From Aeon:
John Tasioulas is professor of ethics and legal philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law (2020), and his recent articles include ‘Saving Human Rights from Human Rights Law’ (2020) and ‘The Rule of Law’ (2020).
Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions?
As political philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls have emphasised, a flourishing democracy has a robust culture of public reason, one in which all citizens are able to participate as equals in collective deliberation and decision-making about the common good of society. In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about dire new threats to the quality of our public reason, such as the rise of populist authoritarianism, the creation of ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ on social media that aggravate political polarisation, or the dissemination online of extremist views and ‘fake news’ by automated bots and other malign agents.
But another kind of threat to the quality of public reason tends to go unnoticed. This is the degradation of the core ideas mobilised in exercises of public reason, not least in the utterances of elite actors, such as bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians and representatives of international organisations and NGOs. These ideas – health, human rights, democracy and so on – are central to the way we formulate and address the main political challenges of our time, from the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One prominent form taken by this degradation of public reason is the phenomenon I call ‘conceptual overreach’. This occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it. In its most extreme manifestation, conceptual overreach morphs into a totalising ‘all in one’ dogma. A single concept – say, human rights or the rule of law – is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time. Of course, we’ll always need some very general concepts to refer to vast domains of value – the ideas of ethics, justice and morality, for example, have traditionally served this function. The problem is when there is a systematic trend for more specific concepts of value to aspire to the same level of generality.
But why worry about conceptual overreach? If ‘human rights’, say, is a phrase that increasingly encompasses more and more things that are genuinely valuable goals, why should we quibble about the label attached to them? Isn’t this mere pedantry? Far from it, I believe.
One danger of conceptual overreach is that we lose sight of the distinctive idea conveyed by a given concept through its immersion in a sea of many other quite separate ideas, a significance that goes beyond the baseline fact that all the ideas in question identify something of value. If, for example, human rights are demands that are generally high-priority in nature, such that it’s seldom if ever justified to override them, then we lose our grip on that important idea if we start including under the heading of ‘human rights’ valuable objectives – for example, access to a high-quality internet connection – that don’t plausibly enjoy that kind of priority. Another danger is that the extraneous ideas that are subjected to a process of conceptual takeover end up being themselves distorted. So, for example, we start regarding modes of treatment that are beneficial to someone, such as mercy towards a convicted offender, as benefits to which they have a right.
As a result, this conceptual overreach leaves us poorly positioned to identify the distinct values that are at stake in any given decision. It also obscures the agonising conflicts that exist among these values in particular cases. But these two large intellectual defects also generate serious practical drawbacks when we seek to engage in deliberation with others. Conceptual overreach in its more extreme forms inhibits constructive dialogue, or even just the brokering of honourable compromises, with those whose political orientation differs significantly from ours. This is because it makes it difficult to find any point of common ground or shared understanding with them. Instead, when we try to reach some kind of reasonable accommodation with them based on, say, fairness or human rights, we find ourselves locked in opposing moral-political worldviews at every turn.
Conceptual overreach might appear rather abstract, so let me give some examples of its real-world presence. A notorious illustration is the definition of ‘health’ in the World Health Organization’s constitution. Health is there described as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. This all-encompassing definition flies in the face of the commonsense view that health is just one ingredient in a life of wellbeing, among others, such as pleasure, friendship, knowledge, accomplishment and so on. What use is this inflated notion of health when we already have the concept of wellbeing at our disposal?....
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