"It all depends": The universal and the contingent in human rights

Abstract

In considering various conventional objections against the universalist conceptions of human rights, it is important to distinguish between those objections which can be articulated as the charge of intolerance from those which are better articulated as the charge of paternalism. While the former are implausible, the latter may be sometimes correct but it is arguable that the paternalism a play is of an unobjectionable variety. But even if we dispel (as I will try to) the charges of an objectionable form of intolerance or paternalism leveled at a universalist project of human rights, we do not thereby satisfy ourselves about the feasibility of such an aspiration. There are clear limits to the feasibility of the universalist project, and the structure of human-rights discourse is such that certain factual factors which are built into this discourse are crucially context-dependent. The main types of such factors are described in this chapter as justificatory, empirical and institutional, and case studies are provided to exemplify each category.