The moral universalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges us to recognize the humanity of others and the reality of their suffering. If that doctrine sounds naive in today’s world, it is because we have allowed malignant spoilers to smother this foundational intuition.
Populism is one of those words that is dying from promiscuous over-use. […] I think what it means it is a general descriptor of any course of political action that does not command assent from a centrist elite of experts. Which means that it is not necessarily a bad thing at all. So we must not use it as a swearword, it may be a wakeup call. I am going to use populism to describe anti-elite, anti-institutional challenges, in the name of the people, to center right and center left political dominance of European politics.
In my book, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, I set out to explore what impact human rights have had upon the ordinary virtues. The question I asked was whether human rights has become a global ethic, a standard reference point for moral judgment in ordinary life in cultures around the world.
Although globalization of our economies has not produced globalization in our hearts and minds, the geography of our virtues has changed. We now play out local conflicts before the whole world; and when we justify ourselves, we do it to strangers linked to us by new media. That is what moral globalization means—the steady enlargement of the audiences before which we feel we must justify ourselves.
Since 1945 America has displayed exceptional leadership in promoting international human rights. At the same time, however, it has also resisted complying with human rights standards at home or aligning its foreign policy with these standards abroad.
Shared among equals, rights are not the universal credo of a global society, not a secular religion, but something much more limited and yet just as valuable: the shared vocabulary from which our arguments can begin, and the bare human minimum from which differing ideas of human flourishing can take root.
