كليدواژه :
Law , Human Rights , West world , Citizens
چكيده فارسي :
Western discussions of human rights have led to the coalescence of two distinct positions regarding the fundamental, inalienable liberties that citizens should be able to enjoy as a matter of principle. The first, commonly known as the cosmopolitan perspective1, asserts that one set of basic human rights is valid for all societies. The other claims that citizens of different societies may possess different sets of human rights, albeit ones that any thoughtful person would acknowledge to be essentially decent and appropriate to the cultural and historical circumstances of the community at hand. Among a great many prominent cosmopolitan theorists, David Held stands out as the most consistent and vociferous champion of a universalist conception of human rights. Arguably the most influential proponent of distinct packages of rights for various social milieux is John Rawls, whose controversial notion of the Law of Peoples explicitly calls on liberal societies to tolerate, if not actually respect, alternative ways in which a minimal cluster of basic rights might be articulated.2 This paper demonstrates first that these two, generally opposed poles of the debate over human rights have moved much closer to one another than one might expect. Second, this paper outlines a pair of arguments that can be combined to offer a viewpoint that differs profoundly from the two conventional positions, one that not only proposes a foundation for human rights that is even more minimalist (and thus more radical) than the Law of Peoples, but also urges us to make a clear demarcation between the civic and moral components of human rights. Finally, the paper offers empirical evidence that an attitude of tolerance for distinct packages of human rights tends to promote interstate peace. This implies that a lack of respect for cross-cultural variations in human rights sets the stage for interstate war.
