Human rights and intercultural relations: A hermeneutico-dialogical approach

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 513-541

  Healy, Paul ^a  

^a University of Technology   (Australia)

Author keywords

culture; dialogue; Hans Georg Gadamer; hermeneutics; human rights; J rgen Habermas; relativism; universalis

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249162637     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064023     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Briefly stated, the term ‘hermeneutico-dialogical’ is intended to designate an approach which, influenced by Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, aspires to do justice both to the dialogical character of human understanding and to its historico-cultural situatedness. So far as I know, the term was coined by Dimitri Ginev in his paper ‘On the Hermeneutic Fore-Structure of Scientific Research’ (Continental Philosophy Review 32 [1999]: 143–68).
2. But in adapting it for use in the present context, I have expanded it to reflect the influence on contemporary hermeneutical thinking of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault as well as of Gadamer. In so doing, I follow Richard Palmer's lead in defending the tenability and value of drawing on theorists like Habermas and Foucault in addition to those, like Gadamer, whose reputation in this area is already well established, in the interests of developing a revitalized conception of hermeneutics commensurate with contemporary needs. (See further Richard Palmer, ‘What Hermeneutics Can Offer Rhetoric’, in Walter Jost and Michael Hyde [eds] Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997], pp. 108–31.)
3. For a detailed account of the development of Ginev's own stance, the interested reader is referred to his A Passage to the Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science (Atlanta, GA: Rodophi, 1997); and for a comprehensive account of the background to, and rationale for, the conception of hermeneutico-dialogical thinking specifically at issue here, to my Rationality, Hermeneutics and Dialogue (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005).
4. For an insightful introduction to Gadamer's philosophy which brings to the fore its dialogical underpinnings, see P. Christopher Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991);
5. also Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).
6. For a succinct overview of Gadamer's position as it bears on issues related to the concerns of the present article, see too my ‘Situated Rationality and Hermeneutic Understanding: a Gadamerian Approach to Rationality’, International Philosophical Quarterly XXXVI (1996): 155–71.
7. For an outline of the hermeneutico-dialogical approach in its application to the domain of intercultural relations in general, see my ‘Dialogue across Boundaries: On the Discursive Conditions Necessary for a “Politics of Equal Recognition”’. Res Publica IV (1998): 59–76;
8. and my ‘Self-Other Relations and the Rationality of Cultures’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2000): 79–101. As indicated in what immediately follows, the present article seeks to demonstrate the merits of hermeneutico-dialogical thinking in terms of its ability to facilitate the cultural mediation of human rights through elucidating the conditions necessary for their non-invidious interpretation and implementation.
9. For an incisive overview of the core issues at stake in the human rights debate between universalists and cultural relativists, see Daniel Bell, ‘Which Rights are Universal?’, Political Theory 27 (1999): 849–56
10. and Evan Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights: a Response to Daniel A. Bell’, Political Theory 27 (1999): 840–8.
11. See Abdullahi An-Na'im (ed.) Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), ‘Conclusion’, p. 430.
12. Cf. Abdullahi An-Na'im, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach to Defining International Standards of Human Rights’, in his Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspective, especially p. 37.
13. R. Paul Churchill, Human Rights and Global Diversity (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006), p. 42.
14. Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights’, p. 843.
15. This term is used to refer collectively to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976). For more on the specific rights at issue, see, for example, Jack Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values: a Defense of “Western” Universalism’, in Joanne Bauer and Daniel Bell (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially p. 65.
16. See too Churchill, Human Rights and Global Diversity, especially pp. 131–3.
17. See further Morton Winston, ‘On the Indivisibility and Interdependence of Human Rights’, paper presented at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, 10–15 August 1998: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Huma/HumaWins.htm [accessed 28 May 2002].
18. See John Montgomery, ‘Human Values as Human Rights’, Pacific Basin Research Centre Working Paper: http://www.ap.harvard.edu/papers/Human_Rights/values_as_rights.html [accessed 28 May 2002].
19. See Daniel Bell, ‘The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights: Reflections on an East West Dialogue’, Human Rights Quarterly 18 (1996): 641–67; see especially 663.
20. See, for example, Onuma Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach to Human Rights’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, especially pp. 122–3.
