International Journal of Applied Philosophy

Volume 26, Issue 2, Fall 2012

Eurocentrism, Human Rights, and Humanism

The universal validity of human rights is endangered by the charge that these rights are ‘Eurocentric’ and this means that human rights could be considered to be a product of illegitimate power relations developed by European cultures. I differentiate several levels of this charge and show that, logically, there is a genetic fallacy at its heart so the concept of human rights cannot be invalidated by it. Historically, human rights are indeed the result of the development of Western humanist thought but we should differentiate the genesis of an idea from its validity. I outline how this development took place, how the argument of Eurocentrism developed, and why this argument can only function when the idea of human rights is taken for granted. Although the argument of Eurocentrism cannot be used to dismantle the idea of the universality of human rights, it still has an important function in a self-critical theory of universal human rights. It can be used as a hermeneutic tool that reflects on the formulation of these rights without endangering the universal claim of the idea itself. The quasi-transcendental legitimation of the idea of human rights developed by the Frankfurt philosopher and Habermas pupil Rainer Forst can be seen as a strategy of validation of the universality of human rights that is able to integrate arguments centred around Eurocentrism in a pluralistic hermeneutics of human rights. Forst’s theory can be read as a response to Amartya Sen’s criticism of transcendentalism as it is developed in his philosophy of justice.