Human Rights and the Relational Self

Human Rights and the Relational Self:-

A Personalist Approach

Denis Chang

3rd International Bioethics, Multiculturalism & Religion Workshop

& Conference, Hong Kong, China SAR

3rd - 5th December, 2013

Organized by

UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights, Regina Apostolorum University and European University of Rome and Hong Kong Baptist University.

ABSTRACT:

This introductory paper, with the help of insights drawn from both secular and religious sources, including the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and the Confucian “Relational Self,” presents a framework for a personalist relational philosophy (the “PRP”) of human rights that can serve as a basis for global values and universal norms in a culturally diverse and pluralistic world. Human beings are both particular and universal, the one and the many, the self and the other, the subject and object of human rights and duties, of love and responsibility.

The PRP is based on a realist anthropology of the human person as an ontological reality and relational being. The “Personalist Principle” goes beyond the Kantian imperative of respect for the intrinsic worth and dignity of all human beings and incorporates an ethic of benevolence and care which pays proper regard to human relationality and vulnerability, with implications not only for biomedicine and bioethics but also generally.

The approach adopted upholds the centrality of the human person and at the same time militates against hyper-individualism on the one hand and fragmentation and loss of identity on the other. It seeks that which truly benefits human dignity and contributes to “eudaimonia”or human flourishing and what in the Confucian “Doctrine of the Mean”(中庸) is called “cheng” (誠) or “authentic self-completion” that engages not just the individual self but advances the integral development of all and the unity of “Man, Heaven, and Earth”.

Introduction

The primary objective of this paper is to give a sketch of a heuristic framework for a personalist relational philosophy (“PRP”) that will indicate how global values and universal human rights norms can be reasonably justified in a culturally diverse and pluralistic world.

As is made clear in Art. 12 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights, 2005 (the “UDBHR”), whilst “due regard” should be given to the importance of cultural diversity and pluralism, “such considerations are not to be invoked to infringe upon human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms, nor upon the principles set out in this Declaration, nor to limit their scope”.

The second, and related objective, is to suggest how a holistic shift to the embodied relational self within a personalist ethic of care can help mitigate the excessive individualism often associated with modern “Western” secular liberalism and, at the same time, the fragmentation and loss of identity that can result by the post-modern “splintering of the self”.

Such a shift can have far-reaching implications not only with regard to the clinical practice of medicine and bioethics but can also, and more broadly, help to transform, inter alia, the ways in which the law structures rights and rights structure relationships. The relational lens, it is hoped, will bring into proper focus the “human” in “human rights” as part of an on-going search for an ecology, hermeneutics and praxis of human rights that best accord with the truth of the human condition and contribute to integral human development.

Self-Construals

Let me, then, take from social and cultural psychology three fundamental types or modes of “self-construal” (i.e. self-definition or self-representation), namely the individual self, the collective self and the relational self. These modes are sometimes also expressed in terms of “independent”, “interdependent-collective” and “relational” self-construals[1].

It is not suggested that one mode of self-definition or presentation necessarily excludes another; or that these are the only modes[2]. Nor is it suggested that we should limit ourselves to the data and insights gleaned from the social sciences alone. As is rightly noted in the Preamble of the UDBHR “a person’s identity includes biological, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual dimensions”.

I argue for an inter-disciplinary holistic approach that attests to the dynamic unity-in-diversity and multi-dimensional character of the human person as a relational being existing in a world which, despite human suffering and structures of alienation and of evil, is still mediated by meaning and capable of being trans-valued by love.

In inter-cultural mediation and trans-cultural understanding, an integral creative vision or shared horizon of civilizing values is called for but without falling into an easy eclecticism or a moral relativism under the guise of a pluralism that all-too readily allows “the substance of justice [to be] held hostage to the brute facts of global diversity. ”[3]

What is the Relational Self?

The motivational primacy of the “individual self” is an atomistic or monadic “I” at the centre of the moral universe whereas the “relational self” is motivated by an empathetic “I–and-Thou” in significant relationships, typically dyadic though not necessarily so. The “collective self” is chiefly driven by an undifferentiated “We” and “Us” of the collectivity[4].

Relationships are constitutive of a person’s character and very identity. A person, however, is not simply the sum total of his or her relationships. Notwithstanding contemporary hermeneutics of the self that speaks, for example, of the self existing only within “webs of interlocution”[5], there is an ontology of the self, or perhaps more accurately an ontology of the human person, with a reality that goes beyond partial perspectives offered by the empirical and social sciences.

The “relational self” that we speak of is “embodied, affective and relational,” [6] in other words it is that of a flesh-and-blood human being socially embedded in a web of relationships which crucially include close “nested” relationships but also extend or are capable of extending to and beyond those of family, friends, faith communities or other groups to which the person actually or potentially belongs. Indeed, it has a spiritual and a universal dimension, including the ecological, with an awareness and care of and concern for other selves and of the lifeworld and stewardship of the environment[7].

What are basic human rights?

Human rights are entitlements or claims which everyone possesses simply by virtue of our nature as human beings[8]. I have used both the singular “everyone” and the plural “our” because we are both singular as well as plural. Each one of us, from the first moment of existence, is unique but all of us are members of the human race. As I see it, human rights are the expression of normative values based on basic human needs or goods and equal intrinsic human worth and dignity translated into claims of right and universal norms[9], or at the very least “a right to have rights”[10] with co-relative duties, rooted in our shared humanity. The modern idiom for what historically was implied in the term “natural right” in the singular, and later better articulated in the plural, is transformed into what is to-day commonly called “human rights”[11].

