that wakes you up. I don't expect people
to wake up because they read an article about
Cameroon, even though that might be part of it. But I think people do get
impacted by the local. But the point of human rights,
or of the way we live now-- our form of life now-- is a global form of life. We can't run away from what's
happening in other places. I usually think about
Israel-Palestine and how, just like
you said, nobody here knew about something. Nobody here knows
what's going on there. So what I do here
locally is, try to get people to
see, understand, and worry about what's
going on in other places. That's the big answer. The smaller question
and answer-- I'm not putting it down-- is,
what do we do with students? I don't know. Some of us are
wonderful teachers because we speak rhetorically. Others are wonderful teachers
because we speak quietly and work with particulars. There's different
ways of teaching-- really teaching. And there, I think, it's
a matter of not just personal charisma, but as
Serena said, getting people to understand where they are. So getting students
to understand what is going on in the
United States is important. But then I want them
to act globally. There's something
about human rights which insists on the global,
or the international, or the cosmopolitan. And there's all those
"-isms" there again-- globalism versus
internationalism versus cosmopolitanism. They're all different
ways of looking at things. But that's when, I dare
say, that terrible word "universalism." There is a point in human
rights that goes that way. And it's a terribly problematic
point, philosophically. But there are things
to do globally. There really are. So that's what I would take it. SERENA PAREKH: So just add to
that-- it's a great question. And it's, you know, one of the
most important questions when you think about doing
scholarship and activism. And I would say that my teaching
and scholarship has been motivated by the following. I really think that
politics, with a capital P-- institutions, laws, government--
are responsive to the beliefs and expressed ideas
of its citizens. And so when I'm
teaching students, what I'm hoping to do is just
to get them familiar with ideas and engaged with whatever
they find passionate about so that, you know, they discover
what's happening in Israel. And then that will motivate
them to speak and to act and-- you know, if people don't know
who refugees are and don't know what's happening to
them, we can hardly be surprised that politicians
will treat them terribly. So that's one of
the things that I think is really important
to do in teaching, and in scholarship,
and when you're engaging with even intellectual
communities like this, of people who are just
interested in learning and understanding. And the other
thing, I think, it's important that I try
to do in teaching-- and sort of to play on
what Anat was saying-- was to pay attention to the
ways that our local actions, behaviors, policies,
are actually implicated in what's happening abroad. So we often think, like,
there are problems in the US. And then there are
problems abroad. And these are two
separate issues. And if you scratch
below the surface, often there is a
deep interconnection. I mean, Israel-- it's maybe the
most obvious example of this. So when you think, well, what
could I do as an individual? What could we do as
citizens of the US? We're just American. What can we do about something
in Cameroon or in Israel? Well, it turns out
that there's a lot. And again, the government
perceives our indifference, our apathy as being
a signal that they can do whatever is in the
interests of the powerful and their own interests. So I think there's a lot to
be said about engaged teaching and engaged scholarship
that can scratch the surface of the
problem here articulated. KENNETH OYE: Other questions? Yes, what I'm going
to do is come back and ask you to stand up so that
the camera can also get you into the frame, please. Yes. AUDIENCE: Hi, my
name is Cynthia, and I'm a graduate
student here at MIT. And I'm doing research
on broadly data analytics and optimization-- so
applied mathematics. So thank you for the talk. And so based on what you said,
it seems that for some issues, there are systematic ways
to analyze a problem-- well, I assume, in some cases. For example, the issue
that in academic research, in some fields, there is
less citation for women than for men. And it's less
likely for a women, to be cited, for example. So you can have a
quantitative measure for these type of issues. But do you believe
that, for things that you can
quantify the problem, is there a systematic
way to solve it? For example, to say,
