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The Rediff Special/ Amartya Sen

Confucius may be seen, in some respects, as being rather authoritarian, as is Kautilya, but so are Plato and St Augustine in the West

Human Rights and Asian Values

I turn now to a particular debate concerning Westernisation involving the place of 'human rights,' particularly related to political and civil liberties. Governments of some countries in Asia and Africa, which have favoured authoritarian forms of government, have often invoked an allegedly fundamental difference between Western values and local values elsewhere. 'Asian values,' for example, are taken to be less committed to such rights than are 'Western values.' The rhetoric against Westernisation played a major part in the confrontations that occurred in the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993.

Is there a real divide between Western and non-Western values on the subject of human rights? It is certainly true that the practice of democracy and the related political and civil rights have strongly emerged in the West over the recent centuries, particularly since the European 'enlightenment.' There have been great champions of human rights in non-western societies as well, for example among the leaders of movements of national independence and basic freedoms (such as Mahatma Gandhi and Sun Yat Sen), but these leaders themselves have not hesitated to praise Western development of these ideas.

What is at issue is not the proximate origin of these political ideas in the West, but whether there is a real divide here between traditions of the West and those elsewhere that allow us to identify these values as quintessentially 'Western values,' as some authors, especially in East Asia, have done. I have tried to discuss this issue rather extensively elsewhere (particularly in my Morgenthau Memorial Lecture at the Carnegie Council in New York last year), and I have argued that hardly any such divide can be seen in this general form in the contrast between the intellectual history of the Western and non-Western worlds.

Writings favourable as well as critical of the underlying concepts of human rights can be seen both in the West and in non-Western traditions -- the Indian, the Chinese, the Arabic and others. Confucius may be seen, in some respects, as being rather authoritarian, as is Kautilya, but so are Plato and St Augustine in the West. Aristotle may be a great champion of political freedom and tolerance, but he too restricted the demand for these freedoms to free men (not slaves, not women), whereas Ashoka's theorising on the importance of tolerance made no such exceptions.

When Akbar was making his forceful pronouncements on tolerance of diversity and religious differences in particular, the Inquisitions were powerfully active in Europe. It is also worth recollecting that when, in the twelfth century, the great Jewish scholar Maimonides had to run away from an intolerant Europe (where he was born) and from its brutal persecution of Jews, he chose the security of a tolerant and urbane Cairo and the patronage of Sultan Saladin.

Even Confucius, who is constantly invoked by the champions of the thesis that Asian values conflict with human rights, had extensive discussions on the importance of dissent when one finds that the authorities are mistaken. As an intensely practical man, Confucius was not, of course, averse to practical caution and tact, but this did not weaken his belief in the need to oppose a government that is unacceptable: 'When the (good) way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly.

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Amartya Sen, continued

Amartya Sen, the world renowned economist, delivered this UNESCO lecture in Delhi recently.

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