12.4.2 Universality and Relativism
Universality refers to the idea thateveryhuman being has the same human rights
because all the rights accrue by virtue of his humanity and nothing else is required.
Here, it is important to unpack the moral and legal dimensions of rights, as
discussed in Sect.12.3. Morally speaking, human rights may be universal, but
legally speaking this is not entirely the case. Not all countries of the world are
parties to all the relevant treaties, and this means that some people have less legally
recognized rights and fewer avenues for protection than others. Moreover, not all
countries have bills of rights.
Cultural Relativism However, even the universality of human rights as moral
ideals has been questioned. For many, the idea that a single set of rights may be
adequate for all people is preposterous. They argue that human rights are a strictly
Western concept and should not be imposed on regions of the world that do not
share the culture, history, and values of the West, such as Asia and Africa. This is
the now the widely known idea of cultural relativism.
A key expression of this idea can be found in the “Statement on Human Rights” of the
American Anthropological Association (1947), which stressed the need to study and honor
the values of other cultures and warned against the making of a Universal Declaration of
Human Rights that reflects only Western values. Typically, African and Asian societies are
said to be community-oriented instead of individualistic in nature, and to put more
emphasis on duties than rights. The “Asian Values” challenge was particularly effective
by the end of the twentieth century, where various Asian countries reached significant
levels of economic development. Apologists of the Asian Values doctrine suggested that
Asians prefer economic development over rights, disregarding rights in favor of
development-enabled economic growth.
Care should be taken not to overstate the force of the cultural relativist critique.
In a certain light, it exemplifies the so-called naturalistic fallacy, which assumes
that the way things are now (people hold different values) determines how things
should be (they should always continue to have those diverging values). In many
cases, one can value something without caring much how or where it originated
from, in the way that one can value Arabic numerals even if one is not from the said
geographical region. Even if it were true that human rights are a Western concept,
this is no reason why people from other regions cannot benefit from them.
12.5 Duties
12.5.1 Who Are the Duty Bearers?
The general orthodoxy is that human rights only create duties for the state. This can
be explained by the fact that, during much of the recent history of human rights, the
power of the state has been secure, and so it has been easy to attribute all major
breaches of human dignity to acts or omissions of the state.
270 G. Arosemena