Freedom and Civilization A Tribute to Andrei Sakharov

Ernest Nagel The International Conference in Honor of Andrei Sakharov was most appropriately devoted to recognizing his exceptional moral and physical courage in defending the liberal and hu-manitarian ideals that, for centuries, have been regarded in the advanced civilizations of the West as essential components in our conception of what constitutes a good society. Few of us can appreciate Sakharov's contributions to science, and we must take his eminence as a physicist on the word of his scientific peers. It is his stature as an indomitable spokesman for the freedom to inquire and to search for the truth, not only in strictly scientific matters but also in matters that directly concern the public as well as the private weal, that has im-pressed our generation and has made him a heroic figure in the eyes of all those who cherish freedom as a necessary condition for overcoming human ignorance.

The liberal ideals for which Sakharov has been a steadfast spokesman include, among others, the freedom to present and debate political, economic, and social issues as well as strictly scientific ones; the liberty to enter into voluntary associations organized for these purposes; and an immunity from arbitrary and repressive interventions by agents of state power. These and other freedoms have often been designated as "rights"; and they have frequently been "justified" and defended on the basis of some theory of "natural" or "human" rights. The theories thus invoked may differ in a number of ways, but they share the com-mon assumption that human beings possess various "rights" as inalienable possessions simply because they are human. Theories of natural or human rights have been adocated by major thinkers

Ernest Nagel is pro%essor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He is a .dormer president of the American Philo-sophical Association and the author of The Structure of Science, among other books.

in Western countries; those theories have a long and complex history and have played important roles in the struggle for various specific freedoms and immunities.

Dr. Sakharov's brave defense of a major tenet of liberal-ism is commonly characterized as a defense of human rights, while the suppression by the Soviet government of further activities of that sort by him is described as a violation of one of his rights. In my judgment, however, attempts to validate or justify claims to various individual freedoms by appealing to some version of the doctrine of inherent and inalienable human rights have not been successful in the past, are unlikely to be successful in the future, and are therefore ill-advised. The burden of this brief paper is indeed that justifications, via that doctrine, of proposed social ideals or objectives, whether these be personal liberties or more "positive" benefits (such as medi-cal care or employment), do not provide a sound or even a plausible basis for adopting them.

In my view the notion that there are universally valid natural or human rights does not stand up under scrutiny. I will give only two of my reasons for skepticism. In the first place, advances in science have made clear that the philosophical assumptions on which most—and perhaps all—theories of natural or human rights rest are at best extremely dubious. For the claim that men have natural rights, or that a specific type of action is a human right, is based in one way or another on the assumption that the claim is self-evidently true or that our reason apprehends it as correct—an assumption that was stated explicitly in the American Declaration of independence. This assumption seemed quite plausible at one time, since it was essentially like the belief, accepted as sound for centuries, that the axioms of Euclidean geometry or of Newton's first law of motion can be established as correct by an appeal to their self-evidence and to purely "rational" considerations. This manner of justifying claims concerning what is to be included in

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the class of alleged human rights provides no way of settling disputes when people differ, as they frequently do, in their judgments of self-evidence; and in consequence, there is no limit to the number and variety of liberties and benefits that might be counted as human rights. But more damaging to the doctrine of natural rights was the construction (or "discovery") of alternative systems of geometry and mechanics (and eventu-ally of other branches of mathematics and physics), each of them as internally consistent as the traditional systems were as-sumed to be. For these constructions showed once and for all that the alleged self-evidence of the basic premises of a system could not be taken as a mark of their truth. It became no less dubious to regard the supposed self-evidence of assumptions in political and moral inquiries as a sufficient ground for accepting those assumptions as warranted.

"Dr. Sakharov's brave defense of a major tenet of liberalism is commonly characterized as a defense of human rights ... In my judgment, however, attempts to validate claims to individual freedoms by appeal-ing to inherent and inalienable human rights have not been successful."

I come to a second reason for dissatisfaction with the doctrine of natural rights. The doctrine has helped to break up the cake of ancient custom and to emancipate men from oppressive restrictions on their behavior; but it has also been used to place limits on what a society might do to improve the fortunes of its members. For proposals to change certain features of the social and economic order in the interest of greater well-being of the poor and underprivileged were often believed by other and more influential members of society to be violations of their own inviolable human rights and were therefore bitterly resisted. Accordingly, the doctrine of natural rights has not always been an instrument of human liberation; and during a number of periods of history it has been a major obstacle to human betterment. But a theory which can be used to justify a social policy as well as its contrary is not a reliable instrument for evaluating proposed social changes.

For these reasons, among others, the assumption that men are natively endowed with various human rights seems to me an unsatisfactory basis for justifying claims to any specific free-doms or benefits. Such a justification requires the establish-ment of two theses: the first is that there are indeed human rights, and the other is that the specific immunity or benefit in question is such a right. However, neither of them has yet been supported by considerations that carry general conviction; and in my opinion, proposed justifications of claims to freedoms and benefits via a theory of inherent human rights are bound to remain indecisive and controversial.

