Asian values and global human rights

Philosophy East and West

Volumn 52, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 173-189

  Dallmayr, Fred ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35548993369     PISSN: 00318221     EISSN: 15291898     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2002.0025     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. - See, for example, Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 133-137
2. As Todorov notes (p. 133), "If the word genocide has ever been applied to a situation with some accuracy, this is here the case."
3. - For the confrontation between Sepúlveda and Las Casas see my Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 71-73. More than two centuries later, when Christianity extended itself into China, a controversy arose over whether Christian dogma should adjust itself to "Asian values," that is, to Chinese language and world-views. As in the earlier case, the defenders of absolute universalism (Christ's message is the same everywhere and at all times) triumphed
4. See George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy (Chicago: Loyala University Press, 1985)
5. - According to the 1999 United Nations Report on Human Development, the combined wealth of the world's three richest families is greater than the annual income of six hundred million people in the least developed countries. During the last four years, the world's two hundred richest people have doubled their wealth to more than $1 trillion; in the same period, the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has remained steady at 1.3 billion
6. See South Bend Tribune, 12 July 1999, p. A6
7. and Human Development Report 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
8. - Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3-7. Given the status of human rights as necessary conditions of action, their denial, in Gewirth's view, amounts to self-contradiction
9. - Jack Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), pp. 31-32, 35
10. Donnelly describes his own theory as "constructivist" and "dialectical" - which may be terms hiding ambivalence. While holding that "human nature" is in a sense "conventional," he also maintains that his theory is "fundamentally consistent with ... the classic natural rights tradition," while also being compatible with the approach of Alan Gewirth (pp. 32, 36). In a more recent study, Donnelly writes more forthrightly (and more foundation-ally): "The term human rights indicates both their nature and their source: they are the rights that one has simply because one is human. They are held by all human beings, irrespective of any rights or duties individuals may (or may not) have as citizens, members of families, workers, or parts of any public or private organization or association. They are universal rights."
11. See Donnelly, International Human Rights (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), p. 18
12. - Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 115-117
13. As Rorty adds (p. 121), the "best explanation" of Darwin's and Dewey's "relatively easy triumph" over foundationalism is "that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw, among Europeans and Americans, an extraordinary increase in wealth, literacy, and leisure. This increase made possible an unprecedented acceleration in the rate of moral progress."
14. - In this respect, Rorty is not far off the mark when he points to the importance of "sentimental education" in the cultivation of rights; see Rorty in Shute and Hurley, On Human Rights, p. 122. Regarding the goal of humanization, one might also wish to concur with Gewirth's formula of "freedom and well-being."
15. - Jack Donnelly, "Human Rights and Asian Values: A Defense of 'Western' Universalism," in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 80, 83
16. Suffering his stance somewhat, he adds (p. 83), "But this does not mean that Asian societies ought to follow 'Western' models blindly. Quite the contrary, internationally recognized human rights leave considerable space for distinctively Asian implementations of these rights... . Human rights are treated as essentially universal, but substantial space is allowed [sic!] tor variations in implementing these universal norms."
17. - See Henry Rosemont, Jr., "" in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Human Rights and the World's Religions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 168, 173-174
18. also Louis Henkin, "Epilogue: Confucianism, Human Rights, and 'Cultural Relativism,'" in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming, eds., Confucianism and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 314
19. - Rosemont, "Why Take Rights Seriously?" pp. 169, 173-175. Without in any way endorsing cultural relativism, Rosemont insists that the move from one "concept cluster" to another requires much more cultural sensitivity and attention to problems of translation than is customary among foundationalists. Universality, from this perspective, is an ongoing agonistic achievement rather than a fixed premise
20. - Tu Weiming, "Epilogue: Human Rights as a Confucian Moral Discourse," in de Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights, p. 302
21. In the same essay (p. 299), Tu speaks of Confucian "core values," namely "the perception of the person as a center of relationships rather than simply as an isolated individual, the idea of society as a community of trust rather than merely a system of adversarial relationships, and the belief that human beings are duty-bound to respect their family, society, and nation" (and global community)
