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

10 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
merely expressing a preference acquired in the course of
socialisation. He considers himself to be averring the
truth and seeks to persuade others to adopt his beliefs.
There are two kinds of relativism which make it
unscientific to argue that beliefs in human rights are
true. Firstly, descriptive relativists argue that anthropological
studies show that the basic ethical beliefs of
different societies in fact differ and even conflict. Metaethical
relativists go further and assert that there is no
objectively valid rational way of justifying one basic
ethical belief, judgment, value, or right consequent on a
value as opposed to another. Thus, two conflicting basic
judgments may be equally valid, or at least neither case
can be proved to be valid or more valid than the other.
In the event, the world's current ecumenical approach to
human rights rests only on tentative philosophical
argumentation, assertions made in the course of international
relations, laws created by international treaties and
the discourse of laymen in those societies where the
rights of men have become an accepted notion in the
culture.
Some Third World political thinkers, whose national
movements, during the phase of their anti-colonialist
struggles, invoked human rights, particularly the right to
self-determination, the people's counterpart of personal
autonomy, now dismiss the view that implementation of
the international human rights' moral code is an
enterprise for the whole human species by virtue of each
person's humanness and claims to autonomy. Instead,
they rely on relativism as between societies and different
cultural traditions to criticise civil and political rights as
manifestations of Eurocentricity or of western cultural
imperialism. Others, including apologists for fundamentalists
and some moral philosophers, do not consider any
discourse to be possible between different cultural
traditions, because no universal standards are possible. 9