Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE USE OF HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE 121
person, nor your presumed norms, which can so easily become
totalitarian. All I need to know is that I am helping Pablo in El
Salvador or Heng Ching in China. Everything else is absurd.”
The key problem with human rights discourse at the
normative level arises out of the tendency in contemporary
culture to refuse, or at least to consider with suspicion, any
discourse which dares to have rationalist, universalist or
absolutist premises. The alternative proposed is a pragmatic and
relativistic utilitarianism: human rights discourse helps people
so we should support human rights here and now, without
further ado. In a cultural context such as that of today it may
well be that in a given case such a response is the right one at a
pragmatic level. Such an approach may also impose itself for
semantic reasons as a kind of juridical and ethical esperanto
which renders natural law theory in an idiom which is
“politically acceptable”. In normative terms it remains
unsatisfactory in that it risks falling into a nihilistic stance on
ethics which undermines the human ability to know right and
wrong and to articulate that knowledge in prescriptive terms
based on something more than spontaneous individual impulse.
If such a mentality is to be avoided normative considerations
must be integrated more explicitly and critically into human
rights discourse. 24
Postscript: Human rights discourse in theological ethics
In contemporary culture, human rights discourse is used by
christians, by people of other religions and by non believers. For
this reason the argument of this piece has been articulated in
“secular” terms, without taking into account the specifically
theological dimensions of the problem. In this brief postscript
we will note a few aspects of the issue which are of specifically
theological interest.
24
“Le destin juridique des droits de l’homme passe par l’avenir d’une
philosophie de la loi naturelle, et aujourd’hui, comme naguère, par une
critique de la philosophie du sujet.” B. BARRET-KRIEGEL, Les droits de
l’homme et le droit naturel (Paris: PUF, 1989), 99.