Are Human Rights Universal? The Relativist Challenge and Related Matters

A vision of future social order is . . . based on a concept of human nature. If in fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the “shaping behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species . . . will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community. ²

The great concern of our contemporaries for historicity and for culture has led some to call into question . . . the existence of “objective norms of morality” valid for all peoples of the present and the future, as for those of the past. . . . It must certainly be admitted that man always exists in a particular culture, but it must also be admitted that man is not exhaustively defined by the same culture. . . . [T]he very progress of cultures demonstrates that there is something in man which transcends those cultures. This “something” is precisely human nature: This nature is itself the measure of culture and the condition ensuring that man does not become the prisoner of any of his cultures, but asserts his personal dignity by living in accordance with the profound truth of his being. ³

I. Introduction

The idea of human rights consists of two parts: the premise or claim that every human being is sacred (inviolable, etc.), and the further claim that because every human being is sacred (and given all other relevant information), certain choices should be made and certain other choices rejected; in particular, certain things ought not to be done to any human being and certain other things ought to be done for every human being. ⁴ One fundamental challenge to the idea of human rights addresses the first part of the idea; it contests the claim that every human being is sacred. Another fundamental challenge, the one with which this article is principally concerned, addresses the second part of the idea. According to this latter challenge, whether or not every human being is sacred—and, so, even if every human being is sacred—there are no things that ought not to be done (not even any things that conditionally rather than unconditionally ought not to be done) to any human being and no things that ought to be done (not even any things that conditionally rather than unconditionally ought to be done) for every human being. That is, no putatively “human” right is truly a human right: no such right is the right of every human being; in that sense, no such right—no such “ought” or “ought not”—is truly universal. Before addressing this challenge, which shall be referred to as the relativist challenge to the idea of human rights, a comment on the other fundamental challenge, which contests the claim that every human being is sacred, is in order.

II. Are All Human Beings Sacred?

One can contest the claim that every human being is sacred by making either of two distinct arguments:

First, one can contend that no argument for the claim that any human being, much less every human being, is sacred—neither any religious argument nor any secular argument—is persuasive. ⁵ In particular, one can insist that after the death of God (Nietzsche) ⁶ —or “after metaphysics has collapsed” (Habermas) ⁷ —sacredness (inviolability, etc.) of human beings cannot be predicated plausibly.

Second, one can contend that not every human being is sacred, but only some human beings—the members of one’s tribe, for example, or of one’s nation.

Typically, the claim that only some human beings are sacred takes the form, not that only some human beings are sacred, but that only some persons are really human beings; in particular, it takes the form that some (other) persons—women, for example, or persons of African ancestry, or Jews, or Bosnian Muslims, etc.—are not truly human...