From Ignatieff Book Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

¶ … Michael Ignatieff's book Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry:

Does Ignatieff's analysis of the politics surrounding human rights shed any new light on the relativism/universalism question? Why or why not?

The language of human rights is often couched in the language of universalism, even when that rights-based language is really specific to a particular nation and a particular worldview. For instance, the idea that everyone is created equal and is therefore entitled to freedom, justice, and liberty, is actually from our own, American words of our nation's nationalist declaration of independence. This assertion is not considered a self-evident truth in the language of all human nations and in the minds of all human beings. However, the danger of lacking any notion of a doctrine of universal human rights is that international organizations can very easily fall into the justification of relativism, and atrocities may occur within and without different nations of the world.

In the first chapter of his text, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Michael Ignatieff stresses that moral relativism is not a tenable way for international community of nations to function. Without certain legal human rights standards, more human rights abuses will occur, as transpired in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda. International notions of cross-cultural human rights must define a kind of what the author calls irreducible minimum of individual freedoms, freedoms that are universally desirable for all societies to hold dear, such as the right for all prisoners not to be tortured or abused.

Ignatieff wrote his text in 2001 partly in response to Islamic critics of Western human rights policy. Muslim critics then argued that the West was attempting to impose its notions of human rights upon other, non-Western and non-Christian nations. The recently exposed prison abuse scandal that transpired during the Iraqi war of Muslims by American soldiers has shown that even Muslims are outraged when they see their own peoples being subject to the abuse of foreign captors. Thus, the idea of some standards of universal human rights, ironically because of Western abuses of Muslim prisoners, may become more amenable to these once-critiquing Islamic nations. Because of American abuses, some agreement may be reached as to irreducible minimums of rights for all.

Also, Ignatieff's stress that human rights cannot be regarded as a secular religion lest this conception of human rights be seen as a moral intrusion of the West upon other nations and other faiths remains important to remember as well. Instead, Ignatieff states that rather than an individualistic of moral conception of international human rights; human society must come to a collective agreement and find a solution of a political and collective conception of human rights, rather than a moral and nationalist ideal amenable to the west. The argument for politically based international human rights can made on pragmatic and historical grounds, for, because they protect people's ability to function as free agents, political human rights principles may prove to be the most effective practical defense against the suffering caused by abuse and oppression that can affect both sides during a war. Moral assertions are only useful after the fact, says Ignatieff. Also, politically-based human right also facilitates needed global cooperation between nations.

Although this theory of political vs. economically based international human rights, sounds excellent in rhetoric, in practice it may be more difficult to enforce. For instance, to take one example cited by the author, what of a woman in Afghanistan who seeks an education or professional health care? The author argues that she must be supported in her quest, even though an Islamic fundamentalist regime would hold that an education outside of the home runs contrary to the vision of Islam espoused by its national and sovereign theocratic conception of the Koran.

What constitutes, for example, crimes against humanity, in a political conception of human rights? Ignatieff argues that international human rights advocates see the idea of state sovereignty simply as a stumbling block to international justice, which is wrong. But during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when nearly a million Tutsis were killed in the course of a few months, how should the world have intervened? Ignatieff believes that it should have, although he reminds the reader that the record of intervention has been, at best, mixed, as overriding state sovereignty does not always result in lives being saved. Nor does the concentrating of more power in the hands of international organizations have a good success 'track' either.