The criticisms of the doctrine of natural rights that I have outlined are quite familiar, and they have been effective in undermining its one-time plausibility. But despite the diffi-culties to which those criticisms call attention, the doctrine has been repeatedly revived during the present century, sometimes in response to the barbarities committed by totalitarian socie-ties of our day. In this revival the notion of what is a human

right has been often considerably extended to cover much more than was denoted traditionally by the phrase "human right"—for example, to include such matters as receiving proper nour-ishment and higher education. In my opinion, however, the revival has not been accompanied by a better grounding for the doctrine of human rights than it has received in earlier cen-turies.

Let me add that I am aware of the fact that some contem-porary thinkers profess a conception of human rights accord-ing to which those rights are not created by society, but have a "variable content" and are not absolute or imprescriptible. However, they have not made clear just what is connoted by the term right when an alleged right is not a social product, how the claim that there are such human rights is established, or how conflicting claims concerning them are to be resolved. There are also writers who reject most if not all the traditional meanings of the phrase human rights but who nevertheless insist on retaining the language of human rights. They rein-terpret the phrase to signify morally justified proposals to continue certain social policies, or to adopt specified social policies if they are not already in existence, in order to satisfy some alleged human needs. However, to assign this sense to the phrase is to fill old bottles with wine not described by their familiar labels. The suggested reinterpretation is comparable to retaining the word"God"but using it in a manner incompatible with long-entrenched connotations of the term. I must confess that I see little merit in either maneuver.

I am therefore unable to subscribe to the doctrine of human rights as a way of justifying various individual liberties and positive privileges demanded by individuals. But it does

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not follow that I must then renounce the important ideals for which Sakharov has been such a courageous spokesman. For the theory of human rights is just one possible basis for justifu ing the freedom he has defended; and the rejection of that theory does not entail the rejection of any of the specific freedoms that have been characterized as human rights. In point of fact, a number of those freedoms have been defended, in the past as well as in the present, on grounds quite different from those implicit in the doctrine of natural or human rights. In any case, I must now make explicit the basis for my own commitment to the various human freedoms defended by Sakharov.

The so/e justification, stated in general terms, I have been able to find for maintaining or extending individual human freedoms consists of the evaluation of the consequences Mr human beings that result from the existence of those freedoms. My defense of those freedoms is therefore utilitarian in a broad sense—perhaps consequentialist would be a better description of my position—but does not involve the assumption that the measure of utility is the pleasure produced or would likely be produced. Moreover, although my defense is in important respects like the one John Stuart Mill gave for various human liberties, it is unlike the latter in that I do not believe a set of personal liberties can be circumscribed that are inviolable and cannot rightly be limited or taken away by society under any circumstances. Finally, my justification is empirical and tenta-tive: for the consequences of any proposed social change cannot be ascertained a priori, and statements about what those consequences are or are likely to be may have to be revised—either because of some error or oversight in reporting what those consequences are, or because unforeseen and unob-

served modifications of the social fabric may nullify the ex-pected consequences of deliberately instituted changes. My argument for a society in which the people generally possess a variety of personal freedoms is that in societies in which reliable knowledge of nature's ways, as well as of the ways of human beings, is indispensable for satisfying the needs and aspirations of the people, freedom to inquire and to engage in critical evaluation of the conduct and outcome of inquiry is a condition for acquiring such knowledge.

A large quantity of factual data, obtained from compara-tive studies of societies of both the past and the present, supports this contention. I shall discuss here only one serious objection to my thesis. It has frequently been noted that the natural sciences have often flourished in societies in which freedom of speech and other individual liberties did not exist for their citizens in general but were at best available only to a small minority. It has been concluded from this that those freedoms are not essential for a thriving science. However, two points should be noted. In the first place, while various bran-ches of natural science have indeed advanced in societies in which freedom of speech was severely restricted, there is com-pelling evidence to show that on matters related to their in: quiries scientists were in fact at liberty to communicate their views to other students of the subject. But there is also consider-able evidence to show that in societies in which scientists lacked such freedom as was the case in the Soviet Union during the Lysenko period in genetics their disciplines rapidly deterior- ated. It seems that Soviet authorities have learned the value of freedom in pursuing inquiries in the natural sciences.

The second point to be noted is that though freedom of inquiry in the natural sciences is quite compatible with the absence of such freedom in the study of political, economic, and social questions, there is evidence to support the claim that when the latter is the case the attainment of reliable knowledge in those domains is seriously hampered. Accordingly, on the assumption that a society should augment its knowledge of matters that are potentially significant for increasing the ma-terial and spiritual welfare of its members, the case for freedom of inquiry and all that goes with it seems to me fairly well established, for the freedoms Sakharov continues to defend are a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the acquisition of reliable knowledge.

I do not believe that, if the word civilization is used as anthropologists tend to use it—in a morally neutral way, so that it has no honorific associations—the idea of civilized society can be equated with the existence of institutionalized individual freedoms. On the other hand, ifa major objective of civilized societies is postulated to be the realization of the potentialities of their citizens and the enrichment thereby of their satisfactions, and if that objective is best attained through the systematic application of reliable knowledge, the mainten-ance and the extension of the freedoms defended by Dr. Sakharov are indispensable for realizing a central aim of those societies. Those freedoms are both the instruments for achiev-ing a high civilization and evidence of its existence. This is the message that Dr. Sakharov's defense of human freedom has conveyed, and this is the message I think is appropriate for us to transmit to those in power in the Soviet Union. •

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