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

The Enterprise of Theorising 31
their values and cultural practices and attempt to resolve
differences. Some conflicts of value now seem irreconcilable,
for example, the unalterability and unquestionability
of religious beliefs in systems condemning heresy
and apostasy, the place of women in various societies
and states and the necessity for preserving female
chastity by infibulation in certain traditional societies.
Yet, in the long run, philosophical and historiographical
discourse may assist by encouraging scholars from those
traditions to re-examine them, just as the views of the
Church Fathers were questioned and reinterpreted. For
example, if the views of the Doctors of Law in the three
centuries succeeding the Hegira were treated by modern
Muslim scholars as being only historical exegesis (a few
already do this), the human rights of women in Africa
and Asia would be much enhanced in practice.
The nature and extent of values, the relationships
between the society as a whole and individuals, also
interacting with each other, and consequential moral
claims and legal rights have varied greatly in different
places and at different times. Their analysis and the
construction of moral theories has in recent years
become a major activity amongst the chattering classes at
Oxford and across the water in former British colonies.
Philosophers, legal, moral and otherwise, have sought to
rationalise either a rights-based ideology or one in which
human rights are a major component. Utilitarians, the
successors of Bentham, who famously described natural
rights as simple nonsense, have engaged in this task too,
but, despite sophisticated reformulations of principle,
their criterion of utility must, in the last resort, override
rights should there be a conflict. Modern followers of
Kant (1724-1804) have also attempted to construct moral
theories, implicitly relying on Kant's presuppositions
that man has freedom and capacity to reason; that the
nature of human reasoning is such that there are