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

A Digression on Moral Relativism 11
These opinions are prevalent in a world of haves and
have-nots, where Western States, earlier primarily responsible
for the slave trade and colonisation, are
perceived as usurious exploiters of the international
banking system and of commodity markets and as
intermittently and hypocritically invoking civil and
political rights standards as foreign policy tools. In
contrast, the Western man in the street would assert that
stoning an adulterous woman to death or whipping her
is always wrong, as is cutting off hands for theft and any
maiming punishment.
It cannot be disputed that, by a conjunction of events,
a significant one being the rediscovery of Aristotle and
Stoic thinkers' texts preserved in Arabic, political
theories of the state and then, of natural or human rights
first emerged in societies constrained to thinking in
European thought patterns. Nonetheless, human rights
have now been adopted as universally binding standards,
admitting, of course, that universal applicability
has always been parallelled by universal violation.
Today, International Law human rights standards bind
states, irrespective of whether their validity can be
philosophically underpinned or anthropologically established.
Although the British and American Governments do
not believe in the practical worth of philosophy, others
believe that were it possible to prove the validity of the
morality of human rights, the benefits would be
profound. Not least, the universal legitimacy of laws
giving effect to human rights would be strengthened,
our tendency to quibble with duty to observe them
might be undermined and educators could promote such
a morality without scruples about indoctrination.
Until a day of proof of moral standards arrives, if ever,
we must not exaggerate the risk of moral scepticism in
daily life. In practice, we do not question the basis of our