Of human rights and social rights

Samuel Moyn's Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World is a sophisticated historical argument for the thesis stated in its title. His introduction explains:

No one ought to be treated differently because of the kind of person they are -- on the basis of gender or race, for example. ... When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve. ...

Moyn contrasts "human rights" -- claims for equal treatment for all varieties of humanity -- with "economic and social rights" which imply a moral imperative for distributional equality.

This is a history of western (particularly European) "rights" theories, practices, and agitation, beginning with the brief Jacobin "welfare state" which acquired a second act in the post-Great Depression and socially mobilized states that emerged from World War II. Notions of distributive justice that emerged there, and in the New International Economic Order championed by the decolonized states of Asia, Africa and Latin America, have given way to a dominant market fundamentalism -- neoliberalism -- which allows at its best for social provision of minimum sufficiency and anti-poverty charity. Through contemporary elites' choice to focus on "human rights -- equality before the law which includes the right to sleep under bridges -- the ever-urgent, unending, human quest for a just society has been deflected and then buried. Or so Moyn argues.

This is a potent case. I can look at the same evidence, read the same texts, study the history, and arrive at the similar conclusions, though perhaps with slightly different emphases. Yet I am uncomfortable leaving it there.

Perhaps this is because, from the life experience of a woman of non-standard sexuality, despite enjoying always the material fact of more-than-enough, it's hard for me to feel that society's concession of my full humanity is a minor gain. In the parts of the world where white men still call the tune -- and that is most of the world -- my kind still face an existential struggle over the definition of "human." This doesn't go away. How much more fierce might that struggle feel to those who are "non-white"?

Moyn knows justice is not simple; he's retrieving what he thinks we have suppressed -- and he's not wrong to want to raise it up. From his conclusion:

Human rights became our highest ideals only as material hierarchy remained endemic or worsened. It was both a breakthrough of conscience and an immense reversal. Human rights emerged as the highest morality of an unequal world ... Human rights will return to their defensible importance only as soon as humanity saves itself from its low ambitions. If it does, for the sake of local and global welfare, sufficiency and equality can again become powerful companions, both in our moral lives and in our political enterprises.

This is not the sort of stuff that gets us to the barricades -- but perhaps this is necessary intellectual armament for a long march.