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Communitarian Approach
99 | Mond.Idéalisation
James Wellstead | Universal Human Rights
We begin with the communitarian school of morality, a theory most
commonly identified with American moral and political philosopher Michael
Walzer. Walzer and his contemporaries place the moral basis of a right within
a specific cultural and historical ontological context. 14 This form of analysis
essentially sees building a rational moral foundation of universally valid ethics
as unattainable. Such an attempt to find a moral foundation applicable in
deriving universal human rights is vulnerable, communitarians argue, to an
external ‘ontological critique.’ 15 Philosopher Jack Donnelly suggests that
claims such as “God gives us rights” are viewed by communitarians as being
susceptible to external ontological questions like “What God?” to which
there is no decisive response. The same is true, it is argued, for basing
foundations upon rationality. As such, these ontological foundational
arguments operate within (social, political, moral, religious etc.) communities
and are reliant upon these contexts in order to sustain and understand the
specific notion of a right. The only way to define and assert these ‘thick’
human rights is through illustrating the internal tensions and contractions of
cultural notions of rights with social criticism launched from within the
specific cultural system. 16
To derive a universally valid and inter-cultural right
might be achieved through an empirical analysis of varying cultural systems
14 Walzer, Michael. Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.
15 Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory and in Practice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 2003, p. 18.
16 Walzer 46-47.