Human values and moral exclusion

Abstract

This article uses empirical data from the anthropology of human rights and the ethics of everyday life to examine the relationship between dominant value frames, moral action, and the rise of 'counter-humanities' in the form of cultural identitarianism, racial and class-based nationalism, apocalyptic theologies, and nativist populism. This article focuses, in particular, on the emergence and growing power of the value frame of human rights in the post-Cold War period and argues that the more recent spread of violent movements based in forms of moral exclusion was an ironic consequence of the power of human rights. After considering, and then rejecting, the possibility that citizenship can stand in for 'humanity' as a more sustainable value frame, the article concludes with an argument for the promise of a post-utopian solidarity inspired by the humanism of Montaigne and More and the pluralism of Berlin.