oh, by this year, we want equal ratio of
gender citation, for example. Because it doesn't seem to work
so much in some areas, right? Like, for example,
ratio of female students versus male students
in some areas. You cannot just say,
I want equal numbers. ANAT BILETZKI: Sally, you're
the one who knows most about-- SALLY HASLANGER: I
had a t-shirt once. It was one of my
favorite t-shirts. And I kept it and wore
it until it fell apart. It said, "Equal rights for
women by the year 2000." And it was, yes, I'm for that. We can update it,
you know, "by 2025." No, I don't think that we can
quantify either what counts as justice in many areas. I mean, as you say, you might
do it on numbers of citations. I'm not even sure that
we can do it there. And I think, setting benchmarks,
goals, those sorts of things are really great. But I think you're asking
for some kind of prediction. And I don't think that
humans are that predictable. ANAT BILETZKI: Can I just
add to that-- just one thing? There was an article. Louise, you must know. I can't remember. There was an article
just recently about women in Scandinavia. How if you quantify,
everything is fine. But everything is
really not fine. AUDIENCE: Are you about the
[INAUDIBLE] paper on greater women's participation is STEM
fields as a function of gender equity in the country? ANAT BILETZKI: I don't think so. I think, maybe. But I remember that it struck
me that counting is not going to help. Or counting might be a necessary
condition, certainly not a sufficient one, for equity. SALLY HASLANGER: I think
you have to have the-- you have to get information. I'm a great believer in
empirically-based sort of interventions,
and having data, and trying to use data to figure
out where the problems lie. But I'm a believer in that. But I think often data is
created by individuals who, themselves, are asking
particular questions that are value laden, their
measures are often value laden, their choice of measures
are value laden. So I have much less
confidence in it all being easily quantifiable,
myself, and solvable. SERENA PAREKH:
Just on that note, Kathryn Sikkink, who's a
political theorist at Harvard-- she's done a lot of
work on looking at data around human rights violations. And if you look at
certain societies-- like, Sweden has the highest
percentage of rape in Europe. And what she points out
is that all that means is that they do a better job
of actually getting data. And so if you at
the places that have high incidence of
sexual assault, that actually just
means that they're good at collecting data. It actually isn't connected to
any outcome that you would-- so it gives us some
information, but not the information that's obvious
from just looking at the data. KENNETH OYE: OK, thank you. Let's see. AUDIENCE: Hi, my
name is Avi and I'm an undergraduate student in
the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. And I was wondering
about your thoughts on-- I've sometimes read this take
that human rights philosophy, as rooted in Western
philosophy, there are sometimes
paradoxes in trying to study places that
have historically been like under colonialism. And I was wondering
about your thoughts on this kind of tricky
research situation of wanting to apply these frameworks
to places that have this high historical context. KENNETH OYE: OK, that looks
like an Anat question to me. ANAT BILETZKI: I don't
know if I'm going exactly the way you were asking. But I mentioned Makau
Matua, who I think, even though it seems late. And at the beginning of
the aughts-- somewhere, 2002 or 2003-- wrote
that very famous article. He gave the metaphor-- how does it go? Savage is something-- SALLY HASLANGER: Is it in here? ANAT BILETZKI:
Yeah, it's in there. Basically talking
about the picture we have of one part of
the world, another part, human rightists, and the
great Western enlightenment coming in as saviors. So they're savages, saviors, and
something else-- a third thing. SALLY HASLANGER: Savages,
victims, and survivors, the metaphor of human rights. Harvard International
Law Journal, 2001. ANAT BILETZKI: And I remember
that article shaking us up. I would like to mention
here Raj Balakrishnan, who is, I think, in Urban
Studies as well-- who has written, I think,
the most wonderful book on how the law-- international law-- is
all Western colonial law. And when I take Matua
and Raj seriously, I just step back and say, I
don't know how to look at this. The way I look at it is through
my education Western eyes, human rights-- the human rights
industry, as Alex always says, the human rights industry. What Sally was talking about--
human rights with a capital H-- no, Serena-- capital H and capital R.
