Universalism of Human Rights the Case of Dworkin and His Critics
Caridad Velarde Quepio de Llano,Navarra
This paper will attempt to outline some of the problems and contradictions presented by a liberal conception of human rights. It is common the consider Ronald Dworkin’s work as paradigmatic of liberal approach. This idea arose from the publication of Taking Rights Seriously1, but perhaps is emphasized at the moment, because of the current debate with communitarian positions, some of which, as is well known, support a multiculturalism that seems to be on the opposite side of liberal universalism, or tries to complete its abstraction.2
From its conception, the discussion on liberalism has affected central topics of moral, political and juridical thought. The subject of this paper is, more specifically, its universalistic conception of the individiual, (and consequently of his rights), which liberalism has been maintaining from its enlightened origins. The main criticism that has been made to that position is that universalism implies an abstraction, because it does not work with the human being as something particular or specific but with the notion of individual which is nothing real.3
In the origin, not only of the idea of rights, but of liberalism itself, and, ultimately of modernity, is the idea of tolerance. Tolerance arose as a neccessity and in direct connection with religions. Paradoxically, it was born as something that is not a given, but that, on the contrary, has to be learned. That is why every cultural manifestation of humankind, in spite of its social character, has demonstrated the necessity of learning how to live together. One of the questions that this topic leads to is that of the compatibility or incompatibility of a universalistic view of man with the notion of tolerance. It can appear paradoxical because liberal tolerance means the aspiration of a harmonious coexistence of the different conceptions of the good life. Liberalism as a theory does not propose a specific way of living; in practice it does. And what is worse, that conception of the good life is incompatible with other ideas (that is what from the occidential point of view, we tend to call the limits of tolerance). In the same manner, the criticism referring to the abstraction and consequent disconnection with reality that supposes working with an individual not related with a cultural environment, is one of the principal claims of communitarian writers. With all those presumptions, this paper does not intend to be more than an approach to problems with difficult solutions, in the least because they deal with concepts that are not univocal at all, and do not belong to schools easy to delimit.
