China poses great challenges to human rights in theory and practice. In
practice, China is considered, by the measure of most Western countries,
to have a patchy record of protecting individuals’ human rights. In the
theoretical realm, Chinese intellectuals and government officials have
challenged the idea that the term “human rights” can be universally
understood in one single way and have often opposed attempts by
Western countries to impose international standards on Asian countries.
What should we make of these challenges – and of claims by members
of other groups to have moralities of their own? Human Rights and
Chinese Thoughtgives an extended answer to these questions in the first
study of its kind. Stephen C. Angle integrates a full account of the devel-opment of Chinese rights discourse – reaching back to important,
although neglected, origins of that discourse in seventeenth- and eigh-teenth-century Confucianism – with philosophical considerations of how
various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims
about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts.
Drawing on Western thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Allan Gibbard, and Robert Brandom, Angle
elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that
Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics.
His conclusion is not that we should ignore one another, though. Despite
our differences, Angle argues that cross-cultural moral engagement is
legitimate and even morally required. International moral dialogue is a
dynamic and complex process, and we all have good reasons for
continuing to work toward bridging our differences.
Stephen C. Angle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan Uni-versity. He is the co-editor and co-translator of The Chinese Human
Rights Reader(2001) and has published articles in The Journal of the
History of Ideas, Philosophy East and West, and The Journal of Chinese
Philosophy.
China poses great challenges to human rights in theory and practice. In
practice, China is considered, by the measure of most Western countries,
to have a patchy record of protecting individuals’ human rights. In the
theoretical realm, Chinese intellectuals and government officials have
challenged the idea that the term “human rights” can be universally
understood in one single way and have often opposed attempts by
Western countries to impose international standards on Asian countries.
What should we make of these challenges – and of claims by members
of other groups to have moralities of their own? Human Rights and
Chinese Thoughtgives an extended answer to these questions in the first
study of its kind. Stephen C. Angle integrates a full account of the devel-opment of Chinese rights discourse – reaching back to important,
although neglected, origins of that discourse in seventeenth- and eigh-teenth-century Confucianism – with philosophical considerations of how
various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims
about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts.
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