21. See too An-Na'Im, ‘The Cultural Mediation of Human Rights’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, especially pp. 151–9;
22. also, An-Na'im, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach to Defining International Standards of Human Rights’, in his Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspective, pp. 19–43.
23. Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’, pp. 122–3. Elaborating, Yasuaki further observes that while ‘it cannot be denied that the Universal Declaration is relatively West-centric’, subsequent conventions and declarations, and in particular the Vienna Declaration, have largely corrected for this limitation in virtue of involving input from the ‘diverse religious, cultural, and ethical views held by almost all nations composing the international society’.
24. See, for example, An-Na'Im, Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ‘Conclusion’, p. 432.
25. See further Churchill, Human Rights and Global Diversity, especially pp. 48–66.
26. Cf., for example, Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights’; Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’.
27. Cf. Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights’, p. 843.
28. An-Na'im, Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, p. 430.
29. Bell, cited in Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights’, p. 840.
30. Cf. An-Na'Im, Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ‘Conclusion’, p. 432.
31. An-Na'Im, ‘The Cultural Mediation of Human Rights’, p. 153, 854.
32. In addition to the cited readings by An-Na'im, see too Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’;
33. also Paul Chevigny, ‘Human Rights and Dialogue Rights’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12 (1998): 159–72.
34. See further Marcello Dascal, ‘The Ecology of Cultural Space’, in M. Dascal (ed.) Cultural Relativism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 279–95.
35. Bell, cited in Charney, ‘Cultural Interpretation and Universal Human Rights’, p. 840.
36. See further my ‘Self-Other Relations and the Rationality of Cultures’, pp. 65–8;
37. cf. also Dascal, ‘The Ecology of Cultural Space’, especially p. 284.
38. Cf. my ‘Self-Other Relations and the Rationality of Cultures’, pp. 71–3;
39. cf. also Thomas McCarthy, ‘Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural Representation’, Ethics 102 (1992): 635–49.
40. Cf. Ronald Kuipers, ‘Toward a Peaceable Mosaic of Worldviews and Religions: Incommensurability, Pluralism and the Philosophy of Religion’, paper presented at the 20th World Congress in Philosophy, Boston, 10–15 August 1998: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Reli/ReliKuip.htm [accessed 4 May 2004].
41. Bell, ‘Which Rights are Universal?’, p. 852.
42. Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, p. 68.
43. Bell, ‘The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights’, p. 644.
44. Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, pp. 68–9, 69.
45. See further Bell, ‘The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights’, p. 651. (Bell in turn cites D. Bodde and C. Morris, Law in Imperial China [1967, publication details not given], pp. 145, 142.) While this example is proffered by Bell, rather than by Donnelly himself, it nonetheless provides an apt illustration of the type of procedure here at issue.
46. Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, p. 68, 66–8, 68, 83.
47. Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’, p. 121.
48. Nurcholish Madjid, cited in Bell, ‘The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights’, p. 650.
49. This is all the more the case in virtue of Norani Othman's contention that the awareness that human beings have rights ‘simply by being humans’ ‘is by no means alien to Islam’. On the contrary, it is ‘grounded in the Qur'anic notion of a common human ontology (fitna) and couched in an Islamic idiom of moral universalism that predates much of the Western discourses about human rights. It is thus doctrinally part of the Qur'anic worldview itself.’ See Norani Othman, ‘Grounding Human Rights Arguments in Non-western Culture’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, p. 173.
50. See, for example, Lin Chun, ‘Human Rights and Democracy: The Case for Decoupling’, The International Journal of Human Rights 5 (2001): 19–44, see especially 21: ‘The perceptions of human values, mutual recognition and fair treatment can be found in virtually every single civilisation … wherever profoundly humanistic elements remain salient, they have an impact on, or provide justifications for, the vision of human rights that we cherish today…. So, as Kofi Annan puts it, now: “Human rights are foreign to no culture and native to all nations”’ (p. 21).
51. Cf. An-Na'im, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach’, pp. 34–7, 33–6.
52. See Charles Taylor, ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, especially pp. 140–3.
53. An-Na'im, ‘The Cultural Mediation of Human Rights’, p. 159.
54. Bell, ‘Which Rights Are Universal?’, p. 854.
55. See Taylor, ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, pp. 124–44, 124, 137, 138.
56. See further Hans-Herbert Kogler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), especially ch. 5.
57. Bell, ‘The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights’, p. 663, 662–6.
58. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the ‘Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 67.
