Human Rights and Relative Universalism

Marie-Luisa Frick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030107857
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

This book argues that human rights cannot go global without going local. This important lesson from the winding debates on universalism and particularism raises intricate questions: what are human rights after all, given the dissent surrounding their foundations, content, and scope? What are legitimate deviances from classical human rights (law) and where should we draw "red lines"?

Making a case for balancing conceptual openness and distinctness, this book addresses the key human rights issues of our time and opens up novel spaces for deliberation. It engages philosophical reasoning with law, politics, and religion and demonstrates that a meaningful relativist account of human rights is not only possible, but a sorely needed antidote to dogmatism and polarization.

© The Author(s) 2019

Marie-Luisa FrickHuman Rights and Relative Universalismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10785-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marie-Luisa Frick¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Marie-Luisa Frick

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Human rights resound everywhere: Underpinning a quasi-universal secular morality they function as a ‘bench mark’ for political decision-making procedures (discursive legitimacy), for the aims and boundaries of political actions (outcome legitimacy), and finally for the overall evaluation of political systems as such (governmental legitimacy). A “last utopia”¹ for the time being, human rights seem to outshine all rival visions for a better world and give a name to the age in which we live, the “age of rights”.² Evidence of the increasing significance of human rights (at least in theoretical terms) can also be found in the discursive ‘explosion’ on the matter filling a vast global human rights library. Its philosophical branch draws our attention to questions that contrast the widespread common-sense understanding and rhetoric of human rights: what are human rights actually? Who decides what is a human right? Are they moral or judicial norms in the first place? What are their foundations and how can human rights be justified? What does their non-finalized stipulation, rendering human rights a medium of continuous intercultural encounters between scholars, policy makers, and activists, tell us about their nature or their future? Are human rights really a suitable normative guiding idea for humankind that, on their road to unification and understanding, faces equally strong tendencies of cultural/regional differentiation and identitarian demarcation? Can human rights ever be the ‘moral lingua franca’ for eight billion people on five continents?

Unsurprisingly, answers to questions like these do not come from one voice but rather hint to different outlooks and approaches in terms of scholarly disciplines and also worldviews. Human rights are a prescriptive concept, evidenced by their historic origins in the modern revolutions of 1776 and 1789 as well as their re-birth out of the debris of master-race ideology and its apocalyptical consequences. They do not simply depict the world as it is but demand a particular orientation for political commonwealths, certain behavior of human beings towards each other, and put specific constraints on State organs in the way they treat (non-)citizens. Like any other normative concept, human rights are affected by an increasing pluralization of opinions and convictions, even though this sometimes tends to be overlooked or belittled. Human rights, as Joshua Greene laments but rightly observes, often do not enter the stage when arguments are settled but rather serve are shields we employ to safeguard “our moral progress from the threats that remain”, as well as weapons to bring about desired changes (cf. Greene 2013, pp. 306ff.).

The following investigation does not seek to resolve such diversity of voices in the global discourse on human rights. Rather, it is an attempt to step back from this discourse and to see the greater picture of what human rights could be if we assume that their universalization or global accommodation is in the making but not yet granted. This ambivalent diagnosis serving as a starting point can be understood better if we look at what the globalization (of ideas) almost always amounts to: On the one side, human rights have started to grow roots in various regional and even local contexts and it is commonly held that their future is decisively dependent upon such processes of enculturation.³ On the other side, such developments of ‘glocalization’ (cf. Robertson 1995) ensure that human rights do not remain what they ‘originally’ might have been: “When ideas or institutions expand from their place of origin to other regions, they inevitably transform their original nature or characteristic features in order to be accepted by the inhabitants of the regions to which they spread” (Yasuaki 1999, p. 112). Such processes of vernacularization are seldom without ambivalence. Sometimes, a formal commitment to human rights language does not translate into actual relevance of human rights norms and ideals in practice. This often passes from view where, in the words of Kiran Kaur Grewal (2017, p. 142), “the appeal to an abstract universalized morality and a reluctance to engage in more substantial debates about how such a moral order should be decided upon and what it should contain” are convenient strategies of shielding human rights from potential critique. Another difficulty, referred to as “the resonance dilemma” by Sally Engle Merry and Peggy Levitt, also deserves mention in that regard: “The more extensively the human rights idea is vernacularized, the more readily it will be adopted but the less likely it is to challenge existing modes of thinking” (2017, p. 216).

