Is “Human Rights” Compatible with Cultural Diversity?
Xiaorong Li, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy In this paper, I attempt to identify one strategy for boosting the idea of human rights in spite of, or more precisely, because of, diverse moral cultures. Specifically, it is suggested that at least a small subset of rights among the usual (internationally recognized) human rights can be seen as cross-culturally grounded given that certain things are true about culture and cultural pluralism. Three cultural arguments for this small subset of rights – core rights — can thus be developed, as I try to do in Part 1 – the moral phenomenological argument, the culture-as-a-good argument, and the cultural pluralism argument. Though not all the known human rights will be justifiable in this mood, I argue in Part 2, some of the non-core rights can potentially be adopted on account of their instrumentality to effectively safeguarding core rights.
