people, and the attitude of the state towards the people’s human rights. This is wrong, as the human rights that the state pledges to protect arise fundamentally from the people that it governs, not from such abstract and authoritarian beginnings. How can a group of fallible individuals (the state) decide the best actions of everyone? Surely the state should not be given total power over right and wrong. But Hobbes thought that the contract between people and state was such that, despite individual freedom being relinquished, the state is right to protect its people from infringements of their rights: if it didn’t do this, then the people have a right, once more, to their natural morality and liberty (overthrowing the state). Relativism states that nothing can ever be true in every situation possible - a rather scary thought that it is hard not to agree with to some extent. This view is incompatible with the idea of ‘universal’ human rights. The right to life, as I have mentioned earlier, is a key thing that most people really don’t want to experience most of the time (again, this is a generalization which simply adds to the complication of universality). However, this must not mean that everyone has a right to live. It goes against human morality that no-one ever deserves to die – for example, if someone has killed many people, or will kill many people, it makes natural moral sense that they deserve to die, or at least have their liberty infringed. Because of this, it is incorrect to say that killing is always wrong, and so no universal rule can be made about this. The same can be said of most other human rights. This problem occurs on a massive scale around the whole world and throughout history: we just seem to love locking people up if they have done things that most other people deem wrong. It is evidently true, that, sticking to what we feel naturally, killing or removing liberties and rights isn’t always wrong, and that means surely that some people deserve more rights than others. One main feature of the universal declaration is the right to equality under the law: the very fact that laws imply punishments that break the human right to liberty or life is a massive contradiction between actual and idealized morality. If killing one person saves ten, then it is surely, on a utilitarian principle, morally and rationally correct to kill that person, even if they are innocent. Complete freedom in all scenarios is clearly not a very good idea. Moral Relativism The fact is that, in a world where property is effectively randomly allotted to the rich, this really should not be anyone’s right. This right to property often deprives other people’s rights to other things. It is very difficult to justify the existence of ‘property’ – it is effectively just a way that has been used to perpetuate poverty. If one person has lots of property and makes a lot of money, while one person has almost none, and is starving, it is wrong to protect the right to property of the rich man when someone else clearly needs it more. But perhaps this thing that seems in-built into our consciousness – the necessity of punishment – is something that should be overridden by better thinking and put into practice by things like the universal declaration of human rights. Cultural relativism is the idea that all people’s beliefs and rights must be understood through the prism of their social environment. Surely no one rule can apply to all human beings when all human beings are effected by their different cultures. Most of the arguments for the universality of human rights begin with the assumption that all humans are the same, and experience the same things. This simply cannot be true: all individuals see their rights and obligations differently, and this is specifically influenced by culture. Take, for example, the universal declaration of human rights – a long document which claims to state all of the rights that every human can expect to have. Notice that it has been Cultural relativism The same is true of the age-old right to property: article 17 of the universal declaration. This reads: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
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