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In recent years, moral philosophy and cognitive science
have explored what seem to be deep-seated moral intuitions _ perhaps
the very foundations of moral judgment.
These inquiries focus on invented examples that
often reveal surprising cross-cultural uniformities of judgment, in
children as well as adults. To illustrate, I will instead take a real
example that carries us to the issue of universality of human rights.
In 1991, Lawrence Summers, later President
Clinton's treasury secretary and now president of Harvard University,
was chief economist of the World Bank. In an internal memo, Summers
demonstrated that the Bank should encourage polluting industries to
move to the poorest countries.
The reason is that "the measurement of the costs
of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from
increased morbidity and mortality," Summers wrote. "From this point of
view, a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in
the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the
lowest wages.
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load
of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should
face up to that."
Summers pointed out that any "moral reasons" or
"social concerns" about such a move "could be turned around and used
more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for
liberalization."
The memo was leaked, and led to a furious reaction,
typified by Jose Lutzenburger, Brazil's secretary of the environment,
who wrote to Summers, "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally
insane."
The modern standard for such questions is the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. General
Assembly in 1948.
Article 25 declares, "Everyone has the right to a
standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself
and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care
and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event
of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other
lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
In almost the same words, these provisions have
been reaffirmed in enabling conventions of the General Assembly, and
in international agreements on the "right to development."
It seems reasonably clear that this formulation of
universal human rights rejects the impeccable logic of the World Bank's
chief economist as profoundly immoral if not insane _ which was, in
fact, the virtually universal judgment.
I stress the word "virtually." Western culture
condemns some nations as "relativists," who interpret the declaration
selectively. But one of the principal relativists happens to be the
world's most powerful state, the leader of the self-designated "enlightened
states."
A month ago, the U.S. State Department issued its
annual report on human rights.
"Promoting human rights is not just an element of
our foreign policy, it is the bedrock of our policy and our foremost
concern," said Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for global
affairs.
Dobriansky was assistant secretary of state for
human rights and human affairs in the Reagan and Bush I
administrations, and in that capacity she sought to dispel what she
called the "myth" that '"economic and social rights' constitute human
rights."
This position has been frequently reiterated, and
underlies Washington's veto of the "right to development" and its
consistent refusal to accept human rights conventions.
The government may reject the Universal
Declaration's provisions. But the U.S. population disagrees. One
example is public reaction to the recently proposed federal budget, as
surveyed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the
University of Maryland.
The public calls for sharp cuts in military
spending along with sharply increased spending for education, medical
research, job training, conservation and renewable energy, as well as
for the United Nations and economic and humanitarian aid, along with
the reversal of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.
There is, rightly, much international concern
about the rapidly expanding U.S. trade and budget deficits. Closely
related is the growing democratic deficit, not just in the United
States but in the West generally.
Wealth and power have every reason to want the
public largely removed from policy choices and implementation _ also a
matter of concern, quite apart from its relation to the universality
of human rights.
We have just passed the 25th anniversary of the
assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, known as a
"voice for the voiceless," and the 15th anniversary of the murder of
six leading Latin American intellectuals, who were Jesuit priests,
also in El Salvador.
The events framed the hideous decade of the 1980s
in Central America. Romero and the Jesuit intellectuals were murdered
by security forces armed and trained by Washington _ in fact,
including the present incumbents or their immediate mentors.
The archbishop was assassinated shortly after he
wrote to President Carter, pleading with him not to send aid to the
military junta in El Salvador, which will "sharpen the repression that
has been unleashed against the people's organizations fighting to
defend their most fundamental human rights." State terror escalated,
always with U.S. support and with Western silence and complicity.
Similar atrocities are taking place right now, at
the hands of military forces armed and trained by Washington, with the
support of its Western allies: for example, in Colombia, the
hemisphere's leading human-rights violator and leading recipient of
U.S. military aid.
It appears that last year Colombia retained its
record of killing more labor activists than the rest of world combined.
In February, in a town that had declared itself a "peace community" in
Colombia's civil war, the military reportedly massacred eight people,
including a town leader and three children.
I mention these examples to remind ourselves that
we are not merely engaged in seminars on abstract principles, or discussing remote cultures that we do not comprehend. We are speaking
of ourselves, and the moral and intellectual values of the privileged
communities in which we live. If we do not like what we see if we look
into the mirror honestly, we have every opportunity to do something
about it.
Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
April 2005
Psicolinea September 2005
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