The Universality of Human Rights

By David Little
Senior Scholar, Special Initiative on Religion, Ethics, and Human Rights
United States Institute of Peace

Note: This paper is based upon a talk delivered at a conference on human rights at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, March 5-6, 1996.

The Problem

Deciding whether or not human rights are "universal" involves some preliminary clarifications and prior considerations.

Let us begin by agreeing that for the purposes of our discussion "human rights" shall mean the norms and prescriptions that are contained in the international human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

Let us also agree that to ask whether human rights are "universal" is to ask whether there are good reasons for believing that the norms and prescriptions contained in the international documents apply to and obligate all human beings equally, regardless of their cultural, social or geographical location.

Now we all know that the idea that human rights are universal in this sense is highly controversial. It is worth recalling that even before the Universal Declaration was officially adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the American Anthropological Association warned that the declaration would be perceived as "a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in Western Europe and America." "What is held to be a human right in one society," they said, "may be regarded as anti-social by another people," since, in their words, "standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive."

These views have not disappeared with time. In anticipation of the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, some forty Asian and Pacific states called special attention to "the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds" in interpreting and applying human rights, and a number of Asian officials and scholars have gone a good deal farther than that. They have left no doubt that in their view the emphasis on individualism in the West has no relevance to and presumably no validity in Asia where allegiance to the community outweighs concern for individual rights.

Representatives of some Islamic countries have struck a similar note. In the eighties, to mention one example, Iran's UN ambassador bluntly repudiated the universality of human rights. According to him, conventions, declarations and resolutions of the UN that are contrary to Islam have no validity in Iran. The Universal Declaration itself represents a secular outlook which can not be implemented by Muslims and does not accord with the values recognized by Iran. That is not necessarily the only official Iranian view, but it is an important one, and it reappears there and elsewhere in the Islamic world from time to time.

Cultural Relativism

Now views like these, which challenge the uniform applicability and validity of human rights, are usually identified with what is called, "cultural relativism." That view holds four things, so far as human rights go. 1) Human rights are related to moral convictions; 2) moral convictions are determined by underlying cultural commitments; 3) underlying commitments differ fundamentally from one culture to another; therefore, 4) the interpretation of human rights must vary fundamentally across cultures.

We need to say something about cultural relativism because it is one of the most fashionable attempts to refute the universality of human rights. Mind you, I doubt that all Muslim or Asian critics of human rights are consistently committed to cultural relativism. I suspect that many of them suppose deep down that their own views are in fact superior to Western ideas, and that everyone would be better off if their views came to prevail universally. Nevertheless, in the present debate, at least, many critics are content with half a loaf-namely, with the kind of live-and-let-live position cultural relativism seems to assure. Because cultures differ, and because human rights must vary accordingly, no one culture can go around trying to impose its view of human rights on others.

Cultural relativism rests on two theses: 1) the diversity thesis, which holds that the world is divided up into separate, fixed, internally unified, and significantly diverse cultural units; and 2), the dependency thesis, which holds that moral beliefs (including related beliefs about human rights) are determined by prior (and necessarily diverse) cultural commitments.

I do not believe either of these theses is very convincing, and I shall briefly try to say why. Because I doubt their truth, I accordingly doubt that cultural relativism represents much of a challenge to the universality of human rights.

1) Diversity Thesis. The idea that there exist sharply defined, self-contained, fixed, and internally unified "cultural units" seems to me a dubious proposition both, as you might say, from a macro and a micro perspective.

"It would be surprising," writes one expert, "if there were in fact one Asian [cultural] perspective, since Asian countries are not homogenous." There are enormous differences in religion, and in economic and political circumstances. In one country the majority is Buddhist, in another Hindu, in another Christian, in another Muslim, in another Confucian, etc. Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are among the world's most prosperous countries, while Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines are afflicted with grinding poverty; Burma is a military dictatorship; Singapore and Indonesia have one-party regimes; China, North Korea and Vietnam are Communist states; Sri Lanka and Malaysia have ambiguous democracies, while India is a relatively well-established democracy.

Similarly, significant minorities exist within many Asian countries-for example, in China, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Japan, Malaysia, Burma, etc., and in several cases, these minorities represent highly deviant positions. In China in particular, minority tensions will be accentuated as new political arrangements are worked out with Hong Kong and Taiwan. Moreover, in several Asian countries, such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea, where accelerated economic growth is occurring, there are expanding numbers of workers who are culturally and economically severely dislocated and disadvantaged.

The simple point is, that the idea of a "cultural unit," as something defined, fixed, and internally unified, tends to fall apart on inspection. That is true whether we speak broadly and inclusively of something called "the Asian perspective," or more particularly of the perspectives of individual countries.

The same point applies, in my opinion, to the so-called "Islamic world." There is nothing particularly homogenous about countries as various as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Sudan, Indonesia, etc., all of whom have Muslim majorities, and some of whom classify themselves officially as "Islamic states." They differ widely not only in the way Islam gets applied socially and politically, but also in terms of economic and political organization. Thus, the idea of some broad, uniform "Islamic cultural perspective" which takes one consistent position on human rights seems clearly mistaken.

