its laws; implicit in Fuller’s argument is a belief in human rights, to which he is
offering a logical entailment defence. Of course, a regime can simply choose not to
justify its actions – although that is extremely rare – but refusal to engage in the
justification process does not undermine the logical entailment argument.
Jürgen Habermas offers the best contemporary statement of logical entailment.
Before we get to his defence of human rights against cultural relativism, it is
necessary to set out briefly Habermas’s rather complex theory of social change. If
we define ‘culture’ as the ‘taken-for-granted horizon of expectations’, then under
conditions of modernity culture is ‘threatened’ by rationalisation in the form of
money (or the market) and bureaucratic power – relations between human beings
become consciously instrumental, rather than implicit and ‘taken for granted’. There
is a diminution of trust. Many theorists, especially in the German philosophical
tradition in which Habermas has been formed, are pessimistic about the
consequences of modernity. However, Habermas argues that the emphasis on
instrumentalisation – or what he calls ‘systemic rationality’ – ignores the positive
achievements of modernity, expressed in ‘communicative rationality’ (Habermas,
1984: 8–22). The growth in consciousness of human rights is one of the
achievements of communicative rationality.
What does Habermas mean by ‘communicative action’? People engage in speech
acts: person A promisesto meet person B on Thursday, requestsB stop smoking,
confessesto find B’s actions distasteful, predictsit will rain. Implicit in each speech
act is an offer or claim. In the first two cases A is making a claim to normative
rightness, in the third case a claim to sincerity and in the final case a claim to truth.
B can contest all three such ‘validity claims’ (Habermas, 1984: 319–28). The success
of each speech act depends upon both parties orienting themselves to principles of
reason that are not reducible to individual intentions: in addressing B person A
treats her as an end in herself. The validity claims are implicit in all human action,
that is, they are universal. This seems a promising basis for defending universal
human rights against the challenge of cultural relativism. However, the validity
claims are abstract from everyday life, and so to redeem them requires appeal to a
stock of culturally specific values. That means the content of human rights is
dependent on culture.
One way to address this problem of cultural dependence is to maintain that
politics is a dialogue, in which people bring to bear their different cultural
perspectives, such that what emerges from the dialogue is something pluralistic yet
coherent. For example, Muslims may be criticised by Western feminists for
projecting a patriarchal conception of gender relations. By engaging in dialogue
Muslims may reform their view of women’s rights, but Westerners might also be
obliged to recognise the deficiencies in their own understanding of family relations,
by, for example, acknowledging the costs entailed in the commodification of sex in
a liberal society.
Habermas argues that there is a tradition in anglophone legal and political theory
of conceiving of the state as grounded in the protection of individual ‘private’ rights
- rights derived from the market contract model. Hobbes is the locus classicusof
this conception of individual–state relations. If we operate with such a theory then
it is inevitable that individual rights will be a threat to cultural reproduction; in
effect, increasing reliance on rights would be another example of systemic rationality
eroding the lifeworld. We are then left with a choice: either we assert the primacy
Chapter 18 Human rights 415