Cultural Relativism and Human Rights
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Abstract
The article provides an analysis of the human rights discourse between universalism and cultural relativism caused by globalisation.
The processes of globalisation strongly increased the understanding of human diversity and demonstrated that the world was still far away from moral integration that was required by the universal understanding of human rights. This conditioned the polemics of the West against the East, and the North – South. The Western and Eastern dimension, or a “colonial” one-point Europocentristic vision of the world culture, considers the human rights as created by the West and adapted to the limited number of not Western countries. The Northern and Southern dimension underlines the existence of the essential gap between the Western Christian and the Eastern Islamic civilization. This means that the individual value of the individual person in the systemic centristic Eastern civilisation is not so strongly manifested as in the personal centristic Western, or European, civilization. Cultures of Asia impart another meaning to the human rights as compared to the individualistic West. They give preemption not to the individual, but to the group, not to competition and debates, but to harmony and consensus, not to the individual self-expression, and freedom, but to the respect to power. Such issues arising in respect of human rights lead to the dangerous cultural relativism.
On the other hand, the human rights standards are becoming more universal; human rights enforced in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are identified still more as secular morality. The concept of the human rights that emerged after the Secon World War is universal at least in two respects: firstly, the individual and collective rights, specified by the still increasing number of international legal instruments, force to apply them in actual fact to all human beings; secondly, the United Nations play a key role in the process of the reinforcement and development of the standards of universal human rights. With the strengthening of integration of different regions in the planet, ideas that have become crystallized in different civilizations, alternative principles of thinking and creation, conforming to the needs of the world culture development in social terms, intermingle in the newest postmodern culture and create the essentially new model of common metacivilized culture. The increasing understanding of humanness maintains certain moral authority between great cultural differences, and this imparts rationality to human rights as useful transnational norms and rational standards of global behaviour. Thus optimistically disposed adherents of globalization foresee the pluralistic and peaceful structure of the world where the concept of universality of human rights means that human rights belong to all human beings and are fundamental in each society and where the main principle of the concept of universality is the right of each to human rights, even if the form and contents of human rights are under change all the time.
The processes of globalisation strongly increased the understanding of human diversity and demonstrated that the world was still far away from moral integration that was required by the universal understanding of human rights. This conditioned the polemics of the West against the East, and the North – South. The Western and Eastern dimension, or a “colonial” one-point Europocentristic vision of the world culture, considers the human rights as created by the West and adapted to the limited number of not Western countries. The Northern and Southern dimension underlines the existence of the essential gap between the Western Christian and the Eastern Islamic civilization. This means that the individual value of the individual person in the systemic centristic Eastern civilisation is not so strongly manifested as in the personal centristic Western, or European, civilization. Cultures of Asia impart another meaning to the human rights as compared to the individualistic West. They give preemption not to the individual, but to the group, not to competition and debates, but to harmony and consensus, not to the individual self-expression, and freedom, but to the respect to power. Such issues arising in respect of human rights lead to the dangerous cultural relativism.
On the other hand, the human rights standards are becoming more universal; human rights enforced in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are identified still more as secular morality. The concept of the human rights that emerged after the Secon World War is universal at least in two respects: firstly, the individual and collective rights, specified by the still increasing number of international legal instruments, force to apply them in actual fact to all human beings; secondly, the United Nations play a key role in the process of the reinforcement and development of the standards of universal human rights. With the strengthening of integration of different regions in the planet, ideas that have become crystallized in different civilizations, alternative principles of thinking and creation, conforming to the needs of the world culture development in social terms, intermingle in the newest postmodern culture and create the essentially new model of common metacivilized culture. The increasing understanding of humanness maintains certain moral authority between great cultural differences, and this imparts rationality to human rights as useful transnational norms and rational standards of global behaviour. Thus optimistically disposed adherents of globalization foresee the pluralistic and peaceful structure of the world where the concept of universality of human rights means that human rights belong to all human beings and are fundamental in each society and where the main principle of the concept of universality is the right of each to human rights, even if the form and contents of human rights are under change all the time.
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Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to the Association for Learning Technology.
Please see Copyright and Licence Agreement for further details.
