Human rights and globalisation – Are human rights

a “Western” concept or a universalistic principle?1*

NGTT DEEL 55, NO 1, 2014

Huber, Wolfgang
Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Theology
Stellenbosch University

ABSTRACT
This paper represents an edited version of the authors’ STIAS lecture
at the Stellenbosch University in 2014. It deals with the global human
rights discourse, as the integrity of human persons all around the world
is at stake, showing the necessity and the universality of human rights.
Therefore the author explores two basic kinds of attitudes towards human
rights, namely 1) forms of human rights optimism – e.g. the argument
that globalisation as such leads to a universal acknowledgement of them
– and 2) variants of human rights scepticism, in which the author sees
those rights practically disregarded, the “Western” concept challenged, and
a human rights exceptionalism spreading. Subsequently he asks for what
kind of universality of human rights we may argue and how cosmopolitan
ethics may support this universality.

1 STIAS Lecture at the University of Stellenbosch on February 17, 2014. I express my

gratitude for the renewed hospitality of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study
(STIAS) during the month of February 2014. And I express also my gratitude to Stel-
lenbosch University for appointing me as Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Theol-
ogy. – I thank many of the STIAS fellows and colleagues from Stellenbosch University
for inspiring reactions to this text. I thank especially Carol Gilligan for her advice on
the natural history of empathy and for her hints to the books of Frans de Waal, Sarah
Blaffer Hrdy, and Jonathan Shay, and Dirkie Smit for his hint to the books of Jonathan
Glover. – I developed another approach to the theme in a lecture on “Menschenrechte
und Globalisierung” at Humboldt University Berlin on October 22, 2012 as introduc-
tion to a lecture series on “Religion and Human Rights” at the occasion of the Ger-
man-South African Year of Science 2012/2013 (to be published in 2014).

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1. INTRODUCTION
The first two pages of the Cape Times on a single day show how endangered human
rights are in the present time. These two pages report among other news on the
“unspeakable suffering of children” in Syria, the “mass torture of Iraqi women”, the
“public lynching of a suspected ex-rebel by soldiers” in the Central African Republic,
the drowning of seven illegal migrants “as they tried to swim to the Spanish enclave
of Ceuta from a beach in neighbouring Morocco”, the conflict about the rights of
parliament in the Ukraine, the investigation on an “alleged massacre of dozens
of civilians by army troops” during the bloody civil war in El Salvador in 1981,
and finally the violent protests in different parts of South Africa in 2014, that have
“claimed nine lives, allegedly at the hands of police, in five weeks” (Cape Times,
Friday, February 7, 2014, p. 1f.).
In all these cases, reported on one single day on the first two pages of a newspaper,
basic human rights are at stake. When we receive those reports on torture, sexual
abuse or recruitment of children for combat, the illegal detention of women for
months or years, their ill-treatment and rape by security forces, the application
of lynch law, the desperate ways of refugees to help themselves, the disregard of
the status of non-combatants, the violent reaction of the police to violent excesses
of protest – when we reflect these attacks on the integrity of human persons it
becomes difficult to doubt the content, the necessity and the universality of human
rights. Whenever elementary rights are bluntly violated these rights themselves
gain evidence. Scepticism regarding these rights seems even to be cynical. It seems
comparably cynical to ignore the extension and the intensity of human rights
violations in our times.
However different kinds of attitudes characterise the human rights discourse in
our days. On the one hand we observe different forms of human rights optimism
guided by the conviction that globalisation, economic progress and legal measures
foster human rights. On the other hand we observe also some variants of human
rights scepticism, for instance regarding the amount of human rights violations, the
weaknesses of traditional foundations of human rights or the pluralism of world
cultures, which is seen as incompatible with the idea of universal human rights.
In the following I will briefly look on today’s human rights optimism and then
move to the sceptical arguments. I will then ask more specifically for what kind
of universality of human rights we may argue and how cosmopolitan ethics may
support this universality.
Before we enter the avenue marked by these points we have to remember that human
rights are not a passe-partout for all problems at hand. The most obvious limitation is

