Critically examine the cultural relativist approach to human rights. (2010)
Human rights claim to belong to every person simply as a human being. Cultural relativism denies that such a claim can be made from nowhere: moral norms, including rights, draw their meaning and validity from particular cultures. The approach contains a real insight about power and context, but its strong form defeats the purpose of rights.
The Relativist Case at Its Strongest
- The anthropological origin. While the UDHR was being drafted, the American Anthropological Association submitted its Statement on Human Rights (1947) to the UN Commission on Human Rights, written by Melville J. Herskovits. It held that standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive, and asked how a declaration framed in the values of Western Europe and America could bind all humanity.
- Western ethnocentrism. Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab called human rights a Western construct with limited applicability (1979). Its rights-bearer is John Locke’s autonomous, property-owning individual.
- Asian values. In the 1990s Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad argued that Asian societies place family, order, consensus and duty above individual claims. Asian governments’ Bangkok Declaration (1993) insisted on weighing national and regional particularities.
- Religious framing. The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990), adopted by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, makes every right it lists subject to the Shari’ah.
- The communitarian self. Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) likened belief in natural rights to belief in witches and in unicorns. A self constituted by its community cannot hold rights specified apart from that culture.
Critique
- Who speaks for a culture? The Asian-values case was made by governments about their own citizens. Amartya Sen (Human Rights and Asian Values, 1997) showed that Asian traditions are internally contested: Ashoka’s edicts on toleration and Akbar’s defence of open discussion are as Asian as any authoritarian creed.
- A shield for elites and patriarchy. Practices defended as “tradition” fall mostly on women, Dalits and dissenters. Strong relativism turns their oppressors into the authorised interpreters of their culture.
- The is–ought fallacy. That moral codes vary is a fact; that no code may judge another does not follow from it. The relativist’s plea for tolerance is itself a universal norm.
- Cultures change. Singapore, the home of the Asian-values thesis, repealed its colonial-era ban on sex between men (Section 377A) in 2022, through its own parliament. Culture is not destiny.
- Donnelly’s distinction. Jack Donnelly (1984) separates strong relativism, where culture is the principal source of a norm’s validity, from weak relativism, where rights are universal in principle and culture shapes only their form and interpretation.
Evaluation
Relativism rightly exposes the selectivity of Western human-rights politics and the need to translate rights into local idioms. India combines universal fundamental rights with minority institutions and plural personal laws. The Vienna Declaration (1993) struck the same balance, keeping particularities in mind while affirming a universal duty to protect all rights.
Conclusion
Cultural relativism is sound as a check on arrogance and unsound as a licence for abuse. The defensible position is weak relativism: a universal core of dignity whose institutional expression may vary. The test in each case is who is invoking culture, and against whom.