Development as Freedom (38 page)

There is, in fact, another feature of people’s reaction to coercion—that of voting with their feet. As Indian family planning specialists have noted, voluntary birth control programs in India received a severe setback from that brief program of compulsory sterilization, since people had become deeply suspicious of the entire family-planning movement. Aside from having little immediate impact on fertility rates, the coercive measures of the emergency period introduced in some regions in India were, in fact, followed by a long period of
stagnation
in the birthrate, which ended only around 1985.
³⁹

The magnitude of the population problem is often somewhat exaggerated, but nevertheless there are good grounds for looking for ways and means of reducing fertility rates in most developing countries. The approach that seems to deserve particular attention involves a close connection between public policies that enhance gender equity and the freedom of women (particularly education, health care and job opportunities for women) and individual responsibility of the family (though the decisional power of potential parents, particularly the mothers).
⁴⁰
The effectiveness of this route lies in the close linkage between young women’s well-being and their agency.

This general picture applies to developing countries as well, despite their poverty. There is no reason why it should not. While arguments are often presented to suggest that people who are very poor do not value freedom in general and reproductive freedom in particular, the evidence, insofar as it exists, is certainly to the contrary. People do, of course, value—and have reason to value—other things
as well
, including well-being and security, but that does not make them indifferent to their political, civil or reproductive rights.

There is little evidence that coercion works faster than what can be achieved through voluntary social change and development. Coercive family planning can also have seriously unfavorable consequences other than the violation of reproductive freedom, in particular an adverse impact on infant mortality (especially female infant mortality in countries with an entrenched antifemale bias). There is nothing here that gives definite ground for transgressing the basic importance of reproductive rights for the sake of achieving other good consequences.

In terms of policy analysis, there is much evidence now, based on intercountry comparisons as well as interregional contrasts within a large country, that women’s empowerment (including female education, female employment opportunities and female property rights) and other social changes (such as mortality reduction) have a very strong effect in reducing fertility rate. Indeed, it is difficult to ignore the policy lessons implicit in these developments. The fact that these developments are highly desired for other reasons as well (including
the reduction of gender inequity) makes them central concerns in development analysis. Also, social mores—what is taken to be “standard behavior”—are not independent of the understanding and appreciation of the nature of the problem. Public discussion can make a big difference.

Reducing fertility is important not only because of its consequences for economic prosperity, but also because of the impact of high fertility in diminishing the freedom of people—particularly of young women—to live the kind of lives they have reason to value. In fact, the lives that are most battered by the frequent bearing and rearing of children are those of young women who are reduced to being progeny-generating machines in many countries in the contemporary world. That “equilibrium” persists partly because of the low decisional power of young women in the family and also because of unexamined traditions that make frequent childbearing the uncritically accepted practice (as was the case even in Europe until the last century)—no injustice being seen there. The promotion of female literacy, of female work opportunities and of free, open and informed public discussion can bring about radical changes in the understanding of justice and injustice.

The view of “development as freedom” gets reinforced by these empirical connections, since—it turns out—the solution of the problem of population growth (like the solution of many other social and economic problems) can lie in expanding the freedom of the people whose interests are most directly affected by overfrequent childbearing and child rearing, viz., young women. The solution of the population problem calls for
more
freedom, not less.

The idea of human rights has gained a great deal of ground in recent years, and it has acquired something of an official status in international discourse. Weighty committees meet regularly to talk about the fulfillment and violation of human rights in different countries in the. world. Certainly the
rhetoric
of human rights is much more widely accepted today—indeed much more frequently invoked—than it has ever been in the past. At least the language of national and international communication seems to reflect a shift in priorities and emphasis, compared with the prevailing dialectical style even a few decades ago. Human rights have also become an important part of the literature on development.

And yet this apparent victory of the idea and use of human rights coexists with some real skepticism, in critically demanding circles, about the depth and coherence of this approach. The suspicion is that there is something a little simple-minded about the entire conceptual structure that underlies the oratory on human rights.

What, then, appears to be the problem? I think there are three rather distinct concerns that critics tend to have about the intellectual edifice of human rights. There is, first, the worry that human rights confound consequences of legal systems, which give people certain well-defined rights, with pre-legal principles that cannot really give one a justiciable right. This is the issue of the legitimacy of the demands of human rights: How can human rights have any real
status except through entitlements that are sanctioned by the state, as the ultimate legal authority? Human beings in nature are, in this view, no more born with human rights than they are born fully clothed; rights would have to be acquired through legislation, just as clothes are acquired through tailoring. There are no pre-tailoring clothes; nor any pre-legislation rights. I shall call this line of attack the
legitimacy critique
.

The second line of attack concerns the
form
that the ethics and politics of human rights takes. Rights are entitlements that require, in this view, correlated duties. If person A has a right to some
x
, then there has to be some agency, say B, that has a duty to provide A with
x
. If no such duty is recognized, then the alleged rights, in this view, cannot but be hollow. This is seen as posing a tremendous problem for taking human rights to be rights at all. It may be all very nice, so the argument runs, to say that every human being has a right to food or to medicine, but so long as no agency-specific duties have been characterized, these rights cannot really “mean” very much. Human rights, in this understanding, are heartwarming sentiments, but they are also, strictly speaking, incoherent. Thus viewed, these claims are best seen not so much as rights, but as lumps in the throat. I shall call this the
coherence critique
.

