Originally published in Cambridge University Press
In a 1958 speech at the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt took stock of the progress that human rights had made since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ten years before. Mrs. Roosevelt had chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration and had hoped that, in time, it would become “the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.” Her answer to the question of how to measure human rights progress has become one of the most frequently quoted remarks of the former First Lady:
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”[1]
The human rights revolution that was inaugurated in 1948 has now run its course: conventions have proliferated, human rights NGOs have grown in influence, UN rapporteurs do their work. It is striking, however, how rarely human rights advocates use Mrs. Roosevelt’s criterion for evaluating the success of human rights: whether the concept of human rights has actually reached into the “small places close to home,” the intimate sphere of private moral decision-making. Those who study the human rights revolution measure its progress using such metrics as state ratification of conventions, state responses to human rights pressure, changes in the incidence of human rights abuses over time, and so on.[2] These are important metrics, but those who chart the progress of human rights in these terms often make the further assumption that once human rights conventions have been ratified, they inevitably have some influence on the “ordinary virtues”—that is, the common practices of trust and tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation that are the essence of private moral behavior. They are ordinary because they are concerned with the recurrent essentials of our common life, because they express our learned instincts about what moral life requires of us if we are to survive and reproduce the life of family, neighborhood, kith, and kin. If state practice is improving, so the argument runs, it must be because human rights consciousness is beginning to change ordinary human beings for the better. Human rights scholars have only just begun to measure, in any serious way, whether this is actually the case. Scholars have used survey data to study public attitudes toward human rights, and their conclusion, broadly speaking, is that human rights remains an “elite discourse,” a language spoken by lawyers, advocates, victims’ groups, and bureaucrats—not by a wider public at large.[3] If this is true, it could have important public policy implications for democratic debate. Political figures who use human rights language to mobilize public support on issues such as refugee assistance or humanitarian aid to strangers in other countries may find that such language resonates with a narrow elite, but fails to attract support among a wider electorate. Thus, while it is difficult to definitively establish whether human rights discourse influences private moral behavior and attitudes, it is worth trying to do so because the public consequences are so important.
Survey data on attitudes toward human rights do not tell us much about how ordinary people actually use human rights language or concepts, if at all, when they try to make sense of the moral and political dilemmas in their daily lives. To get at this, what is needed is intensive dialogue with ordinary people in a number of different cultural, national, and socioeconomic settings—a kind of participant-observer ethnography of moral judgment, aimed at eliciting the role that human rights plays in helping people make up their minds about the moral and political situations they face. This essay is a report on one such project. In an eight-country research project, conducted over three years, we asked two related questions: Has human rights become a global ethic, and, if so, how does a universalist language such as human rights influence or structure the practice of the local or ordinary virtues? While our method—systematic, on-site dialogue—could only yield qualitative, not quantitative results, and our sample size of informants was small, we can claim that we have framed new questions about the impact of human rights on the ordinary virtues. It is our hope that our initial hypotheses about how global and local languages of ethics interact can be tested and refined by other researchers.
The Journey Begins: A Norm of Equal Voice
In 2015 the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, in conjunction with the Uehiro Foundation in Japan, initiated a centennial project to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Andrew Carnegie’s bequest creating the Council in February 1914. The project was designed, in effect, to ask Mrs. Roosevelt’s question from a new angle, that is, whether human rights had become a global ethic, influencing how ordinary people make moral judgments in different settings around the world. The project, which I directed in conjunction with the Council’s Devin Stewart, undertook intensive “global ethical dialogues” in Argentina, Bosnia, Brazil, Japan, Myanmar, South Africa, the United States, and Uruguay.[4] The dialogues convened elite audiences—judges, journalists, academics, and politicians—for focused, iterative exchanges on critical public issues, including corruption and public trust, reconciliation and forgiveness, and resilience in the face of disaster. In these dialogues we sought to understand how a global moral language such as human rights interacts with local traditional and contextual discourses of virtue. We supplemented these global dialogues with “site visits” to reach out to non-elite audiences in favelas in Rio; illegal settlements outside Pretoria; and community organizations in Mandalay, Queens (New York), southcentral Los Angeles, and rural Bosnia.