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that human rights do not immediately describe our obligations and responsibilities
to the fabric of a community. Neither the protection of civil and political rights nor
the promotion of social, economic and cultural rights is sufficient for the coherence
of society. Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. Lee correctly state in using a quote of
theologian Karl Barth that goes back more than half a century: “It is far easier
to make rights claims of a confrontational nature than it is to weave the fabric of
community, fabric that includes the bonds of obligations and responsibilities as well
as affirmations of individual rights. The task of weaving the fabric of community is
even more daunting in an era of globalization in which we have, to use the language
of the theologian Karl Barth, both near neighbours and distant neighbours” (Lee/
Lee 2010:34). But in correctly trying to avoid an overestimation of the range of
human rights, we should also avoid the other mistake – namely to underestimate
them. They are the decisive protection-shield for the inalienable dignity of human
persons. They express in an incomparably clear manner that no human person can
only be seen as an instrument of a foreign will or as an object of foreign domination.
Moreover every human person has to be seen as an end in itself and as the subject
of her own life story.
Whether this understanding of the individual human person gifted with an inviolable
dignity is appropriate and can be preserved under the conditions of globalisation is
one of the crucial questions of our times. It is difficult to evade this question, but it
is also difficult to find answers.

2. HUMAN RIGHTS OPTIMISM

In present times we find three major arguments in favour of the universal validity of
human rights. The first argument says that globalisation as such leads to a universal
acknowledgement of human rights. The second argument assumes that economic
progress leads to democracy and human rights. The third argument refers to the
legal character of human rights, proclaimed not only by single states, but as well by
the United Nations, ratified by most countries, entering in the meantime the sphere
of international customary law.
Let us briefly review these three kinds of arguments.

a) Globalisation includes the respect for human rights.

In an empirical study on the development in 106 selected countries between 1981
and 2004 three economists – Axel Dreher, Martin Gassebner and Lars-H.R. Siemers
– ask whether the inclusion of a country in the process of globalisation and the extent
of economic freedom influence the protection and the promotion of human rights
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in the respective country. The answer can be summarized as follows: A relatively

high degree of globalisation in its economic, social and political dimensions and
an effective protection of individual property and economic freedom improve the
human rights practice of the respective countries and increase significantly and
robustly the protection of personal life and physical integrity. “Empowerment rights”,
that means the rights to participate in political, social and economic processes are
not comparably promoted (Dreher a.o. 2012).
If one looks deeper into the analysis given by the authors one observes that they
are guided by the assumption that the international community has a clearer
understanding of the basic character of rights relating to life and physical integrity
(the so-called negative freedom rights) than of rights relating to political, social and
economic participation. Therefore they assume that the global community is less
effective in promoting empowerment rights than protection rights. Their argument
is therefore not so much on the effects of economic globalisation but more on global
communication. Without saying it they follow the idea of the philosopher Immanuel
Kant more than two hundred years ago. He described his own present as a time in
which the violation of rights at one place on the globe could be perceived at all other
places. And he was convinced that in this moment in history the notion of a common
law for all citizens on the globe, a truly “cosmopolitan law” (Weltbürgerrecht) would
not longer be an exaggerated idea of some extravagant thinkers but a reality (Kant
1964:216f.). That conviction is applicable to our own present even more than to
Kant’s times. Following this idea not economic globalisation and the exercise of
economic freedom but rather the worldwide spreading of news on the violation
of human rights nurtures the hope that these rights will step by step gain global
recognition.

b) Economic progress leads to democracy and human rights

In 1992 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed an “end of
history” (Fukuyama 1992). His optimism was nurtured by the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the end of the division between East and West, between capitalism and
communism, and not to forget by the concurrent events in South Africa, namely
the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the liberation movements.
Fukuyama expected that these events that changed our world so dramatically would
inevitably lead to the global spread of free-market economies and immediately
alleviate the establishment of democratic governments. On this way a final stage
of human socio-cultural development and of global governance would be reached.
This kind of economic determinism anticipates an inevitable progress towards
democratic government and respect for human rights as the result of economic

