Cultural diversity and international political theory
209
He uses the modernist language of rights, but with a particular spin. Rights act to
‘summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various
situations’; such summarizing generalizations increase ‘the predictability, and thus
the power and efficiency, of our institutions, thereby heightening the sense of shared
moral identity which brings us together in a moral community.’27 Since the
Enlightenment, Americans and Europeans have created a ‘human rights culture’ in
opposition to prejudices of one kind or another—racial, religious, most recently,
misogynist and homophobic—and thereby extended the scope of this shared moral
identity. What relevance has this for societies where this seem not to have taken
place? What response can be made, for example, to Muslim extremists who think
that the death penalty is appropriate for writing a book that, allegedly, defames the
Prophet? Not that they are wrong or irrational, or that they have not understood
that the nature of human beings is such that this is an inappropriate response. There
is no such nature, there are no general moral standards that apply here. Human
beings create themselves and if they have not created themselves in ways that are
amenable to a human rights perspective nothing can get through to them. The best
way to see such people is not as ‘wrong’ or ‘irrational’ but as ‘deprived’, deprived of
the security and sympathy that has allowed us to create a culture in which rights
make sense. To get through to them, or, more plausibly, their children, we need to
engage in a ‘sentimental education’, arguing for and promoting the human rights
culture explicitly as a culture, rather than assuming that the way of life it sum-
marizes can be defended by universalist arguments.
How plausible this position is even in its own terms is contestable; Norman Geras
argues quite convincingly that, in extremis, it is precisely universalist arguments that
motivate people to care for others28—but in any event the ways in which Rorty
advocates the human rights culture suggest an attachment to this particular social
formation every bit as strong as that held by those still possessed by what he would
regard as a naïve essentialism about human rights. He holds the same kind of
assumptions about the superiority of the Western way apparently on the principle
that such assumptions are acceptable as long as they are held ‘ironically’, that is,
with the conscious knowledge that they might be wrong—one can then laud the
virtues of a sentimental education through which the rest of the world gradually
comes to share the advantages of being like us.
Rorty’s postmodernism remains, in crucial respects, modernist in its willingness to
privilege some categories of thought. To break out of this mindset it may be
appropriate instead to look in another direction—to the premodern rather than the
postmodern. The reference here is to one of the features of recent thought on ethics
in general, namely a revival of interest in classical ethics, neo-Aristotelianism, and
the ‘virtues’.29 There are two particular features of this thought which, taken
‘The Liberal Ironist: Ethics and International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, 25 (1996), pp. 29–52. Anthony J. Langlois ‘Redescribing Human Rights’, Millennium 27
(1998), pp. 1–22 appeared too late to be considered here, but addresses a number of cognate themes.
Rorty, ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality’, p. 117.
Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind (London: Verso, 1995).
27
28
29
For overviews, see Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Special Issue ‘Virtue and Vice’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 15:1
(1998).