Human Rights, Literature, and Empathy

Literature promotes empathy, and empathy promotes rights. This is a powerful, important story that informs both the work of human rights and the work of literary education in high schools and colleges. Nonetheless, there are powerful, important counterstories about empathy and rights, counterstories made urgent by the implicit ethical claim undergirding them: namely, that just as human rights stories can have unintended ethical and political consequences, the story of human rights itself can also have unintended ethical and political consequences. At the highest level of abstraction, there are two primary and opposed narratives for thinking about the history of human rights: the continuity and discontinuity models. The essence of the argument is that human rights as an historical telos has a continuous and traceable evolution, that it was invented or manifested through the development of philosophical reason or the historical expansion of empathy.

Empathy · Human rights · Political science · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Peace and Human Rights Education · Psychology · Social Psychology