Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

112 MARTIN MCKEEVER
and in the public communication of the reasons for this decision
in a context of highly polemical debate. 12
As noted above, human rights claims are often the subject of
intense political debate at a national and international level.
This inevitably leads to the tendency to use human rights
discourse, with a stronger or weaker ethical accent, as an
instrument of political pressure or simply as a instrument for
the achievement of one’s own (personal, national or
international) political interests. A key pragmatic issue is the
judgement as to how human rights discourse is being used in a
given context. Here the choice cannot simply be between an
illegitimate political use and a legitimate ethical use of such
discourse, for contrary to the tendency of modern culture to
separate these two fields, they are often in fact profoundly
interconnected. One must distinguish rather between an
ethically justified use of human rights discourse which is at one
and the same time political in nature, and a use of human rights
discourse, perhaps veiled in ethical terms, for ethically
unjustified political ends. Such a distinction requires the
application of ethical criteria according to which rival claims
can be assessed. If human rights discourse is to be used as an
ethical category it must be used to explain why it is right or
wrong to do something and not simply as a rhetorical
instrument for the attainment of pragmatic ends. In the light of
these considerations the need for a closer study of the whole
question at a normative level becomes increasingly clear. Before
passing on to the normative perspective it will be useful to
consider briefly the semantic dimension of this question.
12
Perhaps because of this polemical context, the Church has generally
been cautious about making public interventions on the more controversial
human rights issues. One of the ironies of this stance in the case of Germany,
for example, is that the Church has at times been “links überholt” in public
discussions on the environment and on some sexual and reproductive issues,
in the sense that parties such as the Greens have been more ready to publicly
deny certain spurious claims to human rights.