Ebook: Relativism and Human Rights: A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism

Can human rights principles admit degrees of contextual variations? Are our cultures condemned to a formally rigid standard of universalist hegemony? This work provides an innovative contribution to the legal-philosophical understanding of human rights theory. While advancing a post-metaphysical reconstruction for the notion of human rights, it defends an original perspective on the relation between universal validity and cultural pluralism. By rejecting the challenges of relativism and classical abstract universalism, this model reinterprets discursive theory in the light of dialectical recognition and judgmental exemplarity. The result is an enriched substantive notion of universalism oriented to the safeguard of situated authenticity. Pluralistic universalism considers that, while formal filtering criteria constitute unavoidable requirements for the production of potentially valid arguments, the exemplarity of judgmental activity, in its turn, provides a pluralistic and retrospective reinterpretation for the fixity of such criteria. While speech formal standards grounds the thinnest possible presuppositions we can make as humans, the discursive exemplarity of judgments defends a notion of validity which is both contextually dependent and "subjectively universal". According to this approach, human rights principles are embedded within our linguistic argumentative practice. It is precisely from the intersubjective and dialogical relation among speakers that we come to reflect upon those same conditions of validity of our arguments. Once translated into national and regional constitutional norms, the discursive validity of exemplar judgments postulates the philosophical necessity for an ideal of legal-constitutional pluralism, challenging all those attempts trying to frustrate both horizontal (state to state) and vertical (supra-national-state-social) on-going debates on human rights.

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This book advances a post-metaphysical model for testing the validity of human rights principles. It takes into account some of the most recent researches in the field of cognitive linguistics and ethics in order to ground a deliberative model based upon the Kantian reflective judgment. Even if specifically suited for academics and research scholars, it can profitably be adopted as a supplementary textbook in masters and doctoral programmes. As a unique contemporary contribution to the understanding of the conceptual status of human rights principles, this work represents an invaluable instrument also for the activities conducted at research centres and think-tanks. Indeed the abstract premises of the book are oriented to a more and more concrete underpinning of the contemporary human rights challenges as those faced by public officials involved in human rights project cooperation.