The Rights of Others

"Rebecca Buxton: Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish American philosopher who works at Yale. She’s another person who has very much influenced the area of philosophy that I work on, migration and forced displacement and borders. From my perspective, I find this book her easiest one to read and engage with. Rebecca Buxton: Yes, the rights of others is about migrants, but also about refugees and the rights that they have in particular states. The book looks at what she calls this tug of war between universalism and particularism. On the one hand, we have a universal obligation to all human beings as moral equals. On the other hand, we have particular obligations to a smaller set—like families and states. In this book, she characterizes this tension as a tension between self-determination of states on the one hand and this cosmopolitan ideal of universal human rights on the other. It’s a particular problem for liberal democratic states that supposedly espouse universal human rights language, but then don’t uphold it by excluding a very large number of people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the book, she goes through a few approaches and ways of grappling with this tension. She talks about Immanuel Kant on hospitality and Hannah Arendt’s “the right to have rights.” Then she also looks at Rawls’s The Law of Peoples through a cosmopolitan lens. Benhabib concludes by defending something called ‘cosmopolitan federalism,’ where she basically says that we should just have a huge world state but still with borders within it. The borders are porous and everybody’s always guaranteed universal rights, but there’s some movement for self-determination within that as well. In a way, she ends the book with the same tension as she started and she hasn’t really resolved it for us. A few people haven’t found it completely convincing, the way that she’s characterized it. But it’s just a really great book for anybody who’s interested in the philosophy of migration or this question of borders. Rebecca Buxton: Maybe we’ll do another one, but we were never planning to give an exhaustive list. We don’t want to pump out as many of these books as we can. Maybe if we do two, people will expect a third. In a way, the model is quite lovely because we just get to read these beautiful essays from these women that we’ve commissioned to write for us. We edit them minimally, because they’re so great already. We’re thinking about it, but we will definitely be taking a break. I have a PhD to do; Lisa’s about to finish her master’s alongside her job. Lisa Whiting: One thing we would love to see is more books published on women philosophers and more women philosophers as public figures. It’s getting better, but public philosophy tends to be quite male-dominated. One of our favourite recent books is Kate Kirkpatrick’s biography Becoming Beauvoir . It would be great to see more books about women philosophers and it definitely doesn’t need to be us writing or editing them. One thing we’ve struggled with, at times, when creating the Philosopher Queens is the feeling that it never should have really been Rebecca and myself doing it. It’s partly imposter syndrome, but we’re conscious we stumbled across the idea and Rebecca’s view—and I am so glad she persuaded me—was, ‘If not us then who?’ I’m so glad we did it, but there’s no reason why it needed to be us and our hope is that others will be given the opportunity to write about women philosophers if we can show that there’s a market for them."

"She follows the old discussions of Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant, and you can see traces in the Old Testament of the concept of cities of refuge and how to treat a stranger. There is a long history of discussions. We still are discussing this today. It’s very interesting this dialect between the need for hospitality which we have discussed all these years and at the same time increasing hostility. There is some connection between them. I borrow the idea from Derrida, who writes about elements of hostility in hospitality. There is some violence in hospitality. You don’t have hospitality without conditions. All forms of hospitality are conditional. Even in the theory of Immanuel Kant he says that hospitality is conditional. We do not let in everyone. If they do something wrong we deport them. If we don’t like them we deport them. And who decides about these conditions is interesting. In the relationship between host and guest, the guest should follow the host. The relationship between host and guest is embedded in the concept of hospitality. In her theory what’s interesting is how your rights as a human being are territorialised. So if you are not territorialised – if you don’t have a state, if you don’t have citizenship, if you are not a member in a political community – you don’t have access to your rights. I think this is her contribution, how human rights are reduced to citizen rights. So if you are not a citizen, you do not have human rights. This is the paradox that first of all Hannah Arendt wrote about. The paradox of human rights is that they are for people who need them, but the people who need them don’t have access to them. The idea is central in Benhabib’s book. It is interesting to link her work to Kafka’s short story “Before the Law,” in which the law is a door protected by a gatekeeper. The person who needs the law does not have access to it. You can find similar examples in Benhabib’s books. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is a right to nationality but there is no obligation for states to offer membership to non-citizens. This is the paradox in human rights that we have today. If you look at the number of migrations, it has doubled during the last three decades. Today according to the United Nations you have almost 200 million migrants in the world. Thirty years ago we had only 100 million. We are talking about 3% of all the people in the world. We need, as she says, a new way to look at this question. We need a new perspective. What is happening is that people die every day. We have an average of two persons a day who die on the way to Europe. I think that the rate is almost the same between Mexico and the United States. We have an increasing number of stateless people, we have an increasing number of undocumented migrants. So we need a new policy, we need a new way to look at citizenship and membership and social citizenship. She takes it from Immanuel Kant’s Cosmopolitanism and how the right of hospitality is not about kindness and generosity. It’s about a right. It’s a right of all human beings to receive hospitality from others, as strangers, just because of this simple reason that we all share the same Earth. We all live on this globe. Hospitality, kindness, is a right to come in and to be treated properly. You can also think about hospitality in more metaphorical terms – be hospitable in your language, be hospitable in your culture, be hospitable in your religion. For example, English for me is a very hospitable language. You can speak in very different forms, and people understand what you say. But if you make a very minor mistake in Swedish people don’t understand what you say. So it’s not a hospitable language."