A Shared Vision? Human Rights and the Church
From: Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland 2000
For example, in 1977 the American Nazi Party applied for permission to march through Skokie, a suburb of Chicago with a large Jewish population, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust. Inevitably, there were many objections. The local authorities banned the march, but the Supreme Court asserted the Nazi's right to march in a decision in 1978. In the event, having established their rights, the Nazi's held their march elsewhere. However, what is noticeable is that the only resource for adjudicating these competing claims was the Supreme Court's interpretation of the constitution. As a result the Nazis were permitted to march. If Nazis asserted their right to freedom of association and free speech - including the flying of Swastikas - in a Jewish community they were to be granted it. Moreover, if the Nazi's has insisted on their right to march the authorities would have been obliged to facilitate them.
The problem for liberal democracies is that they and their institutions - including their human rights institutions - lack the capacity to define a shared vision of the common good that would help adjudicate such conflicting claims. The human rights tradition, inasmuch as it reflects the values of liberal democracy, has no meaningful concept of a common good or a shared moral vision and therefore cannot articulate either. Instead, the human rights tradition makes human rights itself the end as well as the means. The closest it comes to a shared moral vision is a vision of a society in which human rights are protected and respected. If the end result is a society of multiple and competing moral visions constrained by endless legal conflict over the enforcement of practices associated with these moral visions, then so be it.
This fundamental weakness at the heart of the Western human rights tradition has been recognised by advocates of communitarianism.6 While some communitarian visions can tend towards a view of society or the nation that identifies it as a single community with a single moral vision, those that stress the social nature of human beings which manifests itself in the creation of a plurality of communities, offer an important corrective to the human rights tradition. Doubtless, human rights can play a constructive part in a communitarian vision of society. But to this extent that it remains wedded to a vision at odds with this wider communitarian vision it will remain primarily a mechanism for the management of conflict.
The universality of human rights
There is an ongoing debate over the question of whether human rights are universal. The public debate is largely shaped by the claims of some non-Western countries that the human rights tradition is a specifically Western one and is, therefore, not necessarily appropriate for non-Western cultures. Some go further and argue that the advocacy of human rights is no more than a form of Western imperialism. The difficulty seems to arise because of a failure to distinguish between a general concept of human value and dignity - which may be universal - and the specific understanding of the implications of that concept in different political, social and cultural contexts. Where critics of the human rights tradition are right is in their assertion that the orientation of the Western human rights tradition, its codification in particular documents and its mechanisms for protection are not necessarily universal.
So, for example, the emphasis on the individual that is part of the Western tradition (see below), and so part of the Western human rights tradition, is not necessarily appropriate or acceptable in other moral traditions, cultures or worldviews - not least, it should be noted, that of the church. Nor is the Western emphasis on the delineation, advocacy or enforcement of rights within an almost exclusively legal framework shared in other traditions. The rejection, therefore, of Western individualism and legalism, can be seen as a valid critique of tendencies within the Western human rights tradition which may not, in fact, best serve human dignity. More than this, other cultural emphases on community and on mediation, conciliation and consensus are areas where the Western tradition has a lot to learn. However, the Western human rights tradition, to the extent that it is unwilling to engage in any questioning of the intellectual framework within which it operates, leaves itself open to a critique of the universalist claim for human rights.
The individualism of human rights
The Western rights tradition, as part of the broader Western tradition,
emphasises the individual as primary. The individual possesses rights designed
to guarantee him or her protection from, primarily, the power of the State.
However, as rights talk has developed, the emphasis has broadened beyond
protection of the individual to the empowerment of the individual. Nor is
it only the state that is perceived as potentially threatening or repressive.
Now, other individuals or corporate entities are perceived as having the
potential to persecute or repress or coerce the individual and to deny the
individual the freedom to make the choices that would result in his or her
empowerment. However, in a culture that lacks any coherent conception of
what a moral society should look like, the scope of these choices is immense
and constantly expanding. Beyond legal constraints, the only limiting criterion
that seems to have any force is that people's choices should not hurt anyone
- hurt being understood in a highly limited way. |
