Why human rights trump even in the world of cultural diversity?

Marek Káčer (Slovak Academy of Sciences)

This paper is an attempt to defend the universality of human rights. First of all, the paper is designed as an attack on arguments of cultural relativists who claim that human rights cannot be universal because they are not based on universal consensus among cultures. In its positive part, the paper claims that human rights are universal because of their personal generality and their ability to protect human dignity or to realize, at least partially, any dominant comprehensive doctrine of good. These two features combined together provide moral argumentation in intercultural dialogue with the highest degree of consistency and therefore human rights should prevail over other systems of morality.