The account I am giving does not deny the possibility of human transcendence or exclude religious or theistic underpinnings and dimensions of human sacredness and worth (e.g. by reference to Imago Dei) (Genesis 1:26). Such underpinnings provide ontological grounding for human sacredness and intrinsic dignity in a manner which the Kantian “autonomous self” or a purely immanent frame does not purport to nor can ever guarantee or supply on its own.

However, “both trajectories of anthropology, religious and secular, are necessary in fostering community in the 21stCentury…. Most people live between two worlds, secular and religious, both of which inform their decisions and behaviour. Both discourses speak to our modern dilemma of how to be human in the face of the Other”[12].

The proposition that human beings have certain basic rights simply by virtue of our shared humanity implies that “the basic rights of the human person…have always existed with the human being…independently of, and before, the State”[13]

This means that basic human rights are not state-conferred but it does not mean that positive law has no role to play in their protection and realization. Positive law does have an important and in many cases a necessary role. There is the practical task of fleshing out and translating general principles into specific policies. The process includes what is called “determinatio” in Thomistic methodology, illustrated by the way in which practical reason resolves co-ordination problems by choosing between two options which are incompatible with each other but which are both consistent with the basic requirements of practical reasonableness [14].

Are Particularity and Universality Incompatible?

Particularity and universality are not incompatible categories and can be mutually reinforcing[15]. As I see it in the present context, this is because human beings are both particular and universal, the one and the many, the self and the other, the subject and object of human rights and duties, of love and responsibility (infra).

In short, a human being is here to be taken both as existential referent and concrete universal, thus giving a basis for mediating between particular cultures and universal normative values. In my view, a human rights norm is universal not because of its abstractness but because of its potential completeness, not by stripping objects of their particularities but by envisaging human subjects in their necessities and situated-relatedness.[16]

Such “necessities” are conceived broadly in terms of the basic human goods needed for eudaimonia or flourishing of the human person as a relational being. They include, for example, respect for human life and dignity that is part of the intrinsic worth of each and every human being and what in justice is due to everyone simply by virtue of our shared humanity.

In this context, it has been rightly observed by John Finnis “…when we come to explain the requirements of justice, which we do by referring to the needs of the common good at its various levels, then we find that there is reason for treating the concept of duty, obligation or requirement as having a more strategic explanatory role than the concept of rights. The concept of rights is not on that account of less importance or dignity: for the common good is precisely the good of the individuals whose benefit, from fulfillment of duty by others, is their right because required in justice of those others”. [17]

Of course not all values are normative and not all normative values are universal or translatable into human rights and duties. However, as noted in the opening words of the Preamble to the UDBHR, human beings have the “unique capacity…to reflect upon their existence and on their environment, to perceive injustice, to avoid danger, to assume responsibility, to seek cooperation and to exhibit the moral sense that gives expression to ethical principles”.

A Critical- Realist Axiology:

Realist anthropology & the Ontic Value of Human Persons

It is precisely because of the unique capacity and moral sense that we have as human beings, possessed of both “speculative” (i.e. theoretical) reason and “practical reason” as well as inter-subjective feelings, emotions and empathy as part of our embodied human nature, that we are able to arrive at a firm grasp of values with the aid of human intuition and insights[18] and through a combination of experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding.

What I have just referred to above is the four-level dynamic structure of human knowing and acting as discussed extensively by Lonergan in his works.[19] The first three, relating to “data, concept, judgment”, constitute the “critical-realist” component; the fourth level consists of evaluation and responsible action-oriented decision, the axiological and ethical component.

“Critical realism” insists that true knowledge can be achieved of the world, including the truth of the human condition in its embodied reality – hence “realist” – but that such knowledge is reached not just by taking an unreflective look (as in naïve realism) but through insight and grasp of what is (ontology) and what ought to be (values, ethics) through a process of experiencing, conceiving, judging and deciding.

Inasmuch as a knowledge of reality and especially human reality, is required in a judgment of value, the critical-realist component is prayed in aid in the grasp of values. In my view, the values grasped include the ontic value of persons[20] and other normative values that are translatable into universal human rights and duties.

In other words, the whole person - with the capacity to make rational and affective judgments and responsible decisions– is engaged in the grasp of normative values[21] that pertain to what is true, right and good in the search for authentic human good and happiness not just for oneself but for others and indeed for “All-under-Heaven” (including the “future generations” referred to in Articles 2(g) and 16 of the UDBHR).

The human faculties of “will” and “reason”, so to speak, meet in the unity of the embodied subject as a feeling, willing, thinking and acting person whose inter-subjective consciousness, structured by insight, is transformed into a conscience that can be both intensely personal and no less intensely social. It is also a conscience that can powerfully speak and act through as well as transcend the cultures and ethos of particular times and places.

The realist anthropology adopted here requires that we be attentive to all relevant data, including those facts as apprehended at the empirical, experiential and phenomenological levels, which speak to our human condition, including identity, singularity as well as solidarity.

This is of particular importance when we find it necessary to formulate concepts, discover or establish objective markers or criteria and make judgments and decisions relating, for example, to such matters as the beginning and end of human life and other questions regularly encountered in biomedicine and bioethics.[22]

An approach which is not rooted in a realist anthropology runs the risk of moral subjectivism and relativism and of introducing unjust and arbitrary discriminatory practices in violation of such fundamental principles as are encapsulated, for example, in the UDBHR and other human rights instruments which declare all human beings to have the right to life and to be equal in inherent dignity and fundamental rights.