The same is true, again, when such countries are looked at one by one. The respective populations of Muslim countries as a rule hardly share one fixed and unified attitude toward human rights, or toward much else besides. Indeed, in many of these countries there exist deep divisions, very often among Muslims themselves, over the ideal political and social order. The fact that one view becomes "official" in a country like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Sudan, does not necessarily reflect popular consensus, or even the unanimous agreement of learned authorities. Often it is the result of a simple assertion of power.

2) Dependency Thesis. It is, frankly, difficult to know exactly what cultural relativists mean by "underlying cultural commitments" upon which moral convictions, and, in turn, human rights judgments are supposed to "depend." One reason is that, as we have just seen, cultures, particularly in modern times, are such dynamic, fluid, inconsistent things that are, it would seem, constantly in process of adapting and adjusting to a variety of conflicting concerns and demands. If the underlying commitments are in tension with each other, then it is unlikely that particular moral convictions or human rights judgments are going to be all that consistent from one part of a society to the other.

This condition seems particularly true in today's world, with the profound and universal effects of the global economy, and the attendant explosion of information and communication technologies. In fact, these worldwide forces appear to have an international impact that challenges and destabilizes traditional cultural commitments in Asia and the Middle East, every bit as much as in the United States and the West. While these forces are generating a new global culture, they are simultaneously reinforcing division and fragmentation within cultures according to a common pattern.

The themes of cultural conservatism and economic populism heard in the current Republican primary campaign in this country have the profoundest echoes in other parts of the world. It looks as though different parts of society in countries everywhere are responding in similar ways to contradictory cultural and moral cues, and, not surprisingly, are coming to conflicting conclusions about what is best in regard to applying and interpreting human rights .

If there are "official" voices invoking the mantle of one or another sacred tradition for given economic, political, and social policies, there are invariably opposition voices who, to the extent they are allowed, challenge those policies and the cultural warrants used to justify them.

How, exactly, does the cultural relativist decide which of the competing claims is authentically derived from underlying cultural commitments? If, as one expert asserts, there is nothing "particularly Confucian" about "tight regulation in China and Singapore," since "Confucius argued against reliance on law or coercion, and advocated a government of limited powers and functions," what precisely is the cultural relativist to say? Does one accept the "official view" or the dissenting view as reflecting the "true culture"? And why one or the other? Similar examples of deep internal cultural conflict could be given in the cases of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and elsewhere.

I conclude that cultural relativism can have nothing to say to dilemmas of this sort since it has the wrong view of cultures and the way they work. Cultures do not so much answer questions as raise them. Therefore, it is unlikely a culture is going to have only one thing to say about human rights or anything else. Because cultural relativism is mistaken in this basic way, I believe it does not, as I say, pose much of a threat to a belief in the universality of human rights.

A Constructive Argument

But even if I have successfully dispensed with cultural relativism, I have hardly thereby demonstrated to you that human rights are universal. So far, I have simply "cleared away the underbrush," in the words of John Locke.

My constructive argument in favor of the universality of human rights-very much abbreviated-goes like this: The "human rights revolution," which occurred after World War II with the adoption of the human rights documents and instruments, came about not primarily as the result of a new enthusiasm for Western liberal philosophy, or even of Western international hegemony at the time. It came about primarily as a widespread, profound, and. indubitable moral revulsion to what the preamble of the Universal Declaration calls, "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience" of humankind. These were, of course, the atrocities committed systematically in the name of Japanese and German fascism. The assumption is that any self-respecting human being would be similarly shocked and revolted by such a spectacle. Indeed, such a reaction becomes a mark of what it means to be a self-respecting human being.

The reaction to the existence and practices of fascism made five things forever unmistakable and unforgettable.

On this view, culture as such is by no means "above the law," contrary to the tenets of cultural relativism. To put it simply: cultures are more or less pathological, depending on how they perform on the "human rights test."

Now I admit that all this is woefully oversimple, and is desperately in need of nuance and refinement. Is there no room here for "cultural adjustment" and "circumstantial interpretation"? I devoutly believe there is, and one of the purposes of a symposium like this is, surely, to address that very legitimate concern.

Still, there are a few essentials worth holding on to. Perhaps the most important of all is that any culture, whether "secular," Communist, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, etc. appears, under the "wrong" circumstances, to be capable of an alarming degree of pathological behavior, as modeled once and for all by the fascists of the middle twentieth century. One assumes at the same time that cultures also have their own "corrective mechanisms" by which they endeavor to restrain the pathological tendency. The crucial question is, how successful are they in doing that. The "human rights test" provides a standard against which to make the judgment.

Above all, what one must watch for are the tell-tale signs of a group, especially one in power or one capable of achieving power, which, given the opportunity, undertakes to disadvantage, intimidate, confine, torture, expel, or destroy other groups as it sees fit, and for reasons satisfactory only to itself. That is, I am suggesting, a universal danger against which universal standards and tests are needed. In that sense, human rights apply to and obligate all human beings equally.

The views expressed above do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions.

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