Causes need advocates, but the problem is that the line between the advocates and their advocacies is often blurred with the result that hang-ups one may have with them result in an unsound rejection of the cause. That is sad; it is unfortunate; sometimes it is disastrous! Chico Gascon is chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, a PNoy appointee to be sure, and his yellow shade, one may dislike, but that is no reason to reject the demand that human rights be respected—as our Constitution and our international commitments ordain!
Lately, human rights—or at least, the concept—has received a severe thrashing. It is, we have been told, the antithesis to resolute government. The choir picks up the refrain: It is a stumbling block to the long-awaited change, and finally, the orchestra of trolls brings it all to a crescendo: Pakana ng mga Dilaw ang human rights. I do not like the dilaws either, and I am convinced that PNoy headed a student government from the day he assumed office until the day he left, without fanfare because he was deserving of none! But I do not like it either that we are turning to be a hysterical nation, swaying to the rhythm of a single baton in this recklessness about human rights.
The disjunction is straightforward: either a government is legitimate or it is one that is forced on a people. Submission is no badge of legitimacy. If anything at all, it bespeaks of an irresistible, overpowering force. So it is that an occupying power can force a population into abject submission—but the capitulation of the defenders will not legitimize the occupation. Ex injuria non oritur jus…No right comes from wrong! The Cory administration was extra-constitutional, but, in the terms of the American Declaration of Independence, it was an exercise supposedly in sovereignty by which the people decided to take upon themselves a new government.
If, in our secular age, we are not wont to look to supernatural provenance for authority, how then is the state’s use of force —such as the force brought to bear on the profiteers in the drugs trade—legitimized? Rational consent—that is the only plausible substitute for any Divine conferral of authority. It should be clear that “rational consent” is not necessarily the vote of the majority, for the majority may be very irrational indeed. Stupidity multiplies exponentially. Unfortunately, insight does not diffuse itself as speedily! Consent on the basis of rational grounds and warrants—and on the basis of claims made and claims rationally vindicated—this is what makes for rational consent. It is this kind of consensus that allows for a common definition of a situation and a common resolve on a course of action after possible objections are addressed, once more, rationally.
In other words, legitimacy is born from the rational exchange between the members of a political community that alone can produce the agreement that has binding force, hence the reference to the “juris-generative” power of communicative action. The latter is inconceivable without human rights, the most basic of which —provided one is alive, of course—is the right to participate in that exchange by which we, as members of the political community, arrive at the norms that we take as binding on us all. That everyone has the right to speak, that all relevant questions must be entertained, that every challenge must be acknowledged and properly addressed, that no one be systematically excluded, that all be accorded the listening that allows discourse to proceed—these are the elemental demands of human rights. Quite obviously, all other rights that discourse presupposes—the right to life, to free speech, etc.—make as elemental a claim.
No, it cannot be correct then that human rights are the antithesis of government. Human rights, rather, are the presupposition of legitimacy in government, and the guarantee of the legitimacy of norms. No matter one’s dislike for Chito Gascon (and I personally see no reason to dislike him) or for Leila de Lima (who has given many so many reasons to dislike her!), there is utterly no justification for rejecting their advocacy of human rights, whatever their intentions or motives might be. To sideline human rights, one must be willing to sideline equally the question of legitimacy. But the moment one goes that far, one has not only stripped the forest bare. One has cut down the very last tree standing! And beyond that, there is only a howling wilderness!
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@yahoo.com
