The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 3, 2007

Human Rights

Chenyang Li
Pages 79-83

International Human Rights Discourse as Moral Persuasion

I argue that the nature of the international human rights discourse ("IHRD") is to promote certain moral values across various cultural traditions; as such, this should be done through persuasion; it should not merely be forcing people to change their behavior; it should seek to have people accept certain moral values that they have not embraced or accept certain moral values as more important than they have held them to be. With persuasion as a goal, we need to make strategies suitable for this purpose. The paper has the following sections.