It is inevitable that a document like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [adopted unanimously - though with abstentions from the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian SSR, and Yugoslavia - by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948] should raise questions about the possibility of there being universal values. This questioning started before the document was even finished, has continued to this day, and will probably never end ... The drafters of the Declaration clearly thought otherwise ... They must have thought that they had found a way of qualitatively comparing different value systems that shape different lifestyles and even whole cultures. What they produced has profoundly changed the international landscape, scattering it with human rights protocols, conventions, treaties, and derivative declarations of all kinds. At the end of the twentieth century, there is not a single nation, culture, or people that is not in one way or another enmeshed in human rights regimes ... The literature on human rights is replete with [ethnocentric] criticisms of the Declaration. These criticisms will probably grow in intensity and frequency because the universalist agenda of liberalism is closely aligned with that of universal human rights, and liberalism has come under attack by a growing chorus of contextualist and communitarian thinkers ... As this book was researched and written, I discovered that the charges of ethnocentrism that were leveled at the Declaration were often not well-founded and that friends of the document either forgot or did not know how to answer these charges ... Now that it has matured and made its impact upon the world the document enjoys unprecedented prestige. It has high moral visibility both in courts of law and in the trenches. Yet, with all this respect and attention, it is still constantly being charged with the crime of ethnocentrism. It is still living with the suspicion, nurtured in many intellectual circles, that something went wrong way back at the beginning. The lingering allegation of ethnocentrism is in part caused by the fact that very few people seem to know what was said and done during the drafting process. This ignorance has led to numerous misconceptions about how the document was written and what it and its various parts mean ... This book will help make the continuing dialogue about the Declaration a more informed one by setting the drafting facts on the table. Perhaps the discussants can settle their remaining normative questions but in the full knowledge of what was said by whom, when, and why. - Professor Johannes Morsink, Drew University
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 06:30:07 +0000
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