We're in that bubble when we do human rights. And that's why I
think the criticism is so important, but so hard to do
because it's very hard to step out of your bubble. The one thing that Raj
does is work with people in other places in the world. The first thing you have to
do is just be there and see-- not just see, but be a
part, if you possibly can, of looking at the whole
idea of human rights differently-- from a different
geographic, cultural, historical perspective. I don't know if we're able to. We are within our own
industry, and the industry is now rich and controlled. KENNETH OYE: Serena. SERENA PAREKH: So I
heard your question as a question about
cultural relativism and whether human rights is
simply imposing a Western dogma on non-Western cultures. And I mean, this is a
really important question, and one that kind of raises
its head every 10 years or so. I am more sympathetic
to human rights on this than maybe Anat is. I know there are lots
of anthropologists-- I mean, I think
the position is not that we should go
in heavy-handedly and impose our views
on other people. But human rights can be used
in a very meaningful way in a wide variety of contexts. But you need to be sensitive
to that, of course, and there's lots of ways
in which we haven't been. It's gone terribly wrong. I teach a class on this. At the end of the
class, I always say, there are only two
groups of people who continue to believe
in cultural relativism-- horrible dictators in
non-Western countries who would like to use
the veneer of culture to continue
perpetrating practices that go against human rights and
American college students who seem to be very
concerned about this. Because on the ground, people
who have their rights violated are less concerned with whether
the dogma that they're-- or the language they're using is
influenced by the West or not, or how it's framed. Because what they want
is to have dignity, however they understand that. So I think human rights
can be a part of it. It doesn't always,
but it can be. KENNETH OYE: In that
observation on dignity being something which is
more or less universal, and how the people
that are making the arguments on
cultural relativism are often those who are the
worst offenders of dignity, is certainly
something to consider. AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm
Louise Anthony. I teach at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. I teach philosophy. Do I say that? I've been friends with one of
these people for a long time, one of these people
for virtually eternity, as far as human life goes,
and Serena is a new friend. So I thought I detected a kind
of tension between the advice to act locally and contextually
and Sally's warning that we not simply
take people as they've been socially formed, but
challenge the structures that form them in ways
that are unhealthy. I wasn't exactly
sure what the lesson was that you drew
from the example that you recounted at the end. And maybe you want to say
more about that, Anat. But it did seem to me that
often when someone promotes some reform, like
providing childcare for parents that work
outside the home, which is going to be, basically,
mothers, in most places at this time. There can be a
challenge to advocacy for that policy on the
grounds that it's devaluing stay-at-home motherhood. And indeed, I think
there are women who invest a great deal in
a conception of themselves as having chosen a particular
vocation in life that is being devalued or
denigrated by women who choose to manage their career or
their work and their family differently. So I'm a little bit worried that
paying attention to the context can very easily mean deferring
to the social structures that are already in existence that
have shaped people the way they are. So in Anat's
example, at the end, I was worried that
the background seems to be that if I take it that
the people who are defending the rights of the
rapist, who is also a man with a mental illness-- or saw themselves as
defending his rights-- were failing to
take into account the fallout of challenging-- I mean, maybe they were
challenging his agency and saying, the
parents should've been more attentive
or something. But somehow, the fallout
meant that mothers were being criticized for
not being sufficiently attentive to their children. But the expectation that
falls disproportionately on women and the
blame that tends to fall on victims, that's
part of the social structure that we're dealing with. It should be, itself,
the subject of critique. So I don't know if there's
necessarily attention there. But it seems to me that
that's something that needs negotiation in a careful way. ANAT BILETZKI: Do you
want to go, should I go? SALLY HASLANGER: You go. ANAT BILETZKI: Well, I'll
go first and then you go. Thanks, Louise. My original background was as a
good old analytic philosopher, as Hilary Putnam used to say. And I've left that
behind, which is not to say that I've become
a Derridean or any type of postmodernist. And we're just throwing
these labels around, I know. I look for logical systematicity
and I never find it because of the contradictions. And that's the only reason why I
go to pragmatism, not because I think that James, or
Dewey, or [INAUDIBLE] were grate philosophers. Maybe they were
great philosophers. It's not what calls
me, philosophically. It gives me some way
to look at real life, especially a story like
that story in Hebron. So what happened there-- until you mentioned
it now, I didn't even think of it as a
problem with women, but rather traditional, very
hierarchical places that had a strong social glue
holding them together. And that's what
we had absolutely dismantled as human
rightists going with the enlightenment,
and with human rights law, and all the things that we
