Teacups and Wood Chippers

Our hardest political questions arrive pre-loaded with two wrong answers. It's worth looking beyond false dichotomies to figure out real solutions.

On a Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1947, a sixty-two-year-old widow set out teacups for three guests, and one of them started a fight about the nature of reality.

Eleanor Roosevelt had lost her husband only two years earlier. On the April afternoon President Franklin Roosevelt died, she was the one who told Vice President Harry Truman, resting an arm on his shoulder before he could speak, and when he finally asked what he could do for her, she turned the question around and asked what anyone could do for him. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

Within a week she had packed up the White House. When a New York Times reporter asked what came next, she answered in four words: “The story is over.”

Truman disagreed that Eleanor’s story was over. He appointed her to the American delegation to the brand-new United Nations, where she was asked to chair a commission to define the rights of every human being on earth.

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The problem of agreeing on a legal framework for universal human rights was nearly impossible, but after the murder of millions in the Holocaust, it was also essential.

Let’s start with a key question: what makes a law a law? Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth century English philosopher, laid the groundwork for legal positivism, which says that a law is valid because of who made it and how it was made, without regard to what it says. Whether that law is good or evil is an entirely separate question, one about morality rather than law.

Splitting morality from the law made the law predictable, professional, and scientific. That sounds great (especially in contrast to the arbitrary whims of kings), but the Nazis provided a stellar example of why this is a deeply flawed approach. Hitler became the chancellor of Germany legally, through the German constitution. The purges, property seizures, deportations, and camps were dressed up in appropriate statutes, decrees, and judicial orders. German judges, whose motto was Gesetz ist Gesetz (“Law is law”), enforced these laws because there was no limit to how unjust the law could be as long as it arrived with the right paperwork.

During the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the accused Nazis defended themselves with three arguments that were grounded in positivism:

• First, much of what they did was lawful under German law at the time, and law is law.

• Second, they were charged with “crimes against humanity,” which wasn’t based on any law they were subject to when they acted.

• Third, sovereignty: international law applied to relations between states, not to the relationship between a state and its own citizens which was, legally speaking, nobody else’s business. On what legal basis could anyone judge what Germany did to German Jews?

The Allies had to decide: they could accept those arguments and let the Nazi leaders go free after the murder of millions, or they could establish that there is a law above any country that binds everyone everywhere. ‘Crimes against humanity’ only makes sense if humanity itself is a jurisdiction.

Eleanor Roosevelt and her guests at tea that day were working on what the agreement about fundamental human rights would look like, in order to make sure that “it was legal here” would never again be an acceptable answer to genocide.

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Eleanor described the trouble as beginning right as the teacups were being filled. Peng-chun Chang, the Chinese philosopher and playwright who served as her vice chair, was arguing with Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian philosopher with a Harvard doctorate, who represented newly independent Lebanon and served as the commission’s rapporteur, the officer responsible for the text itself. The remaining guest was John Humphrey, a Canadian lawyer who ran the UN’s Human Rights Division.

The fight between Chang and Malik was not about the conclusion: everyone in that apartment agreed there had to be a law above every state. The fight was about what the basis for such a law could be.

Chang insisted that the declaration they were building couldn’t simply dress up Western ideas and pretend they were universal, saying that there is “more than one kind of ultimate reality.”

Malik responded by citing Thomas Aquinas and natural law. Aquinas proposed the idea that certain rights and morals are inherent in human nature and can be discovered through reason. It follows logically that an unjust law is no law at all. When Martin Luther King Jr. needed to explain to eight white clergymen why he was entitled to break Alabama’s segregation ordinances, he cited Aquinas by name from a Birmingham jail cell.

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

It was clear to everyone working on the Declaration that whatever it was based on had to be something that was beyond the reach of any government, because (as the Nazis demonstrated) if you base it on something a government grants, then the government can also revoke it.

Chang argued that Aquinas and natural law were too Western to use as the basis for the Declaration: a Declaration built on Aquinas’s scaffolding wouldn’t be universal, it would be a Western document imposing Western theology on the rest of humanity.

Chang’s approach to the question was Confucian. Confucian ethics considers the highest virtue to be ren, meaning (roughly) co-humanity or humaneness. The written character for it is built from two parts: the sign for a person next to the sign for the number two. The question of ethics is not about a person’s relationship to God, but rather a person’s relationship to other people.

Confucius described the single principle one could practice throughout life as the concept of reciprocity:

What you do not wish for yourself, do not impose on others.

— Confucius, Analects

Five hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount, the Confucian code of ethics had arrived at the same foundation without mentioning God.

Chang’s argument was that the Western framework Aquinas offered was not needed for the Declaration. China had practiced reciprocity and dignity for 2,500 years without it. No single tradition owned the truth about why humans matter, so a universal document would require openness to non-Western traditions and non-Western ethics.

But if no single tradition could be said to own the truth, would that mean that right and wrong were merely a matter of local custom, valid only inside the culture that practices them?

Roosevelt listened to the debate between Malik and Chang and poured more tea for everyone. Before the meeting ended, the group agreed on one practical step: the Canadian lawyer, Humphrey, would write the first draft. The person who hand-wrote the founding document of modern human rights was an orphan from a New Brunswick village who lost his left arm at age six.

