Official Report 960KB pdf
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Professor Rowan Cruft, professor of philosophy at the University of Stirling.
Thank you for inviting me. I work in philosophy at the University of Stirling. Philosophy can mean slow, careful attention to what we already know. I will attend to an idea that is familiar to politicians, which is rights.
Scotland has notable rights achievements, including the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law. An important question is, what are the practical effects of such measures on children’s lives? A philosophical question asks about the effects on our thinking: what difference does it make to our view of children if we think of them as right holders? What is the value of seeing anyone as a right holder? I argue that rights, especially human rights, matter in our thinking because they show that the individual must not be sacrificed for the sake of society.
Many concepts provide guidelines for behaviour, including duties, goals and ideals. The 10 commandments list duties—ways that people should behave—while the sustainable development goals list goals, which are aims that states should pursue. When we use the concept of a right, we add something extra to the idea of a rule, duty or goal: we give special status to an individual person or group as a right holder. They have status as the person who is wronged if the duty is violated, and have standing to demand fulfilment of the duty. Sometimes, we create that status just because it is efficient to do so: think about the rights created by car parking regulations, for example.
Karl Marx worried that rights are dangerously individualistic and that they focus attention on powerful claimants at the expense of duty bearers. He might be correct when it comes to some of the rights that define markets, but human rights are not like that: they are justified independently of efficiency or social usefulness. They mark a mutual recognition of our common humanity and protect individuals against being exploited or abandoned. When we see the duty not to torture or a duty to provide healthcare as duties that secure human rights, we are recognising that each person matters independently of whether respecting them is good for the wider group or whether that serves other values.
In that way, human rights are anti-fascist: they give a person a special moral and legal status, meaning that they are unsacrificeable for wider society. That is a vital feature, springing from how rights highlight individual claimants, and from how human rights are justified by what they do for the individual right holder. I wanted to remind our elected representatives of the essential value in thinking of people as right holders.
Thank you for listening.
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