Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador by Elizabeth Barnert (review)

I wish I could cede Illingworth the point that human rights are a first principle, because I am immensely attracted to her model. Foremost, her framework upends the notion of philanthropy as an act of private altruism—an idea that becomes immediately hollow once we trace the subsidies and public dollars that subvent it—and instead redefines philanthropy as an obligation. As such, the donor is not free to make any old choice, but instead must meet requirements; and the recipient of the donation is not subordinated but equalized by receiving their due. Even a shift in the language of philanthropy, from generosity and gift to obligation and right, is profound. And it is bracing to imagine the material transformations that might follow, including a serious commitment to economic redistribution, since alleviating poverty is certainly core to the human rights work that Illingworth envisions. When it comes down to it, the problem with putting so much stock in human rights is not only a historical and sociological one—that today’s right might be tomorrow’s wrong; and that different people perceive those rights differently—it is also a human one. On the most extreme end of Illingworth’s framework is a dystopian possibility that instead of the people determining the rights, the right will determine the people. She quietly says as much when she notes that sometimes democratically elected governments do not do what’s best to advance human rights, with climate change policy a case in point. So, when the electorate and the government fail, then we are still obligated to let the human right lead. If I were to have to choose a dictatorship, this certainly would be preferable to others, but human rights absent human consent still strikes me as dangerous. In the end, despite my concerns about the a-historicity and unwarranted certainty of Illingworth’s first principles, the value of her book is its disciplinary honesty. Here, she says, is one way to think about a big problem we have about wealth being improperly used, even when it is behaving philanthropically. Instead of turning away, she walks boldly into the thick of it, challenging us not to give up but to try to do better. Is there an alternative?