The third line of skepticism does not take quite such a legal and institutional form, but views human rights as being in the domain of social ethics. The moral authority of human rights, in this view, is conditional on the nature of acceptable ethics. But are such ethics really universal? What if some cultures do not regard rights as particularly valuable, compared to other prepossessing virtues or qualities? The disputation of the reach of human rights has often come from such cultural critiques; perhaps the most prominent of these is based on the idea of the alleged skepticism of Asian values toward human rights. Human rights, to justify that name, demand universality, but there are no such universal values, the critics claim. I shall call this the
cultural critique
.

The legitimacy critique has a long history. It has been aired, in different forms, by many skeptics of rights-based reasoning about ethical
issues. There are interesting similarities as well as differences between different variants of this criticism. There is, on the one hand, Karl Marx’s insistence that rights cannot really
precede
(rather than follow) the institution of the state. This is spelled out in his combatively forceful pamphlet “On the Jewish Question.” There are, on the other hand, the reasons that Jeremy Bentham gave for describing “natural rights” (as mentioned before) as “nonsense” and the concept of “natural and imprescriptible rights” as “nonsense on stilts.” But common to these—and many other—lines of critique is an insistence that rights must be seen in postinstitutional terms as instruments, rather than as a prior ethical entitlement. This militates, in a rather fundamental way, against the basic idea of universal human rights.

Certainly, taken as aspiring legal entities, pre-legal moral claims can hardly be seen as giving justiciable rights in courts and other institutions of enforcement. But to reject human rights on this ground is to miss the point of the exercise. The demand for legality is no more than just that—a demand—which is justified by the ethical importance of acknowledging that certain rights are appropriate entitlements of all human beings. In this sense, human rights may stand for claims, powers and immunities (and other forms of warranty associated with the concept of rights) supported by ethical judgments, which attach intrinsic importance to these warranties.

In fact, human rights may also exceed the domain of
potential
, as opposed to
actual
, legal rights. A human right can be effectively invoked in contexts even where its
legal
enforcement would appear to be most inappropriate. The moral right of a wife to participate fully, as an equal, in serious family decisions—no matter how chauvinist her husband is—may be acknowledged by many who would nevertheless not want this requirement to be legalized and enforced by the police. The “right to respect” is another example in which legalization and attempted enforcement would be problematic, even bewildering.

Indeed, it is best to see human rights as a set of ethical claims, which must not be identified with legislated legal rights. But this normative interpretation need not obliterate the usefulness of the idea of human rights in the kind of context in which they are typically invoked. The freedoms that are associated with particular rights may be the appropriate focal point for debate. We have to judge the plausibility of
human rights as a system of ethical reasoning and as the basis of political demands.

I turn now to the second critique: whether we can coherently talk about rights without specifying whose duty it is to guarantee the fulfillment of the rights. There is indeed a mainstream approach to rights that takes the view that rights can be sensibly formulated only in combination with correlated duties. A person’s right to something must, then, be coupled with another agent’s duty to provide the first person with that something. Those who insist on that binary linkage tend to be very critical, in general, of invoking the rhetoric “rights” in “human rights” without exact specification of responsible agents and their duties to bring about the fulfillment of these rights. Demands for human rights are, then, seen just as loose talk.

A question that motivates some of this skepticism is: How can we be sure that rights are realizable unless they are matched by corresponding duties? Indeed, some do not see any sense in a right unless it is balanced by what Immanuel Kant called a “perfect obligation”—a specific duty of a particular agent for the realization of that right.
¹

It is, however, possible to resist the claim that any use of rights except with co-linked perfect obligations must lack cogency. In many legal contexts that claim may indeed have some merit, but in normative discussions rights are often championed as entitlements or powers or immunities that it would be good for people to have. Human rights are seen as rights shared by all—irrespective of citizenship—the benefits of which everyone
should
have. While it is not the specific duty of any given individual to make sure that the person has her rights fulfilled, the claims can be generally addressed to all those who are in a position to help. Indeed, Immanuel Kant himself had characterized such general demands as “imperfect obligations” and had gone on to discuss their relevance for social living. The claims are addressed generally to anyone who can help, even though no particular person or agency may be charged to bring about the fulfillment of the rights involved.

It may of course be the case that rights, thus formulated, sometimes end up unfulfilled. But it is surely possible for us to distinguish
between a right that a person has which has not been fulfilled and a right that the person does not have. Ultimately, the ethical assertion of a right goes beyond the value of the corresponding freedom only to the extent that some demands are placed on others that they should try to help. While we may be able to manage well enough with the language of freedom rather than of rights (indeed it is the language of freedom that I have been mainly invoking in
Development as Freedom)
, there may sometimes be a good case for suggesting—or demanding—that others help the person to achieve the freedom in question. The language of rights can supplement that of freedom.