Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach by Jeffrey Flynn (review)

While questions of pluralism and toleration have impregnated almost all debates in political philosophy over the last decades—not least in relation to discussions about global justice and global democracy—the question of intercultural dialogue has received far less attention in comparison. Indeed, deliberative democracy has a stronger position than ever before. But focus among political theorists has been redirected from deliberation as dialogue and mutual understanding towards deliberation as contestation. In light of this change of focus, Jeffrey Flynn’s book Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights is a refreshing exception. Even if we tend to forget, individuals across the globe agree on norms and ways of conduct and this is as much a fact about our world as is pluralism. If there is one area of global affairs in the last sixty years that bears witness to this, it is the area of human rights. Still, among conceptions of human rights that are broadly labeled “political,”¹ not much has been said about the role of intercultural dialogue for theorizing human rights. Working within this “political” human rights framework, Flynn sets out to do just that.

According to Flynn, to the extent that theorists have stressed the need for intercultural dialogue to meet the challenges posed by cultural and religious pluralism, they have tended to presume an already developed theory of human rights. In his view, the problem with such an approach is that the question about intercultural dialogue immediately turns into a question about convincing others of a set of ready-made human rights. Instead, Flynn’s ambition is to make the very dialogue on human rights the object of philosophical inquiry. From this starting-point, it is not at all strange that Flynn finds a Habermasian framework attractive. He aims to demonstrate the strengths of Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory for developing a dialogical approach to human rights over other contemporary approaches.

Against the backdrop of a reframing of the so-called compatibility debates—i.e., the debates about how human rights can be made compatible with different religious doctrines—through a re-reading of the question of compatibility in contextualist and pragmatic terms, Flynn analyzes two attempts to accommodate a non-ethnocentric perspective in providing a framework for an intercultural discussion of human rights, those of John Rawls and Charles Taylor. One of the merits of The Law of Peoples, according to Flynn, is Rawls’ effort to engage with non-Western perspectives in constructing an account of human rights. Motivated by a principled idea of toleration implied by the ideal of equal respect, Rawls primarily does so by exploring how willing liberal societies are to tolerate non-liberal societies, thus recognizing them as equal members of the Society of Peoples. In Flynn’s view, Rawls’ theory could be described as dialogical in at least one important respect: the second-level international original position is not only seen as a device for justifying principles of the Law of Peoples, but also as the point of view from which those principles are to be further interpreted and discussed among well-ordered societies.² However, the problem for Flynn is that these deliberations are not targeted at the content and justification of human rights but only at different interpretations of a set of already defined human rights (indeed, as pointed out by Flynn, Rawls needs a detailed account of such rights in order to define what constitutes a “decent people” in the first place and thus be able to make the argument that liberal peoples ought to tolerate it). For this reason, Flynn argues, Rawls does not really engage non-Western perspectives, even though he takes them into consideration. Instead, he adopts what Flynn calls “the method of avoidance,” sweeping deeply disputed matters under the carpet. However, a genuinely dialogical approach to human rights must interpret equal respect not primarily as toleration in terms of passive acceptance of the other, according to Flynn, but in terms...