Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights

A Philosophical Approach

Jeffrey Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134522224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this book, Flynn stresses the vital role of intercultural dialogue in developing a non-ethnocentric conception of human rights. He argues that Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory provides both the best framework for such dialogue and a much-needed middle path between philosophical approaches that derive human rights from a single foundational source and those that support multiple foundations for human rights (Charles Taylor, John Rawls, and various Rawlsians).

By analyzing the historical and political context for debates over the compatibility of human rights with Christianity, Islam, and "Asian Values, " Flynn develops a philosophical approach that is continuous with and a critical reflection on the intercultural dialogue on human rights. He reframes the dialogue by situating it in relation to the globalization of modern institutions and by arguing that such dialogue must address issues like the legacy of colonialism and global inequality while also being attuned to actual political struggles for human rights.

Part I
Multiple Foundations for Human Rights

1
Compatibility Debates, Colonial Subtexts, and Global Inequality

In March 2002, Amina Lawal was condemned to death by stoning for adultery by a Nigerian court under its interpretation of Islamic Law. The case quickly drew international attention, and by early 2003 an international e-mail campaign, “Save Amina,” had begun. The petition ultimately acquired over six million signatures.¹ In May of that year, however, the local human rights group defending Lawal sent out an open letter asking the international campaign to stop. External pressure, they argued, was doing more harm than good by strengthening the hand of political Islamists who maintained that opposition to such convictions was un-Islamic. Lawal’s lawyers had already chosen to make their case in the courts on Islamic grounds and had never lost a similar case in the appeals process. They ultimately won her case on appeal. This intercultural encounter is revealing. Lawal’s lawyers were highly critical of the colonial subtext underlying the campaign to “save” Amina. Mobilizing moral outrage in this way often relies on what Makau Mutua calls the “savage-victim-savior” metaphor: a foreign savior must intervene to rescue a helpless victim from her savage, illiberal culture.² This subtext, moreover, can feed the tendency to fixate on poor women as victims of illiberal cultures (a problem with “the non-West”) in a way that draws our attention away from poverty and oppression caused by global economic and political factors (a problem that implicates “the West”).³

I began the book by portraying the process of drafting the UDHR as giving birth to a global intercultural dialogue on human rights. But the idea of a UNESCO committee can be an overly narrow prism through which to view such dialogue. It brings to mind a committee with various representatives of all the world’s cultures and religions sitting around a table respectfully hashing out an agreement on human rights. There is certainly a place for this kind of endeavor, and I will have something to say in this book about how to develop the right philosophical framework for thinking about it. But the Amina Lawal case demonstrates how human rights activism can become a significant site for intercultural encounters that include both conflict and dialogue. This is just one of the ways in which the inter-cultural dialogue on human rights needs to be seen in much broader terms than it often is.

In what follows, I attempt an initial reframing of the intercultural dialogue on human rights. Because later chapters discuss various philosophical approaches to framing this ongoing dialogue in a way that is continuous with it—while also critically reflective on it—it is important to begin by noting a number of ways in which the dialogue needs to be reframed from the very start. I begin in the first section by providing a brief snapshot of three debates surrounding the compatibility of human rights with particular religious and cultural traditions, namely, Christianity, Islam, and Asian Values. Above all, philosophical frameworks must appreciate the dynamic nature of these debates along with the local and global political contexts in which they are situated. Thus, the aim is not to determine the ultimate compatibility of any particular tradition with human rights, but instead to challenge the idea of determining—once and for all—their ultimate compatibility. Neither the intercultural dialogue on human rights nor the compatibility debates that accompany it are static; both are ongoing and dynamic. Nor do they take place in a political vacuum. Conflicts of interpretation among adherents of various traditions should not be viewed as isolated academic exercises, but in relation to concrete social and political struggles. Nor should we overlook how debates that get characterized as “internal” to a tradition are also affected by “external” factors. In the second section, I focus on two such factors evoked by the Amina Lawal case—the legacy of colonialism and global inequality—and argue that both implicate deep asymmetries in power that cannot remain in the background if the intercultural dialogue on human rights is to be fully open, inclusive, and symmetrical.

I. Christianity, Islam, and Asian Values Confront Human Rights

Perhaps the most frequently mentioned idea in the intercultural discussion of human rights is that of trying to forge an overlapping consensus, that is, of agreeing on some elements of human rights but agreeing to disagree on their ultimate foundations. This idea was already present in the discussion surrounding the drafting of the UDHR. Jacques Maritain, the chair of the UNESCO project, famously reported, “We agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.”⁴ Numerous philosophers, legal and political theorists, and religious scholars have since embraced this idea in a variety of forms.⁵ Although in later chapters I challenge the centrality of this approach as a philosophical model, here I simply take it for granted as a ubiquitous motif in the intercultural discussion. Whatever form one imagines an overlapping consensus on human rights taking, it would have to be encircled by a series of compatibility debates in which each religious or cultural tradition would determine the extent to which it could support the conception of human rights that was supposed to be the object of consensus. Before delving into three such debates, some caveats are in order. My brief portrayals of a subset of the broader debates do not fully represent the richness and diversity within any of the traditions discussed. Nor should any one of these accounts be construed as the one correct path for reconciling tradition and human rights. Such conflicts ultimately need to be worked out by and be convincing to adherents of the traditions involved. The selective stories I tell are intended to identify a few instructive moves that have been made in particular debates while also pointing to their fluid and dynamic nature and the larger political contexts in which they occur.

