Women’s human rights may be unicorns, but they can fight wicked witches
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088215612376 |
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Author | Eileen Hunt Botting |
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(1) 58 –66
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1755088215612376
ipt.sagepub.com
Women’s human rights may
be unicorns, but they can
fight wicked witches
Eileen Hunt Botting
University of Notre Dame, USA
Abstract
This essay responds to Alasdair MacIntyre’s skeptical claim that human rights are
like “witches” and “unicorns”—as in, they don’t exist, and thus cannot be subject to
abstract rational justification. Putting aside the issue of the abstract rational justification
of human rights, I focus on the more urgent practical question of how human rights
might be meaningfully alleged when they do not yet exist within society, culture, law,
or policy. Borrowing from MacIntyre’s narrative theory of ethics to undermine his
skeptical view of human rights, I contend that human rights—whether understood as
moral rights or as political rights—can be coherently alleged through the same kind
of narrative framework that MacIntyre argued was essential to any intelligible ethical
system of thought. In particular, imaginative narrative frameworks—such as those found
in stories and films—have been crucial for the enterprise of demanding human rights for
the powerless, especially girls and women. Putting at its center a feminist interpretation
of the classic American film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), this article playfully, yet ultimately
seriously, challenges MacIntyre’s dismissal of rights as “witches and unicorns” by showing
how allegations of women’s human rights derive much of their power for fighting human
wrongs from their historically (although not essentially) imaginative character as well as
their deeper narrative structure.
Keywords
Alasdair MacIntyre, human rights, new rights, rights allegations, The Wizard of Oz,
women’s human rights
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) provocatively argued that the natural rights of
human beings were like “witches” and “unicorns”: as in, they do not exist. Although
human rights existed in international law since 1948, they had not, in his view, been
Corresponding author:
Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame, 217 O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
Email: ehunt@nd.edu
612376IPT0010.1177/1755088215612376Journal of International Political TheoryBotting
research-article2015
Article
To continue reading
Request your trial