11 - Thickening convergence: human rights and cultural diversity

Summary

Every substantive account of distributive justice is a local account.

Michael Walzer

The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community. Gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment and exploitation, including those resulting from cultural prejudice and international trafficking, are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person, and must be eliminated.

Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, i, 18

Running from at least as far back as Hegel, through Marx's trenchant “Zur Judenfrage,” and into such diverse contemporary pieces as Charles Taylor's “Atomism” and Catharine MacKinnon's “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace,” is the concern that moral conceptions (including conceptions of rights) will, because of their reach for universality, lose their grasp upon the rich concreteness of actual social life. Since “Zur Judenfrage” a standard, if not the primary, criticism of conceptions of human rights has been that universality has been gained at the price of abstraction, abstraction from any concrete form of social life. Charles Taylor's formulation of one problem in “Atomism” as being about the “primacy of rights” has been influential.