The idea of a common humanity & international law

The idea of a community requires that its members care about the harms suffered by fellow members— moral and criminal harms as well as natural harms like fire, flood and disease, of which we have seen plenty since my book, A common humanity: Thinking about love and truth and justice was first published in 2009 by Text Publishing. This is true of all communities including the international one. Insofar as the latter exists, it has institutions that ameliorate natural forms of suffering amongst its members and international law to acknowledge the wrongs members suffer at the hands of other members, especially war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and genocide.

Much of the work in international law has been done under the concept of rights, protecting and extending them. Applications of the concept have provoked resistance by some nations of the Global South as a Western imposition. Sometimes the protests that the concept of human rights is an imposition upon cultures with historically different values is a cover for authoritarianism, but it is not always so. There is reason to rethink reliance on the concept in struggles against oppression.

Simone Weil, whose criticism of rights I discuss, said it was a ‘mediocre’ notion and awakens ‘a spirit of contention’. Leaders of the Free French in London asked Weil to contribute towards a new Declaration of Rights for the Fourth French Republic. She wrote instead ‘A Draft for a Statement of Obligation to Human Beings’. It was published (unfinished) in France in 1949, five years after her death, and later in English as The Need for Roots, with the subtitle Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind.

I am sympathetic to Weil’s argument and believe that there are occasions when the concept of ‘obligation to need’ is more suitable for thinking through ethical claims upon us and will be so when we respond to desperate people fleeing their countries because of the natural and political consequences of climate change. I would not, however, suggest that we try to banish talk of human rights. The battles for human rights and for the acceptance that all the peoples of the earth share an inalienable dignity that defines their common humanity have been amongst the noblest in Western history. Even if it were desirable always to replace the concept of respect for human rights with that of ‘obligation to need’, it will not happen. But Weil saw more clearly, more hard-headedly, than anyone I have read, that one of the most important motivations of our commitment to human rights rests on an illusion that is reinforced by the way we talk about Dignity, with a capital ‘D’, or of inalienable dignity. It is the illusion that no matter how unrelentingly savage or cruel our oppressors, we can retain a dignity that they cannot touch. Some people suffer affliction so terrible, either through natural causes or because of human cruelty, affliction that crushes their spirits so completely, the idea that they could rescue their Dignity by crying for their rights is as absurd as it is to imagine that the girl Weil described in 1949, who is dragged into a brothel, could do it.

In the introduction I remark on how ill at ease we have become in speaking of the various forms of the ethical, especially of morality. I suspect that is one of the primary reasons why the language of human rights, as we tend now to rely on it, believing that it expresses and protects the idea of a common humanity, in fact threatens it. That might seem too paradoxical to be even intelligible, but I say it because I believe that talk of human rights needs to be embedded in, to draw on, to be richly mindful of, and always to take us back to a richer vocabulary that reveals what it means ethically for a person’s human rights to have been seriously violated. If we rely on the concept of rights to do much of the ethical work alone, we will uproot it from its source and find ourselves ethically illiterate in the characterisation of the terrible wrongs people suffer, wrongs, that as the phrase ‘human rights’ suggests, should be of concern to all human beings, by virtue of the fact that they are human beings. Then talk of rights will undermine rather than support the hope that the peoples of the earth will acknowledge their common humanity and the profound ethical implications of that acknowledgment. It will undermine the prospects for the kind of conversation between the peoples of the earth that would give us reason to hope that we could become genuinely a community of nations, fully equal, made so by rendering ourselves answerable to international law, stripped of its Eurocentric distortions at least regarding war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

That hope may now seem to be a quixotic illusion to which we surrendered for almost eighty years. Many politcal commentators have said that we are now witnesses to the eternal relevance of the Melian dialogue—that the strong do as they will and the weak do as they must. Do not states make law by negotiating their interests in an ethics free zone?

Scepticism about whether morality should have a serious place in law has a long history, but the horror expressed by millions in street protests around the world about what Russia has done in Ukraine, what Hamas did on October 7, and what Israel has done in Gaza runs morally deep. Understandably, people expect that horror to find expression in the crimes proscribed in international law. And, importantly, condemning the moral wrong of crimes that offend against international criminal law and consenting to render ourselves answerable to that law, is regarded by many people now, I believe, as intrinsic to their conception of the national interest rather than a constraint on it—intrinsic to their sense of national pride and dignity. No one knows how long that will last, but disillusionment about the realisation of justice in the conduct of nations and the institutions of the world should not tempt us to abandon the very idea of justice.

This is an edited extract from the Afterword to the Routledge Classics edition of A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice, to be published on September 16 2025. A Common Humanity was first Published in 1999 by Text Publishing and by Routledge in in 2000.

The post The idea of a common humanity & international law appeared first on Australian Academy of the Humanities.