Our journey for the Carnegie Council has given us evidence that the rights revolution since 1948 has changed the rules of moral standing by creating the norm of equal voice. The positive presumption that we encountered with every speaker, no matter how poor or powerless, was that they had the right to speak and be heard. Their negative presumption was that no one could deny them the right to make their case on the grounds of race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation. Whether desperately poor miners in South Africa’s Zama Zama district, street demonstrators in Rio, or displaced Japanese farmers—our humblest interlocutors also took it for granted that foreign outsiders had the standing to ask them questions about their moral preferences. They were not surprised, dismayed, or intimidated by the prospect of joining a global conversation with people coming from outside their milieu.
This is the core of a new global ethic. Thanks to the democratic revolution begun in 1789, post–World War II decolonization, and the ongoing battles for racial, gender, and sexuality-based equality across the globe, a rule of equal moral standing was the default setting for every conversation we conducted on ethical matters on four continents.
The Search for Meaning: Local Ethics in a Globalized World
It is important to note that a norm honored as much in the breach as in the observance is still a norm. Thanks to the norm of equal voice, a person silenced on grounds of race today has recourse in a language of rights that other citizens must recognize as legitimate. A woman who stands up for her rights may have to fight for them, but she does not have to establish the equality norm in the first place. That work has been done. Everywhere, however, a gap remains between what the norm prescribes and what social life allows. In India, the untouchables are accorded rights, but still face stubborn discrimination when they raise their voice. Everywhere, the voices of the rich and propertied have greater political influence than the poor, and everywhere, especially in politics, money’s voice is loudest of all.
Notice, too, that equality of voice is a procedural ethic: no one can be left out of the discussion. But it makes no presumption that we will agree on very much beyond that. In our encounters with Burmese Buddhist monks, for example, they accepted an obligation to dialogue with us, while continuing to claim that their faith gives the only true answer to moral questions. Equality of voice need not imply that the voices will agree. Nonetheless, in the global conversation across cultures and national boundaries, patriarchal and religious authorities that were unquestioned when the Universal Declaration was drafted no longer enjoy the same power to impose their views on moral questions. The privileges that were once attached to race, gender, and religion may not be gone, but their moral authority is contested at every turn. This is the great achievement of Mrs. Roosevelt’s revolution, but it left most of our interlocutors restless and unsatisfied with the results. There is a dialectic of insatiability at work here. The moral equality that has been achieved shows up the real inequalities of privilege, power, income, and fate that remain. This gap calls into question the authority of those who justify or profit from these inequalities.
With the legitimacy of moral authorities in question as never before, we found that the individuals we engaged in dialogue make up their moral life as they go along with fewer authorities to guide them. With globalization has come an individualization of the act of moral judgment. Doctrine, dogma, formal teaching, or generalized rules have become less salient to moral decision-making itself. The very purpose of moral life is less about obedience or conformity and more about affirming the self and, if necessary, inventing a moral community for oneself. This in turn helps to reinforce the sense in which, when we make choices, we are not obeying time-honored universal commands, but rather thinking through for ourselves what our situation—time, place, moment—demands.
In our dialogues we never heard anyone argue as if moral choice was a matter of simply following what some priest, politician, or pundit told them to think. Even the most doctrinaire of our interlocutors turned out to be opportunistic manipulators of doctrines to suit their own political purposes. Everyone took it for granted that they were the ones who would have to make up their minds. This is not to say that they felt free to do so. Sometimes we could feel the pressure they were under not to say what they actually thought. We had many conversations in which the evasions and silences suggested that there were some truths that were known but could not be said.
In the habitations of the poor and dispossessed, we began to see the limits of Mrs. Roosevelt’s revolution and moral globalization in general. Abstractions like human rights were frequently employed by jurists, professors, and politicians, but featured little, if ever, in the language of their poorer fellow citizens. The very poor assumed that their voices deserved to be heard, but they rarely used human rights to frame this claim. When they did use this language, the rights they invoked were not universal, natural, or human rights, but rather their rights as citizens.
This confirmed the research of other academics, but it raised another question: What discourses do the poor—in the favelas of Rio or in the illegal settlements outside Pretoria—use to make moral sense of their existence? At first, this question seemed superfluous: For those living in such extreme poverty, is not life a battle for survival rather than a struggle for meaning? On the contrary, it was soon obvious that even in the most desperate shantytown or the most crime-ridden housing project, life remained a search for moral order of some sort.[5] We learned from the most hard-pressed people we met that moral order is a vital necessity of life and that the battle for it must be waged even if it cannot always be won. For them, it was imperative to believe that there was a community of moral order and not just an anarchic jungle ruled by predators. With order there was hope, even if the hope was of escaping to something better.
