Habermas and Rorty - the existence of universal human rights

Résumé du document

Human rights have been taken for granted in the Western world. It was asserted that they were universal and every human being was entitled to them on the ground that he or she was human. These rights are considered as inalienable since they are inseparable from the human nature. The challenge is to define universal human rights in a pluralist world. Human rights exist as both moral and legal rights, and they constitute shared norms of human morality and legal norms at both international and national level. Jurgen Habermas, a German sociologist, mentions this duality that human rights carry. On the other hand, Richard Rorty's attempt consists of ruling out the aspect of morality. In this document, we examine the similarities and differences between the two schools of thought.

Extraits

[...] His vision of morality is rooted in the Kantian tradition. He regards morality as a matter of unconditional moral obligations with respect to individuals' autonomy. For Kant and Hegel, rationality is very functional, instrumental and goal-oriented ; Habermas argues that it is also subjectivist in the sense that in the state of nature we are self-made mean. Thus his vision differs from Kant's as rationality is intersubjective (rationality emerges only between subjects). Rorty, as we will see later in this essay, says the opposite of what Habermas and Kant say about morality. [...]

[...] People who reject human rights culture identify themselves in exclusionary terms, as they are not instead of regarding themselves as what they actually are, namely human beings. The only thing we need to achieve Enlightenment utopia is to produce generations of manipulated tolerant students. The more students we produce, the more widely we spread global human rights culture. We need to teach them that people” are not that irrational, they actually received a different upbringing and were not lucky. They are not deprived of rationality but of security and empathy. [...]

[...] Rorty Richard, ibid, p.172-185. [...]

[...] Habermas considers the very idea of human rights as Western notions of reason whose origin is Plato [12]. He criticizes the validity of human rights as an Eurocentric bias because human rights are not specific to Western cultural background, rather, for him, it was a response to the challenges in those days. In that respect, a parallel can be drawn between Habermas's position and the functional universality defined by Donnelly. Indeed, in this view, human rights ideas and practises are a product not of culture but of social forces of modernity. [...]

[...] sentimentality Though Habermas and Rorty agree on the importance of human rights, they differ when it comes to justification. Habermas uses human rights to legitimate his system of rights. Such rights are one of the basis of the legitimacy of political systems and constitutional democracies. The power of the state draws its recognition from laws. Actually, political power of modern states is constituted in the form of positive law, in the sense of enacted and coercive law, hence a specific structure and mode of validity of the modern law. [...]