Life, War and Peace: Towards a Hermeneutics of
Human Rights

Nythamar de Oliveira1“Only Human Life has Dignity”——Is it Right?

W

HEN we speak today of a “hermeneutics of human rights,” we are
dealing, above all, with a problem of philosophical justification,
so as to address the related questions “what are, after all, human rights?”
and “why and how should we defend them?” These issues are inseparable from the question of our thematic panel: “The view of life andhuman rights” according to Western and Eastern perspectives. The relationship between life itself and human rights is tied in, moreover, withan ontological-semantic problem, in that we can always ask whether theadjective “human” qualifies not only the “rights” at stake but also the“life” in question. After all, if we take the concept of life in a broader
sense, especially as we have learned from our Eastern friends, bothhuman life and human rights would refer back to a non-anthropocentric
view of life and nature, so that human beings no longer occupy a prominent place, say, as “the crown of creation,” according to a known
metaphor of the Judeo-Christian tradition. With the emergence of environmental ethics and movements for animal rights in the ’70s, it became
increasingly difficult to advocate “special” privileges for human beings
to the detriment of other species, especially now when we can also talkof rights being ascribed to nonhuman persons and denounce speciesism
as a prejudice or discrimination as untenable as racism or sexism. In
effect, with the emergence of environmental ethics and the consolidationof a global ecological awareness, it doesn’t seem fair to exalt human lifeat the expense of wild fauna and flora that have been threatened by thehuman exploitation and domination of nature.2 It seems, therefore, itwould be interesting to understand how humans ended up stealing thescene in evolutionary processes of nature just because they thought they
were the main actors, when in fact they are still in the process of figuring out what, after all, is their place in this vast universe. At least today
more than ever, we recognize that the irresponsible and unfair domination of nature, the systematic destruction of ecosystems, and the wars
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humans have waged against fellow human beings in order to ensure a
supposedly hegemonic domination only contribute to their own annihilation. The self-preservation of human beings, now more than ever, isrelated to our own self-understanding as a species and to our understanding of sustainability, not only of our natural environment but of oursocial, economic, legal, and political milieux. Only a comprehensive
view of sustainability can ensure a promising future for ourselves andfuture generations, as well as for other species of animal and plant life.
A hermeneutics of human rights assumes, moreover, that, as HansGeorg Gadamer put, the being that can be understood is language andself-understanding is correlative with historical consciousness.3 Thismeans that a philosophical hermeneutics of human rights requires aninterdisciplinary empirical research in intercultural dialogue of different
philosophical traditions, in a reflective process of self-understanding of
history, language, and cultures that contribute to understanding the socalled “human nature.” At the end of the day, we finally come to realizethat there is no such thing as a human, essentialized nature, a Gattungswesen, a species being that could be reduced to its material or
immaterial determinations. In a Heideggerian vein, being human means,
all in all, calling into question our very being and modes of existence. In
this brief communication, we will revisit some of the complex relations
between humans in their social life and its vicissitudes of war and peacein the many attempts of Western philosophy to reconcile humanity with
its other—the abstract other of reason, demonized in the ideologies ofthe other and excluded as the concrete other that threatens the horizon of
our taken-for-granted cultural identities.

Need to Justify Human Rights
In order to revisit the problem of the justification or the foundations ofhuman rights in the twenty-first century we could, therefore, address atleast three distinct levels of philosophical inquiry, namely: (1) the ontological-semantic problem, including epistemic questions of meaning andlanguage, seeking a plausible definition of what human rights are; (2)the problem of philosophical anthropology and historicity around the socalled “human nature” or whatever points to an anthropocentric specificity of human rights; (3) the hermeneutic problem of how to interpret,justify and defend human rights, including an intercultural approach, across-cultural or a multicultural one, and to what extent such ahermeneutic standpoint would still make any universalist validity claim.
Given our time constraints, we’ll try to outline these three levels, espe-

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cially the problem of the correlation between universalizability andhuman dignity in light of the indelible contributions of Immanuel Kant’s
cosmopolitanism and modern critics of our civilization, so as to accountfor a philosophical foundation of human rights today. Indeed, contemporary authors such as John Rawls, Norberto Bobbio, Jürgen Habermas,
Paul Ricoeur, Otfried Höffe, Thomas Pogge, Bernard Bourgeois, andAxel Honneth have all contributed decisively in recent decades to aphilosophical foundation of human rights, towards taking into accountthe interdisciplinary approach of the three levels mentioned above, especially with respect to contributions from economics, political theory,social psychology and legal sciences. Departing from universalists andcommunitarians in their various interpretations of the problem of thephilosophical foundations of human rights, we’ll try to show in what
sense variants of cosmopolitanism of Kantian inspiration still shows ahighly defensible model, through the semantic transformations operated
by the Hegelian-Marxist criticism (esp. the Frankfurt School) and therecent appropriation of liberal and republican authors like Rawls andHabermas. While the universalist conceptions of human rights
inevitably refer to natural law and natural rights formulations in thesocial contract models, especially with Locke, Rousseau and Kant, cosmopolitanism remains the most appropriate model to account for theconstant tension between cultural relativism and dogmatic claims ofcomprehensive doctrines (moral, ideological or religious, fundamentalist
or not). Thus, both contextualist and the so-called post-modernist andtranslocalist models seem to incur in the same sort of deficiency that
undermines the socially-laden arguments of communitarian models, as
they seek to justify an ethos, beliefs, values, and traditions inherent toparticular communities, without any pretension to universal, normative
validity claims.4 Cosmopolitanism has proved limited in its universalist
aspirations of freedom and equality, having been criticized, on the one
hand, along the same line of criticisms that Hegel raised against natural
law models, in particular, the abstract and individualistic conception of
morality, and on the other hand, by the materialist conception of history
and their neo-Marxist versions which subverted all forms of idealism.
Furthermore, many documents of conventions, treaties and international
agