Topics Ethics

Question If there is a person that feels no remorse over their hurtful actions, is incapable of feeling love or being loved, is severely emotionally restricted and has no interest in other people apart from using them for selfish means (maybe a psychopath), does that person have humanity? And if that person doesn't - and human rights is a concept of 'shared humanity' as Ronald Dworkin says - does that person have the same human rights as 'normal' human beings?

Accepted:
August 30, 2006

Comments

Human beings can and do change. They may lack important attributes at one time and yet come to possess them later. So we must choose whether to tie the ascription of humanity in the relevant sense to attributes they have or to ones they can have. Your formulations go back and forth between these options.

I think we should choose the latter option. Only if we do can we firmly include infants and small children within the domain of humanity and human rights. Moreover, we should guard against our susceptibility to error, esp. when we feel anger and hostility. We should avoid demonizing those we hold in contempt, we should honor our own humanity by treating them humanely rather than as beasts that may be subjected to any imaginable form of torture and degradation. (The possibilities of error and demonization are amply and shockingly exemplified in the horrors committed in Abu Ghraib.) If their humanity can emerge at all, this is most likely to happen through treating them humanely, not through definitively giving up on them.

What then must we believe a being to be capable of to merit human rights and humane treatment? I do not think we should require a capacity for emotions such as love and remorse (Spock). A capacity for moral judgment and conduct should suffice. So long as someone can restrain, or can yet come to restrain, her conduct by reference to moral considerations, we should regard her as meriting human rights.

I propose this as a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. I do not think we should deny human rights to human beings who fail the test proposed. Those who permanently lack the capacity for moral judgment and conduct -- the severely mantally disabled -- should also be treated humanely and be afforded human rights (though some human rights, such as those to political participation, freedom of expression, etc., may lack application in their case).