Lena Halldenius

History plays an important role in the philosophy of human rights, more so than in philosophical discussions on related concepts, such as justice. History tends to be used in order to make it credible that there is a tradition of rights as a moral idea, or an ethical ideal, that transcends national boundaries. In the example that I investigate in this chapter, this moral idea is tightly spun around the moral dignity of the human person. There has been a shift in conceptions of human rights during the twentieth century, from ‘politics of the state to the morality of the globe’. Rather than figuring in, or as, constitutional principles of the political life of a polity and the relation between a state and its members, the notion of rights has come to serve as the name of a state- and politics-transcending ethical position on the status of the human person, and the relations between human persons. Given that this move from politics of the state to morality of the globe is a recent one, it goes without saying that trying to ground a state-transcending morality of human rights with the help of early modern history is problematic. Still, philosophers of this kind of morality of human rights are prone to claiming, for their accounts, a long-standing human rights tradition that, frankly, is not there, at least not in that form. One example is James Griffin, whose reliance on what he refers to as a historical notion of human rights is the focus of my critical discussion here. Griffin claims that ‘our’ concept of human rights is a product of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought. If ‘our’ concept of human rights is Griffin’s concept, then his claim is false – as I show. I agree, however, that the eighteenth century is a pivotal moment, but if we wish to understand natural rights in eighteenth century thought, we need to grasp the fact that power over others, and the capacity of those who hold that power to also abuse it, was not a contingent concern, or merely part of the extension of a concept defined prior to, or independently of, any such concern. It was built into the concept itself; it was its very point.

In this article, John Locke's accounts of political liberty and legitimate government are read as expressions of a normative demand for non-arbitrariness. I argue that Locke locates infringements of political liberty in dependence on the arbitrary will of another, whether or not interference or restraint actually takes place. This way Locke is tentatively placed in that tradition of republican thought recently brought to our attention by Pettit, Skinner and others. This reading shifts the focus on legitimacy and identifies the independent moral argument for legitimate government as ruling for the good of the people. Consent is left with a hypothetical role to play

Halldenius argues that we should regard Mary Wollstonecraft as a feminist republican, drawing out the implications of reading her in that way for the meaning and role of freedom in Wollstonecraft’s philosophy. Her republicanism directs our attention to the fact that freedom for Wollstonecraft is conceptualized in terms of independence, importantly in two analytically distinct yet heavily interdependent ways. There is a long philosophical tradition of treating moral freedom as an internal phenomenon, as an aspect of freedom of the will. Wollstonecraft makes this inner freedom politically conditioned. Liberty is independence in relation to others and in relation to the law and institutions of society, but also a kind of inner intellectual independence. Attending to the dynamics between the external and internal aspects of independence is crucial for our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s view of society and morality, but also of her philosophical method, which is to reason through lived experience. What liberty is and requires can only be articulated by “poor men, or philosophers”, as she puts it in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790. Halldenius argues that the “poor man” here represents the philosophical vantage point. The view of the unprivileged, of those with no wealth or titles to lose, constitutes the disinterested, impartial view. Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the lived experience of unfreedom and subordination as a valid source of knowledge implies that a crucial question regarding freedom and unfreedom is not only what freedom is, but what it is like.