As we listened to favela dwellers, inhabitants of informal settlements, farmers in their fields, monks in their places of worship, we began to see that most ordinary people do not generalize or systematize their thinking. A global ethic, applicable to all mankind, is unimaginable and irrelevant to them. This is not because ordinary people do not reflect deeply about the injustice of the world and imagine a better one. It is because the validity of a moral proposition for them does not turn on whether it can be universalized or generalized. Its validity turns instead on whether it is true for them and their immediate community, and whether it makes sense even provisionally of their specific context and situation.
Everywhere we went we found that the organizing narratives that make sense of private life were in crisis. In South Africa and Brazil, for example, elite corruption had tarnished the narrative of shared progress toward democratic equality. In Bosnia, a narrative of interethnic accommodation had been replaced by a story of frozen conflict. In Myanmar the story of a peaceful transition from military to democratic rule hung in the balance. With such collective narratives disintegrating and no longer capable of organizing reality, the people we met could only suspend judgment on larger social meanings and get on with the one exercise that did provide reassurance and order, namely, the daily practice of the ordinary virtues.
A further conclusion is that the reaction against the forces of globalization and the homogenizing tide of goods and values is not a passing discontent, but an enduring element in ordinary people’s defense of their identities. Moral globalization cannot be understood apart from the widening gulf between educated elites with skills, networks, and mobility to profit from globalization and those who feel they are globalization’s victims. Yet even those who see themselves as victims are not seeking to wall themselves off from change, but simply seeking to have some choice, agency, or control so that even as the globalizing forces of money and power may impinge upon their community, they will not destroy it. In this battle for control, the most powerful languages of resistance are not global, but local: national pride, local tradition, religious vernacular.
Even as globalization divides the world into winners and losers, both have to live within the same complex moral universe where local and global claims collide. Even as local self-determination clashes with international human rights, there are no trump cards to decide the contest. To live in such a divided moral universe is to live in competing theaters of justification and to face demands to explain one’s choices that will succeed with one audience only to fail with another. To live in such a world, in moral terms, is a struggle with others but also with oneself. Instead of confirming that we are living in a world where moral values are converging, our journey highlighted that we live in competing moral worlds—global and local—and must live with the moral strain of justifying ourselves to competing audiences. At the same time, our journey highlighted just how easy it was, both for us and for our partners in dialogue, to recognize moral kinship across our differences. Human beings speak thousands of languages and we worship in different ways, but the virtues we display are enduringly common because daily life throws up the same challenges: how much, if at all, to trust those who rule over us; how much, if at all, to tolerate those who are different; how much to forgive, if we can, those who have wronged us; and how to rebuild life when fate and misfortune sweep away what we have tried to accomplish. We may recognize each other as fellow human beings. We may see the kinship between the local practices of others and our own. Nevertheless, this recognition and kinship does not mean that we all accept the same moral authority. International human rights activists tend to take their own standing for granted. It is accorded them by the treaties and conventions that states have signed. But the moral standing of human rights was not self-evident to Burmese monks, ANC activists in South Africa, or Bosnian survivors of war, any more than the authority of the European Court of Human Rights is evident to the majority of British citizens who voted to leave Europe. So the ultimate question in our journey slowly became this: Of the three moral systems we set out to examine—human rights, global ethics, and ordinary virtues—whose authority prevails in a given situation?
Universal vs. Local?
In a globalized world, global and local values compete for allegiance, but local authorities are bound to have more influence in shaping the ordinary virtues. This is especially the case where the public authority in question is democratic.
While we once may have thought that democratic values and human rights advance hand in hand, at times the contrary may actually be the case. Democratic majorities have been rejecting universalist claims—the right of asylum in one place, the right of strangers to nationality in another—in the name of a democratic defense of local sovereignty. If Mrs. Roosevelt’s rights revolution has anchored a new norm of equal voice, the equality is the equality of citizens, not human beings as such.
What was also striking was that local and global moral discourses argue from diametrically opposed ideas about the ultimate object of moral concern. In the moral universe of the human rights activist and the global ethicist, the object of ultimate concern is the universal human being. Human differences—of race, class, or situation—are secondary. In this conception of moral life, one’s primary duty is to be impartial, to regard the distinction, for example, between a citizen and a stranger as morally irrelevant. In our conversations surrounding the moral universe of the ordinary virtues, on the other hand, the universal human being was rarely, if ever, the object of ultimate concern. The most striking feature of the ordinary virtue perspective is how rarely any of our participants evoked ideas of general obligation to human beings as such; and how frequently they reasoned in terms of the local, the contingent, the here and now—what they owed those near to them and what they owed themselves.
The audience people imagined when justifying their behavior was not an abstract standard beyond the veil of ignorance or some set of principles written down in a human rights text. The moral audiences that mattered were their neighbors, their friends, their family, and their significant others. They worried about how they would look to these local audiences and to themselves, not to a wider world. For them, virtue was local. When ordinary people have moral decisions to make, they reason about the actual human beings before them—clothed, gendered, rich and poor, racially distinct—and their moral feelings about them depend utterly on their relationships: on whether they are neighbors or strangers, citizens or visitors, friends or foes, like “us” or like “them.” Here Hannah Arendt was surely right when she observed that the concept of Man is too hard for individuals to understand. As she wrote in The Human Condition, “Men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world.”[6] The philosopher David Hume said much the same two hundred and fifty years before when he wrote that there was no such thing as “love of mankind merely as such,” only love of this person for that, in this situation and not any other.[7] It is impossible to think of “human beings” as such. Instead, we think about human beings we know. That is all we can do.
To return to Mrs. Roosevelt, she assumed, as most human rights activists have always done, that human rights universalism and the ordinary virtues are complementary and mutually reinforcing. But what if they are not? In human rights discourse it is assumed as if it were a natural fact that human beings recognize the universal human subject in every encounter we have with distinct human beings and that this is the primary recognition that matters. Indeed, by human rights reasoning there is no “other,” there is only “us.” In contrast, in the ordinary virtues perspective “otherness” is primary. We encounter human beings as they present themselves to us: clothed, differentiated by skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and patterns of speech. On this perspective, what we see is not common humanity, but difference and otherness.
From the perspective of ordinary virtues, the first question we ask of another human being is always: Are you one of us or one of them? From this initial question everything follows, including whether we owe this individual anything. If they are fellow citizens, we may owe them shelter, clothing, a hearing, healthcare, and other forms of assistance. If they are strangers, what we owe them ceases to be a duty and becomes instead a matter of pity, generosity, and compassion. Given these seemingly opposed conceptions of the primary object of moral concern, it is therefore no surprise that the question of what claims citizens must accord to strangers—to refugees and migrants—has become an increasingly contentious issue in a globalizing world. This is as true in Europe as it is in Zama Zama, where Zimbabweans and Mozambicans languish on the fringe of South African society. Here the human rights and the ordinary virtues perspectives diverge radically. Where the former sees asylum as a right that any stranger with a well-founded claim of persecution can claim against a citizen, the latter sees asylum as a gift that a citizen makes as a matter of sovereign discretion.
From a human rights perspective, provided a stranger meets the criteria for protection set down in international law, there is no upper bound to the number of people citizens are required to receive into their community. From an ordinary virtues perspective, a requirement to receive strangers removes from a political community their very sovereignty. It equalizes the citizen and the stranger and removes the power of the citizen to determine who is worthy of the gift. From the ordinary virtue perspective, the claims of the citizen must trump those of the stranger; otherwise, democratic self-determination has no meaning.
In Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1948 after her own experience of being forced into exile from Nazi Germany and then living as a refugee in France before reaching the United States, she observed that it was an illusion to suppose that if a person were to lose their rights as a citizen, they could still claim their rights as a human being. As she bitterly but wisely remarked,
“If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implication of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declaration of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow human being.”[8]
It is when we have no particular claim to make on the solidarity of another—a claim of common citizenship, or race, or kinship, or shared language—that we are forced back on the last claim of all: the claim of human solidarity. And it is then, Arendt rightly says, that we are at our most vulnerable. It follows that it is difference, not shared identity, that is primary in human recognition; that when citizens everywhere believe that asylum is a gift and not a right they do so because they accord a natural priority to those who share their identity as citizens. This illustrates, again, the sharp distinction between the moral perspective of the ordinary virtues and that of universal human rights. Human rights enjoins us to recognize the universal equality in all human beings. From an ordinary virtues perspective, on the other hand, human beings do not appear clothed in what Marx called their “species being.”[9] Ordinary virtues accepts no general obligation to tolerate anyone. Its motto is “take people one at a time.” Tolerance as ordinary virtue refuses the temptation of synecdoche—allowing the part to stand for the whole. In effect, toleration as an ordinary virtue is a discipline of moral individualism, a decision formed by life experience to suspend prior judgment, to take people as they come.
