Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Two: The Maximalist Challenge to Human Rights Justification

Two THE MAXIMALIST CHALLENGE TO HUMAN RIGHTS JUSTIFICATION Maximalist approaches to human rights make direct appeals to matters of first philosophy or religion for their ultimate justification. These premises affect their underlying rationale for human rights as well as the set of liberties or goods that will even be counted as human rights. Further distinguishing maximalist from minimalist approaches is a robust articulation of our common humanity and what it is about us as human beings that entitles us all to this special class of rights called human rights. Recall that the maximalist approach’s primary claim is not simply that human rights can be conceptualized within a larger vision of the good than what is explicitly stated in international human rights conventions or treaties but that they must be so embedded. Those who argue accordingly insist that minimalist strategies of justification are inevitably bound to fail because they fall short of their own desiderata in not being able to provide either a true theoretically “freestanding ” account or one that adequately safeguards the rights of all human beings at all times. I examine in this chapter the maximalist challenge to human rights justification, and I discuss, to that end, three maximalist declarations and four theoretical defenses of the central maximalist contention that the human rights project requires a religiously grounded or metaphysical rationale of some kind or other: the Organisation of the Islamic Conference’s Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI); the papal encyclical Pacem in terris; the Parliament of World Religion’s Declaration on Towards a Global Ethic; and the work of Michael Perry, Hans Küng, Max 31 Stackhouse, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. While leaving in reserve here whether human rights must be justified maximally, I discuss at the close of this chapter why proponents of human rights should at least attempt to defend their universal validity in ways that bypass any necessary recourse to religion. MAXIMALIST APPROACHES IN HUMAN RIGHTS DECLARATIONS AND DOCUMENTS Maximalist approaches to human rights do not simply exist in the minds of those who are committed to them but have functioned practically and historically in important ways on the world stage. Consider the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), which was endorsed by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1990 to serve as a guide for member states and was then presented by the Saudi Arabian foreign minister for adoption at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria.1 Against the conventional narrative discussed in chapter 1 of the Western origins of human rights, the CDHRI attributes their source to divine revelation in seventh-century Arabia instead, when the “last of His Prophets” (i.e., the Prophet Muhammad) received the “Revealed Books of God,” thereby completing previous “divine messages.” The Cairo Declaration names the Islamic Shariah as the ultimate foundation of and reference for all the human rights and freedoms declared therein. This is why “Shariah-prescribed reasons” explicitly constrain the scope of many of its enumerated provisions, including the human rights to life, to safety from bodily harm, to freedom of movement, to the fruit of one’s labor, to various criminal proceedings , to freedom of expression, and to assume public office (preamble , Art. 2, 12, 16, 19, 22–25).2 Other maximalist elements of the CDHRI include an Islamic description of our moral worth and common humanity, that we are all “united by submission to God and descent from Adam,” and an embedding of both the concept and implementation of human rights within a comprehensive way of life (i.e., Islam) such that their observance becomes an “act of 32 The Maximalist Challenge to Human Rights Justification worship and their neglect or violation an abominable sin” (preamble , Art. 1a, 1b). One of the most famous papal encyclicals of the twentieth century, Pacem in terris, could also be regarded as a maximalist document. As issued by Pope John XXIII on April 11, 1963, and addressed to the Catholic faithful as well as to “all men of good will,” the encyclical interprets human rights to be wholly compatible with both natural and special revelation. Our conscience reveals that our universal rights and duties flow from our nature as human beings, and the Bible confirms that it was indeed the “Father of the universe” who originally inscribed these “laws which govern men” upon us (par. 5–7, par...