"They are our brothers, and Christ gave His life for them": The Catholic Tradition and the Idea of Human Rights in Latin America

THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS, law can both reflect and constitute some of our most basic ideas about the requirements of human dignity and the human desire for freedom. It captures certain culturally embedded understandings about the nature of the human person in society and carries them forward in time through an institutionalized discourse and practice. This is especially so in those legal traditions that have inherited Western law's historically consistent orientation toward the individual. Law never makes those sorts of claims in a systematically theoretical way, however. Instead, it is a form of praxis, combining theory and practice, speculation and experience. In this essay I will explore the way that an idea of human rights, one deeply influenced by Catholic traditions of thought about the nature of the human person, was given shape in the mold of historical experience in Latin America and then carried forward through the language of law. Out of that praxis, Latin America forged a distinctive way of talking about and understanding human rights—its own particular accent, as it were, of a language that in the last fifty years has become global.

The Latin American Contribution to Legitimate Pluralism

To some it may seem a little self-contradictory to speak of a purportedly universal language—human rights—in terms that deliberately seek to emphasize local or regional particularities. It is certainly true that human rights has become, globally, the most recognizable and accessible form of communication across cultures regarding the minimal standards of human decency and dignity. This is because there is a basic way in which the terms of human rights genuinely reflect certain universal human desires—the hopes and needs of every human heart for justice and freedom.

The problem, of course, is that the language of human rights is necessarily open-ended, abstract, and to a certain degree indeterminate. It has to be so precisely as a function of its capacity to embrace the many varied expressions of its core ideals in the different concrete historical circumstances of all of the human family, across time and space. The result is that the single language of human rights does have—indeed, it must have—different "dialects." The virtue of this openness is its flexibility and adaptability, its capacity to accommodate the search for truth and meaning that characterizes every genuinely human culture the world has ever known. It recognizes, implicitly, that a person's quest for freedom and justice depends on being situated in a history and in a community that provides that person with a first proposal for leading a flourishing life.

But the openness of human rights language also has a darker side: indeterminacy can mean manipulability too. It can mean, for instance, that one partial view of the meaning of human rights—which is the meaning of humanity and society, really—can capture the entire discourse. Then that view not only dominates, but it dominates with the legitimating aura of a universal ethical language. This is the danger, in other words, that human rights will be the blunt instrument of enforcing a global conformity to the culture of the rich and powerful, who are able to say, "My rights must be your rights, whether you think so or not." Alternatively, the openness and indeterminacy of the idea of human rights can lead to the emptying of the concept, to the evacuation of its meaning and its replacement by a relativization of the underlying truth about the human person of which the idea of human rights is a sign. This is the danger of the cruder forms of a so-called "cultural relativism": "Your American rights are not my Asian rights nor...