know can work systematically and logically, et cetera. So I think that's what brings
me to that type of position. It's not that I'm a pragmatist
from American pragmatism, not a pragmatist
in the other way. It's that we need to look at-- I think you used the
word, Sally-- suffering, concrete suffering. And that is almost the
only criterion I have now, is where you can
lower the suffering or somehow take care
of the suffering. I just want to add one thing. And this goes with
something else that Sally said
about the right not to be who you have
been constructed to be. Another friend-- Ariella
Azoulay at Brown-- when she talks about
Israel-Palestine, she talks about
the Israeli rights that are being violated, the
right not to be an occupier. And I always laugh. I always laugh. I know she's saying
something smart. So that's what I'm saying. I can't play the very
intellectual game here, except to say that we have to
take context into consideration more deeply than anything else. It's not a philosophical
relativism at all. SALLY HASLANGER: I think
there's another question. AUDIENCE: First, I
want to thank you three for the excellent points
of view in human rights. I'm Samantha. I'm from Brazil. And I have a company
that is called Humanistic Responsibility,
translated into English. And the purpose
of this company is to promote a more human
relationship in the workplace. So one of the tools that
we use is class, because of the universal literature. And also philosophy and
other fields of humanities, to improve the sensibility and
treat each other as a person. So I'd like to ask, what do
you think about the personalism that is a field of philosophy? Use it, for instance, Jacques
Maritain, Charles Taylor, and others, that says that
human rights, or in order to promote the
dignity of each other, we need to think about,
respect each value of person, of each one of us. And this is a base
of the duties that we have of promoting rights-- duty as a base to think
about rights, human rights. ANAT BILETZKI: Do you
want to talk about it? Do you know Taylor? SALLY HASLANGER: I
don't know that much. Do you know? ANAT BILETZKI: No. I don't know exactly
how I would answer that, except I want to focus
on the word dignity-- on the concept of dignity. We've got dignity, you said
respect, and you didn't say, but I always think of honor. I think in Hebrew, all
three are the same word. And I think it is, I'm not sure. [HEBREW], right? But I do make a big
distinction between them. And I really don't care
much about respect. I do care about dignity. Or I don't necessarily think
that respect and dignity go together-- and honor, even less so. So there's something
about dignity. And that's why what you're
doing is so important. There's something about
dignity that is elusive for me. And it's the great
paradox of human rights. It's my desire to think of that
as definitive of human rights, but my inability to really
figure out what dignity is. And by the way, maybe I
quoted too much of B'tzelem and too much of God
made us in his image. That, of course, is a religious
answer to what is dignity. But that's not the answer
that any devout secularist could adopt as the explanation
of what dignity is. So I think that's where I
would go with your question. Perhaps you were
asking something else. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ANAT BILETZKI:
Personalism, yeah. AUDIENCE: And the
definition of this field is to promote and respect
the value of person in another human being. So there are some philosophers
that use this kind of field to think about human
rights, like Charles Taylor, like Jacques Maritain. SALLY HASLANGER: So I
think one of the problems is that what is it to
respect me as a person? I mean, it's one thing
to respect me as a woman. I prefer not to be respected as
a woman, thank you very much. But some other women want
to be respected as a woman. And so is respecting
me as a person, letting me decide on
what terms you respect me and how you show that respect? Now that would be ridiculous. So I think that-- maybe moving away from
respect to dignity may be is a way of moving. Because I don't know what it-- I mean, given that our systems
of etiquette and social norms about how to treat each
other vary so dramatically. And based on our social rules
and our social positions that are encoded
in those systems. Talking about
respecting people just feels to me like a
rat's nest, personally. And so I think that Anat
is right to move, maybe, to something like dignity. But there is a lot of questions
that arise there as well. And I think that there
are people who are totally invested in hierarchical
structures of injustice with their whole being. That's what they're invested in. And if you're going to
ask me to respect them and to say that they can carry
on with their lives that way, I'm going to say, I'm sorry. My life is about
dislodging them. KENNETH OYE: And we have
only 4.5 minutes left. So if we could have relatively
brief questions and answers. AUDIENCE: A very
brief question-- Carlos Flores, a parent,
no other identifiers. How, as a human, can
we learn that we're all truly equal if we believe that? And if that's possible, then
get beyond the concept of I as an individual or I as
a member of my society. If I truly believe that
I am equal to a woman or whatever the race
is, and how do we learn to really teach that? SERENA PAREKH: So I would
say we learn the opposite. I think we teach children how
to distinguish each other based on sex, and race, and
these different categories. So pedagogically, I don't
know how you don't do that. Because we need these
shortcuts to carve up the world in these
sort of efficient ways. But I don't think there is
an inherent contradiction between these two. We can see each other in these
different social roles that are valuable and meaningful to us. And then see what's
equal about us is not that we are all the
same skin color, but that we have this
fundamental equality that transcends that and
ought to be what guides our treatment in it. So I feel like the
distinctions aren't as much of a problem as
what gets laid in with that. That's my experience
as a parent. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] KENNETH OYE: A good question,
perhaps, for after the event. AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Melissa. I work here, MIT
at D Lab, actually, in International Development. So when we're talking
about Western culture, I do grapple a little
bit about that-- development, like, who are we
to come in and say, this is the way your economy should be? But that's not what
I'm here to ask. You mentioned something
about dignity. And I really like thinking about
human rights in that context. Do you ever think
about what causes people to want to take dignity
away from other people? What is the root
of why we are here and why we have to have
these conversations in the first place? And if you have any
answers, let me know. KENNETH OYE: OK, what
a great question. SALLY HASLANGER:
So I think, this goes in a way connected
to Serena's point, is that I'm disinclined
to think that there's some psychological
explanation of this in the nature of human
beings or human psychology. That's not where
I'm inclined to go. Because given the
framework that I have, we are conditioned
to reproduce society. And society comes to-- it's there. And we are situated in
it, if we are lucky. If we're not lucky, then
we aren't situated in it. And we're at a loss. So we are lucky to
be situated in it. But the system builds into
it these power relations, and different kinds of
meanings of different bodies, and all of these
sorts of things. That if you're going to
belong, if you're going to fit, you better learn that
right from the beginning. And so it's not
as if, oh, humans are destined to have conflict
and see the other as the enemy, and things like that. It's like this is the
history and culture. And we don't even
have an imagination at this point
about what it would be like differently because it
has been like this for so long. And that was sort of where I
was getting to at the end was, we got to not just worry
about the people who are being destroyed by it. We do need to be
worried about that. But we need to worry about
how to do things really differently. And I think we're not up against
the limits of human psychology yet. We are up against
the limits of power. ANAT BILETZKI: Can I just add
one last sentence about that? This brings me to mind of
something that a bunch of us here were just
reading this week. Erik Olin Wright, who
said, apropos the-- not anti-psychologism, but
not looking to psychology. When you ask about why or
how people do what they do, the point is not to hold
on to a presupposition-- human beings are
good, or human beings are evil, or that whole
human nature discussion that we've had forever,
which was disconnected from the social and
political structures in which this human nature was working. The point that Olin
Wright was making was that we have the
obligation to provide the basis for that good part of
our nature to somehow work out, to somehow be able
to vocalize itself and operationalize itself. And let me just say in
brackets, the only way to do that is through socialism. But that was just-- KENNETH OYE: So a comment
on Anat's last comment-- and I just have to do this. Because listening to
the panel and listening to the musings on
identity and dignity, I kept thinking of my father. So my father-- and it's
ironic, because it was 1942 that he was detained,
imprisoned for years, on the basis of identity. Not one that you would
necessarily choose, but one imposed upon you. And talk about
respect when you're sitting there in a prison camp
in the middle of the desert. But respect is something which
can be weakened or strengthened by the actions of others. So he kept telling us,
when we were children, about this weird Quaker lady
that came out to the desert. And it would be
the kind of thing that could be decried as a
Band-Aid, but it mattered. She was documenting
what was going on. And her actions lent
a degree of respect to those that were detained. And he passed on a message
which was that we-- meaning him, all of us-- have
a duty, a responsibility, to act, to defend,
the human rights and the dignity of others. But it wasn't us-them,
it was, you're on the other side of the barbed
wire and you think about this. Alex-- I'm staring at Alex. Alex, for those of you
that don't know him is Anat's dutiful husband, who
always does what he's asked. But Alex is the son of
Holocaust survivors. And the lesson that
he learned was, frankly, don't let
this happen to others. So he does things that make
him very unpopular in Israel, like campaigning
for Arab parties. The point being that when
we encounter challenges to our respect and our
dignity, what we need to do is to be thinking more broadly
with sensitivity to the terrain as Anat has described. If you're interested
in these themes, next Saturday, there will
be an event in MIT's campus that will feature people who
were interned in World War II, looking back on that period. But also looking to current
challenges to dignity, to children separated from their
parents, to refugee policy, with a panel that would include
Jackie Bhabha from Harvard Medical School-- a woman who was,
in fact, imprisoned as a baby, and others. And this will be, again,
2 o'clock next Saturday as an MIT CIS event. But what remains is,
thanks, to the panel. And to Anat, in particular,
for a wonderful book and wonderful presentations. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
