‘Onora O’Neill and our human obligations’ by Tom Startup

If politics is the art of the possible then too often political philosophy is the art of the impossible: an intellectual competition to see who can build the most elaborate castle in the sky. Its literature is filled with imaginary desert islands or states of nature in which idealized people play out the logical implications of thought experiments. Reality, if it makes an appearance at all, comes late to the party. Onora O’Neill hinted at such a concern in a recent interview: “I find myself weary of writing that is predicated on fictitious views of individual autonomy; fictitious views about well-ordered preferences; fictitious views of the possibility of achieving perfection in policy and politics; and many other fictions”.

From someone who has devoted her entire career to moral and political philosophy, this is a striking statement. But then O’Neill is no ordinary philosopher: Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, she was made a life peer in 1999, and as Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve sits as a cross-bencher in the House of Lords. Best known by the public for her Reith Lectures A Question of Trust (2002) in which, with trademark wit, she punctured the control freakery that surrounded New Labour, she is that rarest of creatures: a philosopher who has direct experience of politics.

Justice across Boundaries is a collection of some of O’Neill’s most important essays and talks from the past forty years on the topic of international justice. The central theme is the need to relocate discussions of human rights in the complex reality of a globalized world of often weak, corrupt, or failing states. She argues that ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, this great liberal idea has spread so far and wide, and penetrated so much of our political thinking, that the rhetoric has now vastly outstripped reality. We say Syrian refugees have human rights, but how is that anything other than verbiage when they are bombed daily and denied basic amenities? How can we make sense of human rights in a world where states are often the perpetrators of violence or incapable of upholding basic liberties for their citizens?

O’Neill’s answer is two-fold. First, we must stop viewing human rights as if they were sweets to be handed out from some bottomless jar. Instead we need to recognize that every human right can be realized only by the fulfilment of obligations. As O’Neill puts it: “It is a significant and non-trivial matter that there is no human obligations movement”. If I am to have the right to free speech then everyone else has the obligation not to interfere with my speech. If Syrian refugees have a right to food and shelter then someone must have the obligation to provide it to them. At a philosophical level, this means that rights advocates need to devote their energies to constructing a framework of obligations that supports the rights they promote. At a political level, it means that politicians must think more carefully about the obligations our rights imply and how they can be fulfilled. In the essay “The dark side of human rights” she raises the prospect that the costs and burdens of such obligations are heavy – perhaps too heavy for us to bear.

The second strand of her argument is that politicians and political philosophers must acknowledge the reality of modern states. Ever since Hobbes, a general assumption of political philosophy has been that states (often defined in the terms of Max Weber as an institution with a monopoly on violence in a geographical area) are the primary source of legitimate power. It follows that if rights are to be upheld, the corresponding obligations fall on them. John Rawls’s seminal work A Theory of Justice (1970) assumed “bounded societies” (meaning no immigration or emigration), and his later work, O’Neill argues, implicitly assumes that responsibilities for delivering justice fall on states. This assumption was also embodied in both the Universal Declaration and European Convention on Human Rights.

Instead O’Neill insists that modern thinking about human rights needs to accept and adapt to the fact of globalization and chronic instability. This means that modern states have porous boundaries, while often they are unable to fulfil the basic tasks of justice. In these situations, the proper response of human rights advocates should not be simply to throw their hands in the air, but to look to the plethora of non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations and transnational companies as potential secondary agents of justice. If they can, she argues, the likes of McDonalds and Oxfam should assume some of the responsibilities that states may be incapable of shouldering.

But what are these obligations and on what are they based? O’Neill’s basic answer comes from an appeal to one of her great heroes, Immanuel Kant. Our duties to others are based on the German philosopher’s Categorical Imperative which, as O’Neill interprets it, places stringent requirements on us to avoid deception or coercion in our dealings with others and work constructively to support and respect the autonomy of others. Fundamentally, our rights arise out of our duties to uphold others’ autonomy. The case for helping the Syrians is not based most fundamentally on charity or saving lives, but rather on our obligations to help others lead lives of their own choosing.

Onora O’Neill’s style is generally clear and concise; like a barrister, she builds her case carefully and logically. The essays are drawn from a multitude of sources, and spanning four decades; there is inevitably some overlap between them, but it is also fascinating to observe the evolution and refinement of her thought. Justice across Boundaries is an opportunity to witness one of our greatest living philosophers cast off fictitious worlds and wrestle political philosophy back into contact with the messy reality of global politics.