¶ … 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...

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…