When someone asserts that each person has the same human rights as every other person, this move goes from a macro-design principle directly to micro operations of personal behavior. Those making this leap of faith are then upset when macro principles—such as those in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—are qualified by all manner of country-specific protocols and reservations.
But such reservations are not hypocritical. Rather, they must be expected if human rights are to be treated reliably. It has been left up to nation-states to enforce universalized values, and the only way we really know that human rights as macro principles are taken seriously is to see how they are applied through context-specific scenarios, contingent to each country when not to each case.
‘‘Thou shall not kill’’ is all well and good, but we do not know how seriously that principle is treated until we get to grappling with qualifications such as ‘‘except in cases of self-defense.’’ ‘‘Granted that I should love my neighbour,’’ wrote R. H. Tawney, the British economic historian, but ‘‘the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, ‘Who precisely is my neighbour?’ and, ‘How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?’’’.
If human rights exist only at the macro level, you counter, are we not all at risk as individuals at the micro level? Yes, but not in the way you may mean. Just because we doubt that human rights actually exist as overarching principles everywhere equally for everyone does not stop us from recognizing that we are at risk in terms of personal and system reliability when systems behave as if those rights did not exist, and that there may be better practices to deal with such situations that are modifiable to the context in which we find ourselves, here and now rather than then and there.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 