K

IT'S been 56 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations; yet the term "human rights" continues to be the subject of many debates.

The most heated arguments revolve around claims that "human rights" is "Western" and "individualistic" and that in many cultures these "Western" ideas often run counter to the interests of the community or even of an entire nation. In our part of the world these debates use terms like "Asian values" and "communalism," pitted against Western "human rights" and democracy.

We hear variations in the Philippines with references to our "demo-crazy" and having "too much human rights" as the cause of our underdevelopment. What we need, we're told, are leaders willing to dispense with human rights and get the country going.

Rights, rights

After years of following these debates, I've come to feel that the debates will be futile if we continue to argue over abstractions. What we need to do is find out what popular perceptions are about rights, and how these perceptions affect our decisions in private and public life, from the household to national governance.

In relation to human rights, we can look at the terms people use locally: the English "human rights" for example, as well as the Tagalog "karapatan." But we don't stop with identifying the words. Even more importantly, we look at how these words are used."Human rights," for example, is still often invoked derisively, best exemplified by the way people spit out the words with sarcasm. I hear this quite often with our AM radio commentators, when they try to explain problems in terms of "too much human rights." To give one common example, we often hear sarcastic references to "rights" in the mass media, with claim that government tolerates the informal settlers (the politically correct term) in deference to human rights. "Pa rights rights pa kasi," people will mumble, the repetition of the term being a way, in local languages, of expressing disapproval.

What should be

Note that while the English "rights" will often be used negatively, the Tagalog "karapatan" is almost always used positively, standing solidly as something that is desirable. The term's root word is "dapat," or what should be, which is in many ways like the English "right" with its ethical connotations: "right" in the sense of "not wrong" is determined by a society's notions of what should be.

The problems come in the way we determine "what should be." Ideally, we should have certain guiding ethical principles in deciding "what should be." Certain ethical principles can be invoked here, dealing with issues of justice (Is it fair?), autonomy (Does it respect the individual?), maleficence (Does it avoid harm?) and beneficence (Does it do good?).

Unfortunately, out in the real world, we tend to be more rigid, defining "what should be" in terms of received traditions, some of which were not necessarily wise or just. In recent years, the term "reproductive rights" has been used to describe, among others, the right to decide how many children one should have, when to have them and in what intervals. That right would seem commonsensical, yet "reproductive rights" have been attacked by religious conservatives. A mural on Shaw Boulevard captures this view showing Jesus with a child and the caption: "This is a child; not a choice." Religions can be regressive in the way they promote this absolute view, often claiming that "what should be" is what has always been.

In other cases, we believe we have the right to do something because everyone's doing it. We complain, for example, about buses and jeeps blocking vehicular flow when they stop at road intersections to pick up passengers; yet, when we're the ones commuting, we stop these public utility vehicles at those crossings to get on. Here, irrational and mutually destructive behavior is transformed into the norm, shaping our ideas of what's "right" and "rights."
Entitlement

We get even more insights into local views of rights by looking at the wonderfully succinct word: K. I don't mean the "k" in texting (which means OK) but the k as in "May k ka ba?" (Do you have k?). The word "karapatan" is drastically abbreviated to one letter, yet this "k" is packed with meanings.

Think of how "k" is used in different situations. I'll just give one example: In sing-along joints, you often hear very bad karaoke singers croaking away with people around him whispering in exasperation that he has no "k" to sing.

"K" tells us that our notions of rights are tied to entitlement. Your bad karaoke singer thinks he sounds like Frank Sinatra and therefore that entitles him to hog the microphone and to do "My Way" over and over again until someone guns him down.

Mind you, these fatal shoot-outs do happen, which leads me to another example of "k": The gunman is probably someone who drives an SUV with a "ProGUN" sticker. He believes it's his right to carry a gun everywhere he goes and, worse, that the gun gives him the "k" to rid society of scum (defined, with time, to refer to anyone who disagrees with him, or who won't yield the karaoke microphone).

I'm not being facetious here. So many of our problems do in fact emerge from these notions of entitlement, notions which are tied to status, whether ascribed as in class, or acquired through a diploma (real or fake), or having a gun.
The privileges are often tied to power with some rather paradoxical variations. The poor, for example, may seem disenfranchised but can, in many instances, play around with entitlements tied, precisely, to poverty. I'm poor, therefore I'm entitled to free services. I'm poor, and there's this empty lot, therefore I'm entitled to use it.

Dissecting concepts of rights and entitlements might help us to deal with all kinds of problems. Just look at corruption for example, with the rationalization: "I have to feed my family so..." Unless people understand that this corrupted entitlement means depriving many other families of what's due them, we will end up with perverted notions of "right" and "rights."

There's much more to karapatan and human rights, but I thought I'd just offer a few insights for today to stimulate more in-depth discussion of rights in Philippine settings so that we can move forward, away from self-centered privileged entitlement toward the original ethical connotations of "dapat," of what should be, for my own and for others' good.