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growth and welfare on the basis of free market economies. This expectation was
often repeated in the years after 1990. But it became in many ways falsified over the
last two decades. Economic progress is not stable at all, as recent crises demonstrate.
Economic growth produces a social division that eventually endangers democratic
commitment. And there is no automatic transition from free market economy to
democracy, China being the most prominent example for that. Some may speculate
on the question how long the coexistence of a capitalistic free market and an
authoritarian one party-regime will endure in China. But even when this country
eventually will move in later years to a democratic form of government it will be
difficult to explain this move following the deterministic model of market economy
inevitably leading to democracy and human rights.
In addition we have to remark at this point that human rights optimists work with
a rather restricted concept of these rights. They concentrate in general on a part
of civil and political rights, namely on the negative freedom rights. They see them
mainly as rights that protect the individual against the misuse of state power. They
concentrate on the rights of “possessive individualism” and the protection of the
physical integrity of the individual person. The deterministic view of history as
an economy-driven continuous progress is therefore combined with a restricted
individualistic concept of human rights.
We may observe that such a kind of economic determinism exists also in an
opposite sense. The counterpart to an optimistic picture of history as progress is
the pessimistic picture of history as decline. This decline may even be described
as inevitable as the progress. We all know intellectual paintings of today’s global
realities of comparably deterministic character but of opposite content. They declare
that globalisation irreversibly leads to the distortion of human rights. The central
argument is the increase of social disparity, the marginalising of a trans-national
precariat, the coincidence between the enormous wealth of a small minority and the
depressing poverty of billions of people on our globe (Fraser 2011).
It is necessary to put these realities at the centre of our awareness. But that does not
automatically mean that we interpret them in the scheme of an inverse progress
theory, namely the conception of an inevitable history of decline. To the contrary:
Whoever chooses this pattern of interpretation runs the risk to follow exactly the
same structure of economic determinism which one wants to overcome, but merely
in the opposite direction.
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c) Human rights gain universal validity through law

Let us start with the South African example. The transition from a system of racism
and inequality to a free and democratic state is most clearly symbolised by the way
in which the South African Constitution of 1996 incorporates human rights as its
most essential point of reference. This reference begins with the equal dignity of
every human person. The basic duty not only of the state and its institutions, but
of everybody is to recognise and to respect the dignity of the other. Human rights
in this respect have not only to do with protection and the avoidance of the misuse
of power, but they have basically to do with mutual recognition. They have to do
with the insight that every human being cannot be reduced to a mere instrument
obeying the will of another but is, to quote again Immanuel Kant, “an end in him-
and herself ” (Kant 1956:68). It was Laurie Ackermann, who inaugurated the HF
Oppenheimer Chair of Human Rights Law at Stellenbosch University who most
recently emphasised the relevance of such a concept of human dignity for the
understanding of the South African Constitution (Ackermann 2012).
The term of human dignity stands for the conviction (to quote the philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah), that “everybody matters” equally (Appiah 2006). Therefore
Laurie Ackermann sees human dignity as the “lodestar for equality in South Africa”.
Especially the value of equality has to be seen from the perspective of the “inherent
human dignity” of every human person (s. 10 of the Constitution). Whenever
you call for equality you have to ask: Equality in which respect? Human beings
are different by nature, by life conditions, by societal circumstances, by personal
biographies, by individual decisions. Under which perspective are they however to
be seen as equal? This perspective is human dignity. Because the inherent dignity of
every human being is equal, they have to have a comparable access to freedom, they
have to be treated as equal before the law, they are entitled not to live in hunger and
poverty, they have the right to equally participate in politics, society and economy,
and therefore they have a right to basic education and emergency medical treatment
and so on.
What I described in following Ackermann is not only the content of the South
African Constitution. You find it elaborated in this country’s constitution in a very
convincing way, but you find a comparable basic structure in other democratic
constitutions as well. Finally you find this basic structure in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the series of covenants voted through by the United Nations
Organisation and ratified in general by a great number of UN member states.
You could easily state that the universality of human rights is proven by the fact that
they are formulated on the most universal platform imaginable, namely the “United

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Nations” and ratified by an overwhelmingly large number of states. However we are

confronted with a broad stream of human rights scepticism.

