Human rights, the commodification of life and the pandemic

Abstract

Human rights, as a discurse and practice, are always under construction, challenged by the historical events of each time. Our time lives under the impact of a pandemic that has removed the mask of the main arguments of the neoliberal model, particularly in several of the principles that supported its philosophy of homo economicus. The reduction of human life to a mere economic variable, a substrate of neoliberalism, showed in the pandemic the real consequences of a thanatopolitics that prioritizes the economy at the the expense of human life. The obstinate denial preached by neoliberalims of the value of the public and the community dimension, has shown its intrinsic fragility during the pandemic, as only countries that maintained a consistent public health system were able to face the serius consequences of the pandemic collectively ond effectively. Finally, the culture of individualism, so insistently inoculated into our subjetivities by neoliberalim, has also collapsed in the face of the radical interdepence that the pandemic has shown to exist between all our individual acts and their community consequences. The pandemic has shown that we are all responsible for everyone and that my individual actions have a direct impact on others. This constitutive interdependence of the humam is the thread that shows that individual rights are the unfolding of the obligations of our responsibility to others.