Thu
04-May-2006

universal human rights?

I've just come across Michael Walzer, and in particular Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (1994). He takes Clifford Geertz's idea of "thickness" which emphasises the context-laden, local provenance of all cultural symbols and applies it to morality and human rights. Unlike the common philosophical point of view that human rights constitute a "thin" universal abstract core underlying all human society, Walzer argues from an anthropological perspective that morality is always local, resonant, culturally integrated and "thick".

I've always found the idea of universal human rights a bit of a headache. What do we do when we want to stick up for the rights of women in Kabul to be educated and go to work and find ourselves arguing for these "universal human rights", so easily understood as Western moral liberal priorities sweeping through the world through brute economic dominance and military force? Walzer's idea is that there is no "thick" universal moral discourse, but that universal human rights can only be "thin" distillates from local, culturally rich, "thick" moral narratives. Universal human rights cannot constitute a freestanding cultural framework, they are nothing more than glimpses of recognition across the boundaries of locally contextualised cultural moralities. The "truth" and "justice" that we talk about in our cosmopolitan transborder international NGO coalitions is a "thin" stripped down version of the "thick" moral frameworks of our own home cultures.

This really makes sense to me. The local context is the only substantive morality that we have available as a reference – we do not discover international solidarity in "thick" core abstract values, but in "thin" recognitions of references to our own local contexts. In the case of the women in Kabul, they do not have to be defended in terms of some flimsy structure of universal human rights, their rights can be argued for in terms of local cultural rights, their right to live their lives according to recently historically established urban practice, in opposition to other rural and religious conventions of female behaviour.