3. HUMAN RIGHTS SCEPTICISM

The validity of the law has always to be examined at least in three dimensions. These
are legal validity, social validity and conceptual validity or justification. Even if we
take the legal validity of human rights for granted, their social validity is under
pressure. And their conceptual validity is highly debated. We start with the problem
of social validity.

a) Human rights are practically disregarded

The new discipline of human rights geography shows enormous differences in the
respect for and the advancement of human rights. In many countries of the global
South, including South Africa, the debate concentrates often on social and economic
rights (Liebenberg 2010). But the debate has also to take into account the aspects
of civil and political rights, of cultural rights like the freedom of expression or the
freedom of religion. Human rights geography is in fact “a geography of human
rights abuses” (Selya 2012). This geography shows big differences between different
regions on the globe in the rates of human rights abuses per million population
(Selya 2012:tab.6).
In the year 2000 political leaders from around the globe vowed to “spare no effort
to promote … respect for all internationally recognized human rights”. In their
Millennium Declaration they committed themselves to the eight Millennium
Development Goals, among them the reduction of starvation by 50 %, but also to
the reduction of maternal and child mortality. But in fact more than 800 million
people on the globe are starving, over 350 000 women die every year from
pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, over seven million children under the age
of five die, most of them from preventable causes like starving, malnutrition, lack
of clean water (Kuruvilla a.o. 2012). Religious bodies all over the world lament the
extent to which religious freedom is violated and religions are politically exploited
– often in a way that intensifies hatred and legitimizes violence (World Council of
Churches 2013). Most recently, civil society organisations in South Africa including
different religious organisations started a campaign to end violence against women
and children. They hope that a rising awareness for this issue will contribute to a
meaningful change (Omar 2014:13). These examples prove that human rights, seen
from an empirical perspective and judged on the level of their social validity, are by
no means “universal”.
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How is the picture when we look on it from a conceptual perspective, from the
perspective of justification?

b) The “Western” concept of human rights is challenged

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948 begins its preamble
with the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights
of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and
peace in the world”. Its first Article underlines the relationship between the inherent
dignity of every human person and her rights in saying: “All human beings are born
free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience
and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” On this basis the
Universal Declaration is proclaimed “as a common standard of achievement for all
peoples and all nations” determined “to promote social progress and better standards
of life in larger freedom” (Brownlie/Goodwin-Gill 2006: 24).
Evidently the document justifies the universal validity and applicability of human
rights with the inherent dignity of all human persons. The explication of this dignity
says that human beings are “endowed with reason and conscience”. Some find in
these words an allusion to the Christian concept of “conscience,” as well as to the
thinking of the Enlightenment, that took the reasonableness of the human person as
basis for her inherent dignity. When the declaration pleads for “brotherhood” one
can see this as an allusion to the ideals of the French Revolution (“liberté, égalité,
fraternité”).
Therefore the declaration was again and again criticised with the argument that it
represented a conception of the human person that was developed in the Western
tradition during the 18th century, That was indeed the time when the first declarations
on human rights (the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 and the French “Déclaration des
droits de l’homme et du citoyen” of 1789) were proclaimed. In the thinking of the
European Enlightenment the autonomy of the person is based on her reasonableness.
During the 19th century exactly this kind of genealogy provoked a strong opposition
among Christian churches against the idea of human rights. That changed only with
the end of World War II in 1945. Following the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights the opinion began to prevail that the ideas of the Enlightenment were a
secularised transformation of the conception of the human person in the Judeo-
Christian tradition. Theological interpretations now strengthened the religious
dimension of the idea of an “inherent dignity”. To characterise human beings as
equal in dignity irrespective of all their differences presupposes a self-transcendence
of the human person that relates her to an instance conferring such an inherent

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equal dignity to her. The term “image of God” became central for that approach.
Taking into account that such an approach may not develop a convincing or even
binding force for adherents of other religions or for persons without religion Jewish
and Christian theologians felt obliged to offer the concept of the human person
created in the image of God as a point of reference for the inherent equal dignity of
all.
But there is a vast variety of interpretations proposed in newer theological literature
for the meaning of the term “image of God”: the domination of humanity over the
non-human nature (dominium terrae), the dialogical connection of human beings
with God und their fellow human beings, the compassionate solidarity with all
the other creatures, the calling to witness God’s revelation to the world, to name
only some of them (Welker 2006:327). The variability of interpretations indicates
a metaphorical richness of this tradition, but does not so easily lead to a clear
and unambiguous concept of human dignity. Therefore some argue that religious
references in general and especially the image of God-metaphor make human
dignity an “empty formula” (Pöschl/Kondylis 1992: 637ff.). The sentences on human
dignity and its inviolable and inalienable character are therefore seen by some as
“program sentences” without any concrete impact for certain fields of application.
Any clear contours of human dignity seem to disappear under such kind of critique.
The consequences for problems of high relevance, for instance in the fields of life
sciences and medicine, are enormous. A German legal expert commented already
ten years ago: “Human dignity was inviolable” (Böckenförde 2003, my italics).
Whoever is confronted with the big questions of bioethics has to deal again and
again with the future of human dignity.
Discourses on the proper meaning of human dignity are important. But no single
religious or philosophical interpretation can serve as the one and only foundation
of human rights. We have rather to develop an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls
1986:133-172). People have to critically reflect their specific worldviews in a direction
that strengthens not only their own religious or cultural identity but promotes at the
same time shared values and mutually respected rights. Only through an overlapping
consensus among different interpretations the idea of universal human rights can
gain plausibility. By such a discourse the values inherent in different traditions can
be generalised. They are not universal just from the beginning, but take part in a
pluralism of values. It is mostly the experience of their violation what provokes the
process of “value generalisation”, as Hans Joas, a well-known German sociologist,
calls it (Joas 2008, cf. Joas 2000, 2013). For that purpose openness for different
foundations is crucial for any idea of universal human rights. For anyone who is
convinced that his or her reasons to accept universal human rights are the most
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convincing it is difficult to develop such openness. However that seems to be the

only way to overcome the exclusive dependency of the idea of human rights upon
specific worldviews and conceptions of the human person.

c) Human rights exceptionalism is spreading

As long as the idea of human rights exists there is an on-going search for reasons
to state certain exceptions. When the emigrants from Great Britain settled in
North America and confessed in 1776 that all human beings are by nature free and
independent, they did not worry about holding black people as slaves. When the
French revolutionaries in 1789 proclaimed the equal rights of human persons and
citizens, they addressed practically only the rights of men and ignored deliberately
the rights of women (Reuter 2013:247). When the United States applauds the ideas
of dignity and freedom they do it without drawing all the necessary consequences.
They continue the practice of the death penalty and regard in every war on terror
their own security as more important than the human rights of the adversary (Smit
2014).
But in our time a new kind of exceptionalism has emerged. This is cultural
exceptionalism. Binding the idea of human rights exclusively to “Western” values
has become a good argument for constructing exceptions on cultural grounds. The
debate on “Asian values” was of specific importance in this respect. With growing
intensity after 1990 Asian participants in the debate opposed the idea that human
rights could really appeal for universal validity. They saw in them a one-sided
emphasis on individual rights and freedoms to the detriment of family values
and the rights of communities. They wanted to emphasise the role of local leaders
replacing the autonomy of the individual. A collective decision on the participation
in clinical trials for instance was not seen as a restriction of the informed consent
of the single participant. Comparably representatives of Islam argued for the
father’s right to decide on questions regarding his wife or his children, especially his
daughters. Arranged marriages for instance were interpreted as not interfering with
women’s rights. Ministers of Asian States declared in 1993 frankly that universal
Human Rights should not restrict the principles of sovereignty and non-interference
in the affairs of the respective states. In addition they argued for greater emphasis
on economic, social and political rights over civil and political ones. In fact they
put in question the unity and indivisibility of human rights formally declared by
the Human Rights Conference in Vienna the same year (Donnelly 2007; Pogge
2008:52-54; Freeman 2011:119-155). You have to address comparable problems
when it comes to the inclusion of vernacular rights into the rule of law. As far as
South Africa is concerned, President Jacob Zuma explicitly declared in November

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2012 that African problems should be solved “the African way, not the white man’s
way”. And he added: “Let us not be influenced by other cultures and try to think the
lawyers are going to help. … We are Africans. We cannot change to be something
else” (SAPA, November 2, 2012, quoted by Smit 2014). Cultural relativism puts into
question the universality as well as the indivisibility of human rights. Is there a way
out?

4. WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSALITY?

a) Universality of suffering and compassion

Cultural relativism with regard to human rights emerges from two problematic
narratives on the genesis of human rights, which I mentioned already. One narrative
derives human rights from the Jewish-Christian tradition of the human person
as the “image of God”, the other resorts to the Enlightenment concept of human
autonomy based on human reasonableness. But as Hans Joas in his splendid book
on the “sacredness of the person” demonstrates, none of these two narratives is valid
(Joas 2013). Over centuries or even millennia the Jewish-Christian understanding
of the human person did not lead to the formulation of universal human rights.
It is only in retrospect that we identify an egalitarian universalism in the sources
of Jewish and Christian faith. That retrospect finally induced Christian churches,
reluctantly enough, to recognise this egalitarian universalism in its mundane form,
namely as secular human rights. It took some decades until theologians explicitly
formulated a theological interpretation of modern human rights (e.g. Huber/Tödt
1988). Something comparable is true with regard to the Enlightenment concept
of human autonomy. For two hundred years it was applied only very selectively.
Slavery, racism, sexism, ethnic cleansing, group-focused enmity and others hindered
and still hinder a really universal acknowledgment of human rights. The impulse
to transcend the boundaries given by these restrictions did not so much originate
in theoretical reflections; it emerged much more from the concrete experiences
of violence and humiliation, of disrespect and enslavement, of oppression and
exploitation. Hans Joas uses in his “new genealogy of human rights” the examples
of torture and slavery, the traumatisation of people by such kinds of violence, the
solidarity among them and the growing compassion of others as the way in which a
feeling for the “sacredness” of the person emerged. It was necessary that in a process
of self-transcendence people realized that they were more than the humiliated
objects of despotic arbitrariness under which they had to suffer, often from day to
day. In their revolt against their own dehumanization they realized what it means
to be human: namely to have an equal dignity irrespective of gender and age, status
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and wealth, colour and race, belief and conviction. They asked for a human right in
the most elementary sense of the word, a right given with the human existence as
such. They asked for the right to be treated as human beings, or, as Hannah Arendt
expressed it so convincingly: “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1949:754-770; Arendt
1993:452ff.).
Arendt’s formulation refers not to the struggles of the 18th century, in which the
first catalogues of human rights were formulated. She coined the formula of “the
right to have rights” in the time in which the United Nations were founded and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed. Arendt refers to the
experience of refugees from Nazi-Germany, the Soviet Union or other places, which
had no rights in the country where they asked for refuge. What are the rights of a
stateless refugee? Should he or she not at least have a right to have rights?
This experience coincided with the traumatic events of the 20th century leading
to the mass murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and to genocidal actions
also in other parts of the world since the Herero-unrest in 1904 or the Armenian
catastrophe of 1915. Once again the suffering of people and the compassion with
their destiny made obvious that we cannot speak about rights without applying them
to every human person. It is not pure contingency that the first convention on a
specific aspect of human rights was proclaimed by the United Nations the day before
the vote on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948
(Brownlie/Goodwin-Gill 2006:284-287). The next convention that followed in 1951
was the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 (Brownlie/Goodwin-
Gill 2006:288-303). It is true that the idea of universal human rights emerged from
the abysses of the “moral history of the twentieth century” (Glober 2001). It is this
history that gives Jonathan Shay’s statement its severe evidence: “The understanding
of trauma can form a solid basis for a science of human rights” (Shay 1994:209).
It may not be too difficult to develop an understanding for this kind of “new
genealogy of human rights” in a South African context. The suffering of the majority
of South Africans under the Apartheid regime, the solidarity with its victims, the
growing revolt against this deprivation of rights and the compassion of people and
groups around the world attributed to human rights their specific weight for the
new South Africa. Therefore it has to be remembered that the universality of human
rights is in the first instance due to suffering and compassion.
There are strong reasons to support this approach to the universality of human rights
from a theological perspective. A Christian understanding of the human person
takes especially into account the vulnerability of humans and looks on the status

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of a society from the perspective of the most vulnerable members of this society
(Koopman 2007). It considers the inviolability of human dignity with the eyes of
those whose dignity is endangered by hunger and illness, poverty and loneliness,
refuge und migration, violence and war. The preferential option for the vulnerable
and their suffering is mandatory for a Christian perspective on human dignity and
human rights.

b) Universality of recognition and communicative freedom

In 2011 Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at Yale
University, published a series of essays on human rights (Benhabib 2011). Her
starting point is Hannah Arendt’s formula of the “right to have rights”. And she
brings Arendt into dialogue with Raphael Lemkin who was the father of the UN
Genocide Convention. Whereas Hannah Arendt understands the “right to have
rights” primarily as a “right to membership in a political community” Benhabib
conceives this basic right as “the claim of each human person to be recognized as a
moral being worthy of equal concern and equally entitled to be protected as a legal
personality by his or her own polity, as well as the world community” (Benhabib
2011:62). And she endorses a statement of Rainer Forst, who writes: “Human rights
secure the equal standing of persons in the political and social world, based on a
fundamental moral demand of respect” (Forst 2010:718).
For the universality of human rights it is not sufficient to refer to the legal status of
these rights and to state that they belong since some decades to the international
customary law. There has to be some justification for that status. The legal
universality of human rights has to rest on a moral universalism. Benhabib finds
this moral universalism in the “equal respect for the other as a being capable of
communicative freedom” (Benhabib 2011:64). Communicative freedom means the
capacity to accept or reject reasons for the possible validity of a commonly accepted
norm. Communicative freedom in this sense is presupposed whenever we enter
with another person in a discourse. Communicative freedom is a precondition of
communication and an a priori for every human community of communication
(Apel 1973).
Respect for the other in Benhabib’s sense implies two dimensions. It refers to the
generalized other and to the concrete other. “The standpoint of the ‘generalized’
other requires us to view each and every individual as a being entitled to the same
rights and duties we would want to ascribe to ourselves” (Benhabib 2011:69). In
the language of Christian ethics the standpoint of the “generalized other” follows
the “Golden Rule” to treat others the same way we want to be treated by them.
The relation to the “generalized other” is guided by the norms of equal respect and
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reciprocity. “The standpoint of the ‘concrete other’ … requires us to view each and
every being as an individual with an affective-emotional constitution, concrete
history, and individual as well as collective identity” (Benhabib 2011:69). The
concrete other needs our compassion and solidarity; our relation to him follows the
rule to love your neighbour, even your enemy. The relation to the “concrete other” is
guided by the norms of empathy and solidarity.
A justification of human rights on the basis of mutual recognition of communicative
freedom is preferable not only on philosophical but also on theological grounds. It
takes the egalitarian universalism seriously that binds philosophical and theological
ethics together. It concentrates on one “principle of rights” that is universalistic,
namely the right to have rights. It distinguishes from this principle the “schedule
of rights” that substantiates this principle with respect to different dimensions and
regarding specific contexts (Benhabib 2011:73-75, 79-82). The codification of human
rights on global, regional and national levels and the work on their protection and
implementation are good examples for this difference between the principle of rights
and the schedule of rights. So I should not say that human rights are universalistic
principles but that they rest on a universalistic principle of rights. I call this principle
universalistic because it is a principle of moral justification and not simply of legal
validity.
It is evident that this approach transcends a purely individualistic justification of
human rights. This justification is rather grounded in a relational understanding
of the human person entering dialogues with others and cooperating with them
on common grounds. It includes an element of self-transcendence insofar the
communicative freedom of the other is respected independently of the extent to
which the other is able or willing to make use of this communicative freedom.
For a last remark I return to the way in which Seyla Benhabib makes reference to
Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin. Arendt learned from her analysis of totalitarian
regimes what Lemkin learned from his confrontation with the genocide: Whoever
wipes plurality off our life-world destroys this world itself. This means that our
perception of the world depends on the plurality of perspectives. In extinguishing
one of those perspectives we destroy the world. As much as we have to mourn the
victims of violence brought to death by tyranny or war, we also have to lament that
we lost a perspective on the world, a part of the world as such. Therefore we have
to defend the plurality of perspectives on the world represented by people in their
individual diversity as well as in the variety of their cultures and religions. Equality
therefore means the equality of the different. The inherent dignity of every human
person provokes our recognition of the different (Huber 2011).

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c) Universality supported by cosmopolitan ethics

A long-standing tradition emphasises that human rights are entitlements towards the
state. Therefore the importance of human rights for the legislation, the governance
and the adjudication are often at the centre of human rights research. But human
rights need advocacy. They are therefore an important topic for civil society. In
addition human rights have to be applied to global realities. Therefore they need
a global or cosmopolitan awareness. Trans-national actors in civil society, among
them the ecumenical bodies of Christianity may and should act as advocates of
human rights.
The struggle against Apartheid included in my understanding this element of
cosmopolitan advocacy that transcended the borders of states and continents.
Nowadays we find many examples for the urgency and the relevance of initiatives
emerging from civil society in favour of human rights. Each of those initiatives
deserves detailed analysis and interpretation. But that is a separate task for another
occasion. Today I will only mention three of them. I have in mind the campaigns
against child labour that brought trans-national corporations – at least some of
them – to more respect for children’s rights, the Treatment Action Campaign, that
changed the South African Government’s attitude towards antiretroviral medication
completely, and the on-going campaigns in different parts of the world in favour of
non-citizen’s rights.
• Child labour
For a long time trans-national corporations argued that they have only to respect
the existing law in the place where they invest. Therefore they used child labour
especially in sports and textile industry whenever it was not forbidden in the
respective country. Only after public campaigns, partly related to international sport
events and to the public interest they attracted, trans-national corporations restricted
child labour not only for themselves but also for their suppliers. For instance the
Global Sullivan Principles of Social Responsibility state that the signatories “refrain
completely from use of child labour. We define child labour as being below the
minimum legal working age according to local law, or under the age of fourteen,
whichever is greater” (Lee/Lee 2010:72).
• Sufficient health care
The South African Constitution attributes in its Bill of Rights to everyone the
right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care
(s. 27). However under President Thabo Mbeki a big conflict arose on the use of
antiretroviral drugs against the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Only through the actions
and court cases filed by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAV) the question was
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brought into motion and finally became decided by the South African Constitutional
Court in 2002. Nowadays South Africa has the largest publicly provided AIDS
treatment programme in the world – a tremendous example of the possible effect
of cosmopolitan human rights campaigns emerging from civil society (Wolff 2011;
Cameron 2014:139-200).
• The rights of “non-citizens”
Finally we return to Hannah Arendt’s and Seyla Benhabib’s insight that the core of
human rights is the right to have rights. A central issue with respect to human rights
is nowadays the question which rights could and should be given to non-citizens,
among whom we have to distinguish a lot of different groups: stateless persons,
asylum seekers, rejected asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and trafficked persons,
to name the most important of them (Weissbrodt 2008). The degree to which a
society accepts and respects the rights of those groups depends to a high degree not
only on their legal status in the respective country, but also on the willingness of civil
society to take care of them.
The globalisation of our days puts cosmopolitan ethics (or, as some prefer to say:
global ethics) at the centre of ethical reflection. The core of cosmopolitan ethics is
empathy. For a long time empathy like altruism, compassion and solidarity were
seen as abstract and unrealistic expectations with regard to human behaviour. But
in this respect we experience a paradigm shift in the scientific debate. Empathy
is deeply rooted in the evolution of humankind (de Waal 2009). The capacity for
mutual understanding develops early in childhood (Hrdy 2009). The question is
not how such a capacity can emerge but what makes it to disappear. The painful
question, as Carol Gilligan poses it, is how we lose the capacity to love (Gilligan 2014).
Theology has to take this reversal of the question very seriously, because theological
anthropology begins with the insight that the human person is relational in essence.
The relational character of the human person stays therefore at the centre of the
theological understanding of human rights (Botman 2006) and is the starting point
for a theological reflection on cosmopolitan ethics. Therefore cosmopolitan ethics
does not ignore the more narrow forms of community, because for the relational
character of the human person the experience of belonging is of central importance
(De Villiers 2014). But it overcomes all kinds of exclusivism that emphasises the
value of the narrow communities at the expense of those who do not belong to
them. It takes seriously what Martin Luther King observed already in his Letter
from Birmingham Jail half a century ago: “We are caught in an inescapable network
of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly affects all
indirectly“ (quoted by Gilligan 2011).

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Cosmopolitan ethics has to make this paradigm shift its point of departure. But
it has also to take into account that for all ethics “the ought implies the can”
(Lee/Lee 2010:76f.). Nobody can take care of all distant neighbours at the same
time. Cosmopolitanism is, however, a necessary critical principle in avoiding an
exclusivism that also in our days often takes totalitarian forms denying the rights
of disrespected people (Benhabib 2011:8-19). Cosmopolitanism takes seriously that
everybody matters equally and that human persons have a right to have rights not
only as citizens of their respective states but “in virtue of their humanity” (Benhabib
2011:13).

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KEY WORDS
Christian Ethics
Communicative Freedom
Cosmopolitanism
Human Rights
Universalism

CONTACT DETAILS
Prof. Wolfgang Huber
w-k.huber@t-online.de

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