22. See also his Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays on Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979)
23. and Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985)
24. Compare my "Humanity and Humanization: Comments on Confucianism," in Alternative Visions, pp. 123-144
25. - Roger T. Ames, "Rites as Rights: The Confucian Alternative," in Rouner, Human Rights and the World's Religions, pp. 205-206
26. Rosemont, "Why Take Rights Seriously?" p. 1 77
27. - Ames, "Rites as Rights," pp. 206-207. Ames illustrates the different approaches to universality by pointing to contrasting conceptions of human equality (p. 208), where Western human-rights discourse stresses the numerical or quantitative equality (read: sameness) of individuals, while Confucianism cultivates "qualitative parity": "Where rights-based order strives to guarantee a minimum and yet vital sameness, ritual-based order seeks to guarantee tolerance. For it is the basic nature of harmony, the aspiration of ritual practice, that is enhanced by a coordinated diversity among its elements."
28. See also Tu Weiming, "Epilogue," p. 299
29. and the exchange between Ames and Jack Donnelly: Ames, "Continuing the Conversation on Chinese Human Rights," and Donnelly, "Conversing with Straw Men While Ignoring Dictators: A Reply to Roger Ames," Ethics and International Affairs 11 (1997): 177-206, 207-213
30. - Rosemont, "Why Take Rights Seriously?" p. 180
31. If this goal is to be accomplished, he adds (p. 168), "the Western philosophical tradition will have to incorporate more non-Western philosophy than it has in the past."
32. - Sumner B. Twiss, "A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism and Human Rights," in de Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 32, 34
33. - Henry Rosemont, Jr., "Human Rights: A Bill of Worries," in de Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 57, 60
34. As he adds (p. 62), "I would also argue that industrial capitalism can never become the norm for most of the world's peoples, which should make rights talk even more suspect." Compare also these comments, adding to his bill of worries (p. 59): "Isn't there a hint of desperation in having to claim that trees have rights?... I believe we fundamentally misunderstand our human relations to trees, animals, our great-great grandchildren, and the natural world that sustains us by seeing them all as rival rights claimants. This view must see us as essentially distinct from the entire nonhuman world, in the same way that free, autonomous individuals are already cut off from each other in the 'original position' " (of Rawls). According to a recent report of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., the wealthiest 2.7 million Americans have as much to spend today as the poorest 100 million Americans; the top one-fifth of American households now earns half of all the income in the United States
35. See "Gap Between Rich and Poor Found Substantially Wider," New York Times, 5 September 1999, p. 14Y. Still greater disparities prevail on a global scale; see note 3 above
36. - Richard Falk, "Cultural Foundations for the International Protection of Human Rights," in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, ed., Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 48
37. See also Falk, "The Making of Global Citizenship," in Jeremy Brecher et al., eds., Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 39-50
38. "Human Rights and the Dominance Pattern in the West: Deforming Outlook, Deformed Practices," in Chandra Muzaffer, ed., Human Wrongs (Penang: Just World Trust, 1996), pp. 234-242
39. and his On Humane Governance: Towards a New Global Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)
40. - Smitu Kothari and Harsh Sethi, eds., Rethinking Human Rights (Delhi: Lokayan, 1989), p. 9
41. - Chandra Muzaffer, "From Human Rights to Human Dignity," in Peter Van Ness, ed., Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 26, 28, 30
42. See also Muzaffer, Human Rights and the World Order (Penang: Just World Trust, 1993), where, commenting on the "generations" of rights, he states (p. 39): "By equating human rights with civil and political rights, the rich and powerful in the North hope to avoid coming to grips with those economic, social and cultural challenges which could well threaten their privileged position in the existing world order. What the rich and powerful do not want is a struggle for economic transformation presented as a human rights struggle, a struggle for human dignity."
43. - See Charles Taylor, "A World Consensus on Human Rights," Dissent, Summer 1996, p. 20
44. also his "Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights," in Bauer and Bell, The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, pp. 124-144
45. See also Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, "Introduction," in An-Na'im, Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, pp. 2-4
46. also his "Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach to Defining International Standards of Human Rights," in the same volume, pp. 19-43
47. Compare also An-Na'im, "The Cultural Mediation of Rights," in Bauer and Bell, The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, pp. 147-168
48. his "Islamic Foundations for Religious Human Rights," in John Witte, Jr. and Johan van der Vyver, eds., Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), pp. 337-360
49. and Alison D. Renteln, International Human Rights: Universalism versus Relativism (Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1990)