Human Nature and Human Rights.

• Author: Fox, Robin

IN THE CLOSING months of his presidency, Bill Clinton and some of his entourage have taken to using the buzzphrase "human and political rights" to replace the simpler "human rights." A call to the White House press office produced no explanation of the coinage, but assured me that "no policy change was implied." It's always nice to know that it is business as usual.

One would like to think that some sense of the paradoxes and complications of the term "human rights" had come home to the administration, and that in consequence it was on its way to even more qualifications: perhaps "human, political, economic, legal, cultural, national, sexual and domestic rights." This may be too much to hope for, but one gets the impression that President Clinton has meant to restrict "human" to "personal and family" and so needs to tack on "political" to cover all those "rights" that are to do with the wider society and participation in it. But what does this mean? That political rights are not human? That "human" has to do only with our persons and families? Whatever happened to "natural rights", which traditionally used to cover all of the above?

So much has now been written about "human rights" that, like President Clinton, we tend to lose our perspective and get confused. As with the classic issue of "natural rights" before it, the debate becomes so infused with passion that straight thinking is almost impossible. Argument about rights of one sort or another is both possible and desirable, particularly given the current penchant for using "human rights" as a basis for often quite brutal foreign policy decisions. But we have to recognize that putting "human" in front of "rights" -- when, for example, talking of the "human right" of people to free elections--is simply to use a warm hurrah word as a rhetorical device. In the same way, wars of political suppression become "humanitarian interventions", and anything we do not currently happen to like becomes "unnatural", even if it is something as basically human as the hunting of game animals or investment in multiple spouses.

Both "human" and "natural" do have a real content, and we can identify that content. Given the all-too-free use of these terms, perhaps we should ask ourselves what that content might be. The trouble is that we have used them as hurrah words for so long, that we balk at any result that is not consonant with our current enlightened prejudices. We want to define what is natural; we do not want nature to do it for us, for the result might not be pretty.

Thus, if anyone were to make an argument, however logical, coherent and backed by evidence, that there was no natural or human right to vote, for example, he would not be answered so much as ridiculed and condemned as reactionary and anti-humanitarian. Yet a respectable argument could indeed be made that there is nothing in nature, or certainly in the nature of being human, that demands the right to vote as such. That right is not so much a natural or human right as one contingent on the fairly advanced economic and political development of certain civilizations. This is probably the sort of thing Clinton has in mind when he adds political to human in the rights catalogue.

The natural/human right might be phrased as "a right to a say in the affairs of one's group." How such participation in group decision-making is to be ensured, however, is not defined by anything in nature or humanity. Voting only becomes an issue at a certain sophisticated level of political development. It may be possible to argue that at such a level everyone has a right to vote (although exceptions will rapidly be listed--children, lunatics, felons, peers, exiles, non-residents, resident non-citizens, non-property owners, unregistered persons), but such a right is scarcely natural or human. It is more properly cultural, or social and political, deriving from the nature of government so achieved rather than from facts of nature or humanity.

On the other hand, a very good argument could be made, using basic kin selection theory, that there is a natural and human right to revenge. If someone kills my nephew or grandson, he robs me of a proportion of my inclusive fitness, that is, the strength of my personal gene pool. To redress this imbalance, it could be argued, I have the right to inflict a similar loss on him. I should be allowed to deprive him of someone related to him. This could be satisfied by killing two of his first cousins, or any such combination that would level the balance sheet. It is remarkable that many systems of vengeance in human society seem implicitly to observe the logic of inclusive fitness. They do not, for example, necessarily prescribe that I kill the person responsible: one of his kin or clan will do just as well.

This system of vengeance is less efficient as a redress than a system whereby I would get to impregnate one of the perpetrator's females, thus forcing him to raise to viability a person carrying my own genes. Actually, in the example cited this would amount to overcompensation, since I would gain by half to a loss of one quarter. It would be more exact if my brother were allowed to make the impregnation, thus restoring the exact balance. Either method is of course impractical given intertribal or clan hostility, but note how ubiquitous is the practice of impregnating captive women or the women of defeated rivals. The advancing Russian forces in World War II made a massive effort to redress the imbalance caused by German depredations during Operation Barbarossa. Russian genes are now being nurtured by the Federal Republic's economic and welfare systems on a vast scale.

I probably do not have the right to demand that any superordinate entity carry out this vengeance for me (although I may call on supernatural agencies, and will commonly use sorcery to harm an offender). In strict fitness theory I am bound to redress my own wrongs and either succeed or fail, thus determining my own ultimate fitness in terms of the genes that I, and those who have genes in common with me through descent, contribute to the pool. Perhaps the most basic claim we have against a collective entity is that it leave us alone to settle our affairs. It is generally observed, however, that as human societies evolve, many of the self-help functions are delegated to some superordinate authority.

This is the essence of the social contract: for the sake of harmony within the group, certain basic rights to individual action are delegated to the group itself. Hence, compensation comes to substitute for vengeance. Again, this is often framed in reproductive terms: compensation for a murdered man is that which will enable his kin to raise another child to replace him. In many systems before the advent of the monopolistic state, there was no question of personal retribution through the execution of the murderer. Just compensation, which would enable the genetic replacement of the victim, was considered...