Intervention and Transparency: the Case of Human Rights

Daniel Diederich Farmer
Marquette University

Title:
Intervention and Transparency: the Case of Human Rights

In this paper, I critique constructivist accounts of universal human rights (Jack Donnelly’s in particular) by deploying a criterion of transparency. A ‘transparent’ moral vocabulary is one in which questions about fundamental terms can readily be given truthful, elucidating answers. However, the language of human rights, I contend, functions in ways that mask its origins in Western, liberal and capitalist market practices. In terms of the vocabulary itself then, the question of why something is a human right cannot be answered truthfully. That is, human rights talk is ‘opaque’ rather than transparent. As it stands, it is consequently a bad moral vocabulary.