59. For more on how this ‘fusion of horizons’ might take place in the course of cross-cultural dialogue about human rights, see Churchill's account of the process of ‘worldview integration’, adapted from Michael Boylan, in Human Rights and Global Diversity, especially pp. 122–3.
60. For more on the Gadamerian concept of ‘fusion of horizons’, see, for example, Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 182–4; see too my ‘Situated Rationality and Hermeneutic Understanding’, pp. 159–66.
61. Cf. Taylor, ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus’, pp. 133–7.
62. Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’, p. 123;
63. see too Muzaffar, Rights, Religion and Reform, passim.
64. Cf. Mohammed Arkoune, ‘Democracy: a Challenge to Islamic Thought’: http://www.philo.8m.com/akroundemocratie.html [accessed 4 May 2004]; cf. also An-Na'Im, ‘The Cultural Mediation of Human Rights’, especially p. 154;
65. see too his ‘Human Rights in the Muslim World: Socio-Political Conditions and Scriptural Imperatives’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 3 (1990): 13–52.
66. The concept of ‘problematization’ is used by Michel Foucault in particular to denote a radically questioning conception of inquiry, whereby taken-for-granted presuppositions and beliefs are subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny with a view to liberating heretofore unrecognized possibilities for thinking, doing and being; see further Paul Healy, ‘A “Limit Attitude”: Foucault, Autonomy, Critique’, History of the Human Sciences 14 (2001): 49–68.
67. See further An-Na'im, for example, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach’, pp. 34–7;
68. cf. Muzaffar, Rights, Religion and Reform, especially chs 16, 17.
69. Taylor, ‘Conditions of an Unforced Consensus’, p. 143.
70. Muzaffar, Rights, Religion and Reform, p. 232.
71. Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’, pp. 120–1.
72. Cf. Simone Chambers, ‘Discourse and Democratic Practices’, in S. White (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 242.
73. Cf. An-Na'Im, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach’, p. 29; also p. 39.
74. For more on this concept, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 100. In a related context, Lorenzo Simpson succinctly summarizes what is centrally at issue here, as follows: ‘As we engage in a reversibility of perspectives, our experiential horizon, composed of background assumptions and values that shape our interpretations of the world, can be broadened in such a way that those assumptions and values can be situated alongside different assumptions and values of a formerly unfamiliar culture.’ Elaborating, Simpson makes the point that if we are to develop an enriched understanding in the sense just outlined, we must engage with the other in all its difference on a ‘non-strategic’ basis so as to put ourselves ‘in a position to take seriously the reasons and the reasoning of the other’ (The Unfinished Project [London: Routledge, 2001], pp. 79–80). In this connection too, see Churchill's account of the process of ‘worldview integration’, adapted from Boylan, in Human Rights and Global Diversity, especially pp. 122–3.
75. Yasuaki, ‘Toward an Intercivilizational Approach’, p. 123.
76. See further Donnelly, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, especially pp. 70–83;
77. Inque Tatsuo, ‘Liberal Democracy and Asian Orientalism’, in Bauer and Daniel (eds) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, pp. 27–59;
78. and Amitai Etzioni, ‘Cross-Cultural Moral Judgments’, in his The Monochrome Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially pp. 235–8. Donnelly succinctly epitomizes the drift of these arguments when he observes (p. 70): ‘Taken at face value, [appeal to national sovereignty] amounts to a claim that whatever a country does with respect to human rights is its business and its business alone. Rather than a defensible conception of human rights, this would subordinate human rights to the competing rights and values of sovereignty…. Far from being a guarantee of human rights, sovereignty is typically the mantle behind which rights-abusive regimes hide when faced with international human rights criticism.’
79. See further P. Christopher Smith, ‘The I-Thou Encounter in Gadamer's Reception of Heidegger’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1997), pp. 509–25.
80. Etzioni, ‘Cross-Cultural Moral Judgments’, especially pp. 240–4, 234, 242.
81. Cf. Thomas McCarthy's discussion of ‘multicultural cosmopolitanism’, where the concept of intercultural dialogue is held to presuppose accountability in a multicultural forum. (See D. Hoy and T. McCarthy, Critical Theory [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], especially ch. 3.4; cf. also my ‘Dialogue across Boundaries’, especially pp. 72–4.)
82. See further my ‘Self-Other Relations and the Rationality of Cultures’, especially pp. 76–7; with specific reference to the human rights debate, see too Chevigny, ‘Human Rights and Dialogue Rights’, especially pp. 163–71.
83. Georgia Warnke, ‘Communicative Rationality and Cultural Values’, in White (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, p. 139.
84. See Yameng Liu, ‘Justifying My Position in Your Terms’, Argumentation 13 (1999): 297–315; see especially 309–12, 312.
85. As noted throughout, An-Na'im has been a consistent, and persuasive, advocate of the need for ‘internal cultural discourse’ as a necessary accompaniment to ‘cross-cultural dialogue’ as a prerequisite for advancing the cross-cultural mediation of human rights (see, for example, An Na'im, ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach’, pp. 27–8), 168.