Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Religious Pluralism: Buddhist and Christian Perspectives

Abstract

The question of how the concept of human rights-so crucially important for the implementation of justice in a rapidly globalizing world-relates to the plurality of cultures and religions has still not been solved. Controversies such as those over land rights in Aboriginal Australia and Asian values in Southeast Asia have shown this repeatedly. In such cases, discussion eventually becomes focused on the universality of human rights, not just the global scope of the idea itself but the universal validity of catalogues of specific rights such as those contained in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948). There is something arbitrary and unsystematic about such charters, as is shown by the rather different emphases in the African and Islamic documents which were meant to correct the UN's lack of universality.2 But if, in attempting to explore this problem seriously, one appears to tamper with the principle of universality, one can easily be accused of diluting the ethical force of human rights by questioning their applicability to every human being without exception. Nothing could be further from my mind, so before explaining what I wish to do in this paper I shall first set out some presuppositions that I take to be axiomatic: 1. Our starting point is the dignity of the human, the unique value of each individual human life as a world constituted by consciousness, an originating source of free acts, which is therefore an end in itself and must never be misused as a means to other people's ends.3 This principle is reflected in formulations such as dignitas humana in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which goes back to the biblical doctrine of the creation of human beings in the image of God, or in the unique status of the human being in the Buddhist scale of existence, on which neither animals nor gods but only humans are in a position to grasp the reality of their situation and strive for definitive release from the chain of becoming; hence the severity of the prohibition on taking human life as the third of the four cardinal offences