ABSTRACT
Contemporary discussions of human rights are characterized by a widespread tendency toward normative prudence. While the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration felt it natural to reaffi rm, in Article 1, the two leading ideals of the American and French revolutions – freedom and equality of all humans – sixty years later theoreticians seem to think that the founding fathers of the human rights culture were simply too ambitious. The ideal of perfect (formal) equality, and the consequent refusal of all forms of arbitrary discrimination, is currently set aside to make room for different ethical sensitivities in a world characterized by the fact of a more or less reasonable pluralism. The cultural challenge to human rights is taken more and more seriously, and one can safely affi rm that the “cultural/moral skeptic” has won a signifi cant battle. At least since Rawls’s ( 1999 ) work on global justice, theoreticians have generally moved toward a compromise between liberal justice and the standards set by human rights ideals. This compromise entails tolerating discriminatory practices carried out by governments on religious or ethnic grounds, as long as these leave room for some degree of individual freedom and do not cause and are not accompanied by serious harm such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass deportation. Very few today hold onto the idea that if a person is discriminated against – independently of how serious the damage is – because of her belonging to a religious or ethnic minority group, or merely to a gender, her human rights are violated.
