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Your audience for this paper is a person whom you know and who has shown an interest in the question of human rights. The purpose of this paper is for you to explain
the key differences between a philosophical and anthropological approach to human rights. To do so draw from the class texts listed below. You do not need to take a
personal position or make an argument; the paper is designed to be informative and explanatory. You also do not need to begin with a hypothesis, other than the fact
that philosophers and anthropologists approach this issue differently.
Sources:
1. Stephan J. Hood, “Rights Hunting in Non-Western Traditions”.
2. Jane Cowan, et.al. “Introduction” to Culture and Rights, pp 1-26.
3. Mark Goodale, Surrendering to Utopia.
4. Sally Merry, “Changing Rights, Changing Culture” in Culture & Rights, pp 31-55.
5. Kenneth Morris, “Western Defensiveness and the Defense of Rights”.
6. Marie-Bénédicte Dembour “Following the Movement of a Pendulum: between Universalism and Relativism” in Culture & Rights, pp 56-79.
7. Jane Cowan, “Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights.” American Anthropologist 108:1 (2006), 9-24.
8. Sally Merry. “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology along the Way)”. Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 26:1 (2003), pp 55
-77.
Evaluation Criteria:
1. Do you answer the question?
2. Do you support each part of your analysis with citations?
3. Do you avoid opining?
4. Do you properly cite source material?
5. Do you paraphrase and cite, not quote, material?
Paper I: What would an ideal paper include?
Posted on: Tuesday, October 1, 2013
What are the core tenants of a universalist perspective on human rights?
1. Rights exist prior to social and cultural ties.
2. These rights are rooted in a biological sameness, which implies a moral sameness.
3. These rights, as part of human identity, are discoverable and knowable through reason.
What are the most important challenges to this perspective?
1. The ontological basis of rights cannot be proven; these are rooted either in nature (biology), the supernatural (God), or an ambiguous natural law.
2. A claimed universal value system (morality) does not logically follow from the fact of biological sameness. No empirical evidence for a shared universal morality
exists beyond very general categories such as reciprocity.
3. Even if rights are discovered through reason, people do not agree on what is reasonable.
4. The ultimate purpose of rights is unclear: if the right to have rights is the ultimate purpose of rights, doesn’t this mean life is no more than ‘freedom of
choice’?
5. Yes, some people claim a universal rights regime is a form of ‘Western’ cultural imperialism.
What are the core tenants of a relativist perspective on human rights?
1. Humans are born both blank (without an innate code of behavior) and into a particular society.
2. A person’s moral code (hence values) is a product of cultural conditioning and an accident of birth.
3. The only way to evaluate social practices that are different is to recognize and reflect on the fact that the evaluator already has a norm or a spectrum of norms in
her head.
4. Hence, what is right, and thus acceptable, depends on what counts as right and acceptable in a specific society or community.
What are the most important challenges to this perspective?
1. Relativism tends to overstate the degree of consensus in a given society.
2. Relativism can be overly deterministic, assuming ‘culture’ controls individuals much more than it does in practice.
3. In doing so, relativism may ignore the internal struggle over power, resources, and social practice found in any ‘culture’ (society).
4. The above illustrates how the word ‘culture’ as used by relativists is slippery and confusing.
5. Unreflective and purely descriptive relativism can at times be amoral, leading people to refuse to make any value judgments about what others do.
6. Relativism can be used by conservative elites to maintain power in the name of ‘culture’.
7. A relativist critique of a monolithic universal system of rights is itself simply a monolithic alternative.
None of the people we read embraces a purist position. They collectively recognize that extreme relativism over-determines culture and ignores individual agency while
extreme universalism over-determines individual agency and downplays or ignores culture.
Two forms of universalism are evident: what Morris suggests is a limited universal consensus based on shared experiences, and what Hood believes is an already-achieved
set of rights based on the discovery of these by specific Anglo-American philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Two forms of relativism are also clear: an unreflective relativism which all these authors reject and a reflective and critical relativism which is explained by Merry,
Cowan, and Dembour.
This is a graduate level course and there for it should be written as such. No outside sources. And please be an expert in this field. Attached is the last paper one
writer wrote and i got a C on it. I have been allow to do a redo.
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