(a) Christianity and Human Rights: Conflict and Reconciliation within the West

Human rights are often criticized for their Western origins, but they are by no means a straightforward outgrowth of a Christian idea of human dignity. In fact, a number of philosophers have suggested that the relation between Christianity and human rights can serve as a good starting point for intercultural dialogue not because of their long-standing compatibility, but instead because their long history of conflict and only relatively recent reconciliation is instructive. As Heiner Bielefeldt aptly puts it,

The history of human rights in the West is not a binding “model” that allows us to make forecasts about the prospects of human rights in other parts of the world … Rather, the history of human rights in the West gives us an example—not the paradigm per se but merely an example—of the various obstacles, misunderstandings, learning processes, achievements, and failures in the long-lasting struggle for human rights.⁶

For a very long time it was not at all obvious whether, for instance, the Catholic Church would fully embrace human rights. The process by which it has attempted to do so may illuminate some of the obstacles and prospects for other traditions.

To get just a sense of the long-standing conflict between Western Christianity and human rights, we need only recall two historical periods in which there was implicit or explicit conflict between the two.⁷ First, think of the early modern period in Europe, a period during which conflicts within Christianity were a source of immense violence and generated problems for which human rights can be viewed as a possible solution. Religious fragmentation and the competing claims of different religious groups increasingly led to violence in the form of persecution of heretics by the official Church prior to the Reformation and then hostilities among different denominations after. Beyond internal European conflicts, Christian missionary zeal also led to countless deaths and the destruction of non-Western cultures. Calls for religious freedom, doctrines of toleration, and demands for individual rights to life and bodily integrity can be viewed as a response to such violence, but that is not to say that ideas of religious freedom were easily embraced. Second, consider the long period following the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a period defined by the explicit rejection of the “rights of man” by the Catholic Church. As Bielefeldt puts it: “Traumatized by anti-clerical radicalism in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church played, for more than a century, the role of the most influential opponent to human rights in general and to religious liberty in particular.”⁸ This period is exemplified by a series of Papal documents beginning with a letter from Pope Pius VI in 1791 (Quod aliquantum), calling religious liberty a “monstrous right,” and culminating in Pius IX’s Syllabus Errorum of 1864, which condemned religious liberty and freedom of the press as among the grave errors of modern liberalism.

Yet by the 1960s, with the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in terris (1963), and then Paul VI’s Dignitatis Humanae (1965), it was clear that human rights had come to form an indispensable component of Catholic social ethics. And since the Second Vatican Council, human rights have been further incorporated into Catholic social doctrine, summarized clearly in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Here it is stressed that the “human person” is “created in the image of God,” and in maintaining the “value of human rights” it is pointed out that “the Church sees in [human] rights the extraordinary opportunity that our modern times offer, through the affirmation of these rights, for more effectively recognizing human dignity and universally promoting it as a characteristic inscribed by God the Creator in his creature.”⁹ What made possible this significant shift from overt rejection to positive promotion of human rights? In part, it was the broader shift away from seeing human rights primarily as liberal rights and toward the inclusion of social rights. This allowed the claims of a Catholic social ethic—which included rights to work, to a just wage, to social security, and to organize trade unions—to be translated into the language of human rights. So here we see a shift within Catholic social thought toward accepting human rights, but this was only made possible through a corresponding shift in the meaning of human rights themselves.¹⁰

One of the most interesting parts of this story is that Jacques Maritain played a significant role in both shifts. He was a strong advocate of the doctrine of “personalism” that influenced both the evolution of Catholic natural law thinking and the character of the UDHR itself. Samuel Moyn has recently pieced together how this once “reactionary critic of rights transformed into their champion” within the context of a broader “transformation of political Christianity.”¹¹ Although American Catholic groups used the term human rights in the early 1940s, “Maritain intersected this earlier but episodic, unsystematic and selective Catholic tradition of rights and made it his most enduring contribution to the twentieth-century church and world.”¹² Opposition to the two “rival materialisms” of liberal capitalism and communism partly defined the idea of “personalist communitarianism”: in contrast to the “individual” of atomistic liberalism, the “person” at the heart of this doctrine was deeply connected to and embedded within a moral community, but a community that was not viewed in collectivist terms either.¹³ The key move Maritain made in modifying natural law theory was to embrace rights talk within the personalist framework as a way of protecting the dignity of the human person. This transformed Maritain into a philosopher of human rights and Catholic natural law thinking at the same time.

In either a stroke of a master, or a sleight of hand, or both, Maritain—as if the Thomistic movement had not long and unanimously rejected modern rights—claimed that the one implied the other and, indeed, that only the one plausibly and palatably justified the other. Thanks to Maritain above all, the older view that Christianity’s political and social doctrine could not be reformulated in terms of rights was dropped in exchange for the claim that only the Christian vision placing them in the framework of the common good afforded a persuasive theory of rights.¹⁴

One can see this move in Maritain’s work as early as Natural Law and Human Rights (1942) and trace it all the way through to his fullest statement in Man and the State (1951).¹⁵

The key point here is Maritain’s influence on Catholic natural law thinking. But Maritain also played a central role in influencing the meaning of human rights within the broader culture of his time. He was an active public intellectual and tackled the long history of conflict between Christianity and human rights in radio addresses to France at the Liberation. “He offered his political and social philosophy to his French brethren, who he thought were finally in a position to see the mutuality of Christianity and democracy that their oppositional history—not least in their own country—had obscured.”¹⁶ He was able to extend the influence of personalism into the drafting process of the UDHR while simultaneously influencing later popes when serving as French Ambassador to the Vatican (1945–48).¹⁷ The “human person” ultimately became a foundational term in both the UDHR and in Catholic social doctrine.¹⁸

The intercultural dialogue on human rights must be informed by accounts of the Western history of human rights that include all the polemics for and against them, the various historical contingencies involved in generating commitment to them, and shifting meanings of human rights over time. These brief historical notes should r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Multiple Foundations for Human Rights
• PART II A Dialogical Framework
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index