In the Name of What? Defusing the Rights-Culture Debate by Revisiting the Universals of Both Rights and Culture

Abstract

This article unravels the perceived dichotomy between universal human and women's rights and apparently misogynist cultural claims and practices. It does so by mainly focusing on the ‘universal’ side of the dichotomy. In pursuing this argument, it first describes how recent feminist work has gone beyond a critique and transformation of the content of universals and suggested the transformation of both the status and structure of universals. At the same time, feminists find it useful to retain universals, not because they are in fact universal, but rather because of the political utility of their universalising thrust. This radical feminist critique of Western universal ideals is further fleshed out with the help of Aristotle's notion of phronesis. Thereafter, the culture side of the perceived dichotomy is briefly considered and it is suggested that cultural claims often function much like universalist claims, only on a smaller scale, and that the same conditions apply to their invocation in any specific concrete situation that should apply in the case of Western universals, as indicated in the first part of the article. The theoretical considerations are throughout demonstrated using mostly South African examples.