Against this backdrop, I want to address the following interrelated questions: (1) What is the non-negotiable core of human rights? Which axiological-normative premises does this idea entail? (2) Which foundational paths do exist to ground (the idea of) human rights and what is their relation to each other? Can different grounding strategies coexist? (3) To what extent do the axiological-normative fundamentals of the human rights idea resonate with various sets of values and beliefs, or: how ‘stressable’ are they when transplanted into different contexts of worldview? How should we interpret conflicts over human rights? How should we maneuver between the universal and the local and what ‘red lines’ can the idea of human rights draw in that regard?

As this book is situated in the relativity/universality debate on human rights and my points of view will become clear in the following (sub-)chapters, it is crucial to briefly sketch the conceptual landscape according to my own theoretical and terminological account. Understood here as descriptive terms, relativity and universality pertain to the actual acceptance of human rights and their underpinning values. In that sense, saying that human rights are universal would amount to the claim that there is an effective consensus on the meaning and importance of human rights norms and values. On the other hand, holding that human rights are in fact relative suggests that their acceptance is conditioned upon certain sets of norms and values that are not shared among all people or traditions alike. There exists, however, a middle position that we can name relative universality according to which human rights are in fact shared as general principles whereas their specific meaning, scope, or implementation is subject to particularist interpretations. The right to life could serve as an example: Even if virtually all people would supposedly agree that this is an important right, they nevertheless might disagree whether or not abortion or capital punishment, for example, are reconcilable with it. A different question, yet not independent from empirical acceptance, is the one of universalizability. To raise it only makes sense once a non-universality stance has been taken. In that perspective, human rights may not (yet) be shared as a universal normative commitment, but could have the potential to be universal—depending on the cultural/religious conditions they meet in the course of their journey round the globe.

Furthermore, the question of human rights’ relativity/universality can also be raised on a metaethical level. Here it is the ontological status of their norms and values that is debated. Are human rights valid independently of peoples’ opinions (thesis of ontological absoluteness) or is their moral validity dependent on human acts of establishing and asserting them (thesis of ontological relativity)? Those who side with ontological absoluteness often regard human rights as (embodiments of) divine commands or unquestionable dictates of an authoritative human nature. From the perspective of ontological relativity by contrast, human rights appear as human constructs, not echoing an objective cosmos of rules and values, but rather represent reactions to contingent historical experiences or to the needs of a non-fixed human condition. Whereas the question of factual universality or relativity is a mere empirical one, ontological absoluteness or relativity is a matter of interpreting that very empirical reality. I will elaborate on this in Sect. 1.2 in more detail.

Adding to the complexity of the universality/relativity debate is the fact that it does not only involve a descriptive and an ontological or hermeneutical dimension, but also a prescriptive one. At the heart of this dimension lies the question: Should human rights be enforced and their acceptance requested even where they are not (fully) shared? Certain varieties of (cultural) relativism, for example, repudiate such human rights universalism. As a more nuanced position, relative universalism intends to balance universalism and relativism. It thereby makes use of the distinction between absolutism and universalism: That norms should be accepted or implemented everywhere on this planet does not yet determine whether or not this is done in consideration of local traditions, for example. Whereas relative universalism allows for such particularist inseminations, absolute universalism demands that human rights are universally recognized and enforced without any deference to other (cultural) normative regimes. The core challenge for any relative universalism, and this is a main concern of this book, is to decide how far human rights can be compromised and how limits of legitimate deviances should be set. Otherwise, human rights run into danger of whateverism and misuse. Or, in the words of Stephen Hopgood: they soon will find themselves on a road to nowhere (cf. 2017, pp. 295ff.).

1.1 Beyond Catalogs of Rights: The Idea of Human Rights

The question what the core of human rights is, rests upon a central methodological distinction: that between the idea of human rights and content-laden lists or catalogs of human rights. This distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘forecourt’ is an invitation to focus on a core area that does not yet determine in detail the precise design of particular rights claims.⁴ It thus aligns with those approaches in the human rights field that aim to counter the rising inflation of ‘rights language’ and exuberant entitlement mentality with an emphasis on a distilled ‘essence’ of human rights.⁵ Whereas content designs of human rights are equally numerous and contested, the idea of human rights only conveys that there are certain claims—yet to be defined—that all human beings in virtue of being human should enjoy. The idea of human rights hence amounts to a claim entitlement of the first order (level I), that is an individual right to human rights which is the basis for the claim entitlement of the sec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Idea of Human Rights
• 3. Foundational Paths
• 4. The Idea of Human Rights in Global Contexts: The Equality Dimension
• 5. The Idea of Human Rights in Global Contexts: The Liberty Dimension
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter