peter.harvey sez:
>Santipala Stephan Evans, in his conference paper, (p.4) says 'If the potential for enlightenment is the ground for human dignity, where does that leave those who have no interest in realizing that potential?'

>Surely, one can respect a person's rights nevertheless: abusing them is no way to ehnance one's own potential OR draw out that of the abused.

Of course. But do we respect others //because// of that (possibly neglected, or even abused) potential? My point is that the potential for enlightenment (or Buddha nature, etc.) is a weak support for human rights and may even work against it, as the Sri Lanka tradition (first or second century CE I think) that non-Buddhists are not fully human, Bodhidharma's statement that killing a Hinayanist would be justified (reminescent of Acquinas advocacy of Capital Punishment for heritics), etc.

But my respect for others is not based in their potential for enlightenment -- and I seriously doubt that Christians respect others because of the //Imago Dei//. Rather what I respect is just //this person//. I do not see dignity or enlightenment or God (or rights) in that breast, but just this person. If I see anything there it is my own reflection -- that she has captured something of me even as I have of her. How to articulate this situation usefully, this mutual necessity, is the problem. Rights language is a short hand language for talking about certain aspects of that situation -- especially when the situation is elaborated to the relations among individuals, groups, societies, states ...

Kim (I think) keeps hammering for a clarification what level of human rights we're talking about: individual, group, society etc. I think this is a central problem area in HR talk in general AWA at this conference. I do not think we will make a contribution focusing on the individual in isolation: as though the individual were a self contained, self fulfilling unit and society no more than the arena of its flourishing (the maintenance of which we may have contracted out ...). Society //is// all that, but also it //is// our flourshing, and the source of our particular existences, and the creation of our mutual lives.

If rights apply strictly to the individual, than using that language we can only ask the PRC to grant a circle of privacy around each Tibetan: "Free Tibet" becomes meaningless. Applied strictly to the culture ... but here are problems. The culture is not the state, where are its boundaries etc. etc, is female infanticide OK if it's part of the tradition? Nevertheless a culture (or rather a people which has a culture) is some sort of reality and the crushing of Tibet is a tragedy quite apart from the many individual, personal tragedies. What I think we need is a method for formulating rights statements which would first look at a total situation, evaluate it in the light of Buddhadharma, //then// see whether rights language is useful in expressing/correcting/preventing abuses (abuses of beings not of rights).

>Several people, eg. Traer (in conference related material) see 'inter-dependence' as the foundation of rights in Buddhism. But, while we (snip) > should one grant equal respect to: oppressive rulers, iindustrial polluters, the smallpox virus, HIV virus etc. etc., and to the extyent of letting them get on and 'do their thing'? We are just as ''inter-dependent' with
>them. So, to link inter-dependence with rights, more argument is needed.

>Peter Harvey

We are not deities in a position to let them do their thing or not but contingent beings in the world of others in realtions of dependency and conflict. We make choices -- we cannot //not// make choices //vis a vis// these others. Often the promptings of compassion conflict -- as Peter H. points out: imprisoning a murderor is cruel to him, compassionate to his possible victims. In fact the Jatakas are full of stories of ethical conflict. As Buddhists, we make the best choices we can taking risks because we don't always know what is best, and accept the consequences. "Rights" provide guidelines in the form of boundaries for that decision making -- but they leave many loose ends: we still have to risk making choices even knowing that we are mired in ignorance.


BTW, I very much like Jay Garfield's article, "Human Rights and Compassion," grounding human rights in compassion. I wonder if he knows how very Confucian this thinking is, especially in considering the problem of compassion (or //jen//) at a distance. Ironic that the PRC cries "cultural imperialism" when so much of China's own tradition calls for restraint of unjust power. In any case, the early Buddhist social-political vision is strikingly similar to Confucianism at its best. Too bad that early vision has been so long neglected. One question for J.G. -- if we criticize the HR theorists for simply asserting inalienable rights with no justification might we not be criticized in turn for calling for compassion with no more justification than that the Buddha said so?

-- "Santipala