< < <
Date Index
> > >
Human Right and Critique?
by Seyed Javad
13 December 2003 16:38 UTC
< < <
Thread Index
> > >

Greetings,
 

I have been for some time thinking about the relationship between the Human Rights-discourse and the decline of morality (both in public square and private sphere). I am thinking if Human Rights-discourse is such a good idea and desired ideal then why wherever this idea is codified into law and endorsed by political and social forces of institutional nature the morality (and sense of goodness) is on decline? Isn't a right for human being without a strong sense of duty and responsibility wrong as well as undesirable?

 

If one argues that Human rights language is a secular response to the decline of a religious ethic and an attempt to construct a secular alternative that might resist human greed, militarism, etc., since a transcendentally-based spiritual ethic is no longer compelling for most people in Europe and America. Then there could arise a question, which is of no less interest and that is if religious prism of morality is accepted by many, who do not share the same desire to construct a secular alternative why should they transform their civilizational frame of reference in complying to those of secular ideology? Are there compelling intellectual reasons for such a transformation or the change is politically related and ideologically propagated? If there are intellectual reasons of intelligible nature what are there? And if the reasons are purely ideological and a result of politicised propagations then why international organizations such as United Nations do not reflect the reality of ‘inter-nationalism’ that underpins its very existence? In other words, why not the question of Humanism be credited an international significance and the discourse of Religionism be banned from international reality while all of us know that secular ideology is the worldview of less than 10% of world population? The problem becomes even more cumbersome once one is recalled that the dominant secular philosophical views on ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningfulness’ are currently endorsing plurality of meanings and the impossibility of reaching Truth in metaphysical sense. While this is the recent achievement of philosophy of the ‘social’ the political philosophy of modernity is still attached to a view of monologicalism, i.e. there is only one truth and that is the prism of secularism. What makes the question of Human Right even more suspicious is the absence of critique by intellectuals, who don’t explicate the imperialism of ‘meaning’ by one discourse over against a ny position that does not share the ontology of secularism.  If this suspicion is of any intellectual significance then how should one view the importance of international discourses?

 

 Kind Regards



Reduce spam in your inbox with MSN 8's intelligent junk e-mail filters.
< < <
Date Index
> > >
World Systems Network List Archives
at CSF
Subscribe to World Systems Network < < <
Thread Index
> > >