Reflection on Human Rights and Market Society


Reflection on Human Rights and Market Society
Wenqin Weng

What are the unique characteristics of human rights? The most obvious one is the universality of human rights. Almost in every articles of the universal declaration we can see phrases such as “all” and “nobody”. This unique element differs human rights from any other rights in law. They are unconditional and owned by all from the moment they are born to this world. Other rights might have some restrictions and preconditions and differ greatly in different states, which has different culture, economic system and political backgrounds. However, the universality indicates that human rights are mandatory, unconditional and independent from culture, economic and politics.
Unfortunately, our current understanding of the economic system completely rules out the element of morality. Nowadays we evaluate the market purely on its efficiency and we believe that a market is only good, when it maximizes the utility. In underdeveloped countries we can see exploitation of cheap labor and even child labor, and when people see the pictures of miserableness in those countries, they would sigh and pity them for a split second and head off as if they haven't seen them.
In the “good old days” we perceive markets not merely as a coordination of transactions. We take more of a moral perspective to evaluate the market. It was considered as a mechanism to fight against the feudalism in the Middle Ages, since it provided people with a fair trading ground, where everyone’s effort gets paid adequately. The market is also considered as lifting us out from barbarianism into a more civil society. This aspect fades as our society transforms into a market society.
It is time for us to change our perspectives and seriously consider taking into account basic human rights into account when we evaluate a market, or a business. What is universal should not be violated for monetary gain.

Comments

  1. jdoutFebruary 20, 2018 at 10:42 AM

    Good job, Oscar. As we mentioned in class today, most choices made by people are made of their own free will. In many ways, we have much--practically unlimited--freedom to act, and yet to hear people speak, and they way they rationalize their decisions, one has the impression that there is such a thing as "the market" out there which is constraining people's actions.
    Prominent business people often explain their decisions in terms of "business decisions" or "because of the market." Most notable for me was Ivanka Trump's explanation of why her corporation outsources labor to developing countries--countries where she is able to extract labor from a population who works under worse living conditions and is paid less well than equivalent workers--seamstresses--would be if they lived in the USA. She explained that it was a "business decision." This is a bluff; she was hoping people would assume it is "too complicated" for laymen to understand, as prominent people often do.... because otherwise people would understand her real rationale: greed.
    BTW: it is interesting to look at the role played by the USA in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights at its inception in 1948. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the drafters (see photo below of that great woman). However, in the United States, the Supreme Court in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain (2004), concluded that the Declaration "does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law."
    It remains a work in progress...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights#/media/File:EleanorRooseveltHumanRights.png

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