Is There a Human Right to Democracy? Beyond Interventionism and Indifference

Seyla Benhabib
Yale University

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H Seyla Benhabib θα είναι ομιλήτρια στο 23ο Παγκόσμιο Συνέδριο Φιλοσοφίας θα διεξαχθεί στην Αθήνα  από την 4 έως την 10 Αυγούστου 2013 πληροφορίες

There is wide-ranging disagreement in contemporary discourse about the justification as well as the content of human rights. On the one hand, the language of human rights has become the public vocabulary of a conflict-ridden world which is increasingly growing together.1 The spread of human rights, as well as their defense and institutionalization, are now seen as the uncontested language, though not the reality, of global politics. Yet “… in recent years, as political commitment to human rights has grown, philosophical commitment has waned.”2 Some argue that human rights constitute the “core of a universal thin morality,” (Michael Walzer); others claim that they form “reasonable conditions of a
world-political consensus,” (Martha Nussbaum). Still others narrow the concept of human rights “to a minimum standard of well-ordered political institutions for all peoples”3 (John Rawls) and caution that there needs to be a distinction between the list of human rights included in the Law of Peoples and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Different justifications of human rights inevitably lead to variation in their content and to “cherrypicking” among various rights. Michael Walzer, for one, suggests that a comparison of the moral codes of various societies may produce a set of standards, a “thin” list of human rights, “to which all societies can be held – negative injunctions, most likely, rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression and tyranny.”4 But this way of proceeding would yield a relatively short list. “Among others,” notes Charles Beitz, “rights requiring democratic political forms, religious toleration, legal equality for women, and free choice of partner would certainly be excluded.”5 For many of the world’s moral systems, such as ancient Judaism, medieval Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, Walzer’s “negative injunctions against oppression and tyranny” would be consistent with great degrees of inequality among genders,lasses, castes and religious groups…

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