Here was the problem with the choice for what to base the Declaration on: if either side won, the project would fail.

Malik was proposing a view that included God or Nature, which would make the Buddhists, Confucians, secular French, and Soviet bloc walk away. The notion of Universality would end before it began.

Chang’s proposal for pluralism ran a risk of rights becoming a matter of local custom. If a local custom said torture or genocide was okay, there would be no standing from which to judge that, no standing for condemnation of the Holocaust or prosecutions for crimes against humanity.

One path would lead to a document no one signed; the other would lead to a document with no meaning.

How do you solve the unsolvable problem?

You reject the false choice.

The drafters proceeded carefully. For most of the drafting, the first article said people are endowed by nature with reason and conscience. In the final debate, they took out ‘by nature’ because it suggested a theory about where reason and conscience come from. The Declaration simply says people are endowed with reason and conscience. The foundation was left open, and both Aquinas and Confucius fit. Jacques Maritain, who worked on UNESCO’s survey of world philosophers, said, “Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why.”

The fight over frameworks wasn’t necessary, because you don’t have to decide why humans matter before deciding how they should be treated.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1

Less than two years after that meeting, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed the United Nations General Assembly, and there was not a single vote against it. Malik guided the draft through eighty-one meetings that fall, serving as an Arab delegate defending universal rights during the first Arab-Israeli war. He never saw his heritage and his principles as a choice he had to make.

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There is an obvious false choice dividing dinner tables, campuses, and coalitions in the US right now, which is: Whose side are you on, Israel’s or the Palestinians’?

This question is fundamentally flawed. It assumes the only answer is to pick a side and in picking accept anything that happens to the people on the other side. Mourning a starving child in Gaza is seen as ignoring a family killed on October 7.

That false choice is terribly dehumanizing. We can grieve for every person killed on October 7 and simultaneously grieve for every person killed in Gaza. Most people believe that killing a child is wrong, regardless of who the child is. Most people believe that the basic rights of everyone in Israel and Palestine should be protected. But that answer is often dismissed as naive, evasive, or a dodge.

It is the answer forty-eight nations voted for in 1948.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

So how has the answer that once united the General Assembly become the answer you are not allowed to give?

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In general, false dichotomies aren’t mistakes or accidents. They’re tools. Tell people that the choice is A or B, that your team is for A and the other team is for B, and you have an extremely effective way to get people to stop paying attention to principles. As long as the question is about your team rather than your values, it becomes possible to justify almost anything, and it makes accountability treason.

So ask yourself: who gains when there is no universal standard?

In February 2025, Elon Musk described his weekend “putting [the United States Agency for International Development] into the wood chipper.” The agency he gleefully destroyed had, over twenty years, prevented about 91 million deaths: more than 25 million from AIDS, 8 million from malaria, and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis, according to a study in The Lancet. The same study predicted that dismantling the agency would cause over 14 million more deaths by 2030, including about 4.5 million children under five.

A Boston University study found that Musk’s wood chipper had, in the first few months, already caused about 108,000 adult deaths and 224,000 child deaths, or about 88 people every hour. In one Dubai warehouse, nearly 500 metric tons of high-energy biscuits, emergency food for malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sat for months waiting for approval to be distributed, and then, after they expired, were destroyed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those biscuits would have fed 1.5 million children for a week.

Elon Musk’s actions weren’t an argument that a TB patient in Sierra Leone has rights that matter less than those of an American taxpayer; it’s an argument that her rights have no effect at all.

The richest people in the world are terrified of a world in which the rights of other people are enforced. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that cutting off a child’s food so they starve to death is a violation of that child’s rights: there is a victim and there is someone responsible, and Musk is morally culpable for every one of the millions of deaths his actions cause.

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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

— Frederick Douglass, 1857

The Declaration isn’t just a floor for human rights. The phrase ‘the full development of the human personality’ appears three times, linked to education, social security, and our duties to each other. The drafters were trying to describe a world focused on what each person could become. After the war, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that freedom without bread means little.

But the Cold War turned questions of human rights into questions about what team you were on: civil liberties, or bread? In 1966, the United Nations split the Declaration into two treaties. The United States ratified the civil and political rights, but never the economic rights.

Frederick Douglass’s choice of demand rather than fight is important: a fight is force against force, and a plea is an appeal to the other side's mercy, but a demand claims something the other side owes you. It only works if some rule binds both of you.

Both false dichotomies and relentless appeals to team tribalism serve the same purpose: they undermine discourse about standards and accountability. If you excuse your own side's cruelty, then standards about cruelty can’t bind anyone: they just become team slogans. It’s your side or the other side. And the people at the top? There are now no standards that bind them and no consequences they have to answer to.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.

— Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

Collectively, we have power over the Elon Musks of the world. Every structure that protects him and people like him is supported by our everyday participation: our money, our attention, our data, our labor, our votes, and even our silence. It is possible for us to change the balance, to withdraw our consent, to stop supporting them.

Eleanor Roosevelt spent the last part of her life explaining to audiences that the decisions we make close to home can change the world. She wasn’t talking about mere sentiment: she was describing a supply chain.