The common good of constitutional democracy: essays in political philosophy and on Catholic social teaching

Nine: Can Political Ethics Be Universalized? : Human Rights as a Global Project

NINE Can Political ethics Be Universalized? Human Rights as a Global Project Human rights are made up of all the values that concern social and political life, and are supposed to be universal. Though their origin is Western, human rights today are to be applied globally. Taken as a global political ethos, then, they form a minimum moral standard for civilized life, meaning one that is founded on full respect for human dignity. The question I would like to respond to is this: can such political ethics truly be universalized? What are Political ethics? As I understand it in what follows, political ethics are (or include) all those values that characterize a functioning society, insofar as it is politically organized. These values include not only the goals of a society’s political and legal institutions, but also the behavior required of its citizens. Political ethics are thus not simply a series of norms that define honest or moral behavior in political affairs, but rather they are the moral base of the institutions in which the political life of a country takes place. Accordingly, political ethics are an expression of political culture. The institutions in which the political life of a country develops include, first, legal institutions such as the constitution, judicial authorities and the administration of justice, penal law, and the law in general. Second, they include political institutions, such as the parliament, the electoral system, and the bill of rights. Third, they include social institutions such as social 292 security. It is evidently impossible to distinguish definitively between these three areas, as the political and social spheres are not entirely distinct and, in fact, overlap. Political ethics composed of these parts make up the ethos of a nation and the fabric of its society, which is in turn the product of its history. This fact does not rule out the universal applicability of such ethics, though there is inevitably a certain tension between universality and the diversity of particular social histories. This tension, and the consequent ambivalence brought about by the particulars of history, is a chief obstacle to the universal acceptance and application of political ethics. This obstacle is apparent in the case of human rights, which are the expression of the political ethos whose universal validity we are seeking. This form of ethics is precisely the product of the history of a particular culture. Nevertheless, the universal validity of this ethic of human rights is to be sought not because they should be exported from their origin, the Christian or post-Christian West, as a neocolonial initiative, but because they have become part of a normative global heritage. Even Islamic countries, for example , and non-Christian countries in general, declare that they consider human rights as a valid standard for what they judge to be desirable norms in politics, even if, one must acknowledge, they occasionally give “human rights” interpretations that run contrary to their original meaning. There are even authors who attempt to trace the Islamic origins of human rights, a task that is not straightforward.1 The viewpoint from which I will reflect upon these problems is that of political philosophy. Now, it is a fundamental feature of political philosophy , also the political philosophy of human rights, to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it not only is normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization . The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy that would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the Can Political ethics Be Universalized? 293 1. See Heiner Bielefeldt, Philosophie der Menschenrechte. Grundlagen eines weltweiten Freiheitsethos (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 134ff. 294 Can Political ethics Be Universalized? good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, the historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political.2 Briefly: political philosophy and ethics are not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical...