The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

8 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
thinking just as human rights conceptions were about to
be given pride of place in European constitutions.
Scottish and English writers influenced Montesquieu
(1689-1755), who pointed to the plurality of cultures and
the relativity of morality to each culture. Awareness of
the fact that for each alleged universal right there was
some society which failed to recognise it had the result
of turning most thinkers into cultural relativists. But the
most devastating impact on Natural Law and human
rights thinking had been made before Montesquieu's
writings, by the Scots philosopher, David Hume (1711-
1776), who destroyed pretensions of Natural Law to
scientific validity. Building on earlier British and French
thinkers about human psychology, as well as on
Aristotle and Cicero, Hume demonstrated the absence of
rational grounds or of necessity for our moral beliefs,
which rest on habit and association. Values, Hume
argued, depend upon human propensities, and they
may or may not be generally approved—except by "the
moral majority." Morality, he urged, was socially
constructed and could not be demonstrated to be
scientifically true. Nor could any particular society's
moral code be logically demonstrated to be better than
another. Despite the titanic endeavours of various
godless gatherings of philosophers for the next two
hundred and fifty years, they have, although providing
justificatory arguments, failed to re-establish the dreams
that once existed of Natural Law and natural rights. 7
Hume's logic did not entail that we cannot continue to
reason about values. Quite the reverse. What he showed
was that the soundness of reasoning has primarily to be
adjudged on the basis that it is shared by the majority of
the reasoner's particular community, which habitually
shares responses. Indeed, he believed it impossible to
maintain a society of any kind without justice—a view of
which would have been constructed by the community.