So it is not surprising that while ethical convergence around universalist standards may be occurring among cosmopolitan elites, human rights as law or ethics figures little in ordinary people’s reckoning with the moral quandaries they face in everyday life. Eleanor Roosevelt had hoped it would, but it has not happened— and, I believe, it is not likely to.
What Is the Use?
What then might be the use of a universal ethic like human rights in a world where the moral perspective of most people is still determined by the ordinary virtues? Universalism is not best understood as deriving from our ordinary virtues, or indeed from any basic emotional intuitions. Instead, it is best seen as a rational thought experiment, as a critical discourse enacted into international law, whose purpose in the discourse of a free society is to persuade the ordinary virtues to enlarge and expand their circle of moral concern. Human rights functions best as a challenge to majoritarian moral preference. As such, it has a crucial role in criticizing the partiality of the ordinary virtues perspective. But human rights can only enlarge the moral scope of the ordinary virtues if it works with, rather than against, the intuition that what a citizen owes a stranger is not a right, but a gift.
Moral globalization ought to have had one key additional result: to make transnational solidarity between human beings easier now than it was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s time. Universal languages of obligation, such as human rights, are supposed to help widen ordinary people’s circle of moral concern. This widening of concern is in turn empowered by the technologies that are reshaping our time. We can travel from zones of safety to zones of danger and back again in almost no time at all. We can donate to charities halfway across the world by tapping a touch screen. Equally, if it is horror we wish to confront, it is all just a click away. But despite these advances, we should not announce a revolution in global solidarity too soon. It would be difficult to argue that human rights have rooted transnational instincts of solidarity in us any more deeply now than they were in Mrs. Roosevelt’s time, or in times more distant still. The feelings of solidarity, shame, and sorrow that we feel when our technologies present us with the martyred child, the drowned grandmother on a Greek beach, or the massacred innocent in a Nigerian school yard are likely not very different from those that Michel de Montaigne felt five hundred years ago, observing the slaughter of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics in the religious wars of the sixteenth century. He saw men leaving the dead bodies of their enemies to be devoured by pigs. It disgusted and repelled him as it disgusts and repels us. We agree with him when he says, “For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive—that a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only for the sake of the spectacle.”[10] Our technologies now enable us to make a spectacle of cruelty beyond anything Montaigne could have imagined. But we remain his moral kin. He hated cruelty then and we hate it now just as he did. Our conscience may be more enabled than Montaigne’s, since we have more information about the moral harms done to others far away, but our conscience is no sharper. His conscience was local and he blessed the ordinary virtues of his fellow French men and women as the saving graces of a savage time. We should too. Our conscience is local because our ultimate loyalties are local: to kith and kin, our own, our people, our community. The human rights revolution has changed what we believe about the duty of states. It is much less clear that it has changed us.
Virtues are social: they can be strengthened by good institutions and weakened by poor or corrupt ones. The best institutions for sustaining the ordinary virtues are what could be lumped together as “liberal freedom”: consent of the governed, rule of law, an independent judiciary, freedom of assembly and expression, majority rule and minority rights, and competitive markets. These institutions have made it possible to create moral individuals, to pry loose the carapace of class, faith, religion, and caste and allow individuals to live as free moral agents. To say this, however, is immediately to bring rights back as the essential institutional safeguards required for ordinary virtue to function. But these are not universal human rights; rather they are the rights enshrined in national laws and constitutions, the ones that traditions of local struggle and national history have rendered dear to those who defend them. Ordinary virtues endure when liberal freedom is absent, but they struggle because authoritarian rule confers impunity on the corrupt and the abusive.
If ordinary virtue is social, that is, if it requires tolerably good institutions in order to flourish, there is no place on earth, not even in those societies that originated liberal freedom, where these institutions have a fully clean bill of health. As Montaigne said, just as ordinary virtue is in constant struggle with ordinary vice, so too are liberal institutions constantly at risk from corruption, predation, and abuse.
One lesson from our journey is the true fragility of the institutions necessary to safeguard the ordinary virtues. Despite enormous advantages—constitutional stability, high per capita wealth, and global power—a liberal order in the United States is still struggling to deliver on its basic promise of due process to millions of its people, especially its black citizens. The moral operating system of global cities depends, above all else, on rule of law, fair policing, and fairness in the criminal justice system. Who would say the ordinary virtues receive adequate institutional support in America? Japan, likewise, thinks of itself as the most stable of the liberal democracies, but what Japanese citizen can still trust that the state’s nuclear regulators and operators will keep them safe? Fukushima was many things, but it was also a failure of the liberal state.
Even in developed liberal democracies the ordinary virtues struggle without honest, noncollusive, responsive institutions. Ordinary virtues cannot flourish in an environment of organized injustice toward immigrants, minorities, and the poor. If poor and disadvantaged families cannot count on equal protection under the law, their private virtues will languish. Developing and developed societies alike are struggling against the iron law of oligarchy, against the inveterate temptations of power, and against the ordinary vices of human indifference and greed.
No government approaches full legitimacy in the eyes of all its citizens. At all times, there will be abuses and injustices that awaken their anger. The question is when citizens will finally snap. The tipping point is always moral, when people suddenly come to see an abuse long tolerated as an expression of moral contempt by the elite toward the people. At some point, when injustice is too flagrant, contemptuous, or indifferent to dignity, the coping that ordinary virtues make possible simply breaks down. Conversely, when institutions function and when officials do their jobs, ordinary virtues can be revived as public institutions display resilience and public officials shoulder duties of care. Good institutions matter, but they matter because they empower the virtues that are essential to the cohesion and moral decency of society.[11] In a world increasingly divided between authoritarian capitalist regimes and liberal democratic ones, believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones abroad, but whether they can prevail at home against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality. In all of these situations, the virtues struggle with their opposites: with avarice and corruption, intolerance, hatred, and desire for vengeance. It is exactly as Montaigne wrote in his essay “On Cruelty”: “The very name of virtue presupposes difficulty and contention and cannot be experienced without an opponent.” Ordinary virtues are in a lifelong battle with ordinary vices. Without the constant inner temptation of the ordinary vices—cruelty, hatred, power-lust—virtues would not be what they are: a victory, however temporary, of the best in us over the worst in us.
Conclusion
Although globalization of our economies has not produced globalization in our hearts and minds, the geography of our virtues has changed. We now play out local conflicts before the whole world; and when we justify ourselves, we do it to strangers linked to us by new media. That is what moral globalization means—the steady enlargement of the audiences before which we feel we must justify ourselves. The audiences are global precisely because, thanks to the human rights revolution, all of us—former masters and former subjects alike—live in a postcolonial, post-imperial world, where the default norm is equality of voice. This does not prevent us, however, from giving priority to the audiences closest to us and most like us. Moral justification, we found, remains stubbornly local.
Perhaps, over time, as our local justifications fail, we may start to become ashamed of our provincial convictions and begin to enlarge our conscience, but moral change, in the deepest realms of our hearts, will always be slow. Internally, we are always locked in a battle with ordinary vices. In the public realm, our conflicts over power, resources, standing, and significance are inveterate, and many of these conflicts will not be settled by argument but with blood and fire. Our moral languages do not share the same history, and they are very slow, as they should be, to forget when followers of one moral system visit humiliation and injustice on those who adhere to another. It is also the case, however, that we share the same biology, the same body, and the same eventual fate. We also share the ordinary virtues, and we recognize them across all our differences.
The test of a decent society and the test of public institutions is whether they make it possible for us to display these virtues toward each other, and whether they deliver on the norm of equal voice for their poorest citizens. The institutions most likely to foster the ordinary virtues are liberal democratic ones, but there are no societies that have freed themselves from struggles against oligarchy, corruption, and injustice. And even if there were one, there would be no guarantee of its permanence. The only true constant is our never-ending struggle to live by the ordinary virtues.
Footnotes
[1] Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in “In Your Hands: A Guide for Community Action on the 10th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (New York: Church Peace Union, 1958).
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[2] Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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[3] James Ron and David Crow, “Who Trusts Local Human Rights Organizations? Evidence from Three World Regions,” Human Rights Quarterly 37, no.1 (2015), pp. 188–239.
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[4] For a full account of the Carnegie project see Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Operating Systems in a Post-Imperial World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017).
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[5] For more on this observation, see Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (New York: Random House, 2012); and Jonny Steinberg, Man of Good Hope (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015).
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[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1998).
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[7] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956 [1896]), p. 481.
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[8] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004 [1948]), p. 381.
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[9] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Dover, 2012).
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[10] Michel de Montaigne, “On Cruelty,” in The Complete Works, Donald M. Frame, trans. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003 [1948]), pp. 372–86.
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[11] Dani Rodrik, in Institutions, Development, and Economic Growth, Theo S. Eicher and Cecilia García-Peñalosa, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
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