[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on values

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Khaleej Times Online
	Universality of human rights
	BY NOAM CHOMSKY
	10 April 2005

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 liberalisation."

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 UN 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 US 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
US 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
US 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 organisations fighting to defend their most
fundamental human rights." State terror escalated, always with US 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 US military aid.

It appears that last year Colombia retained its record of killing more
labour 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 is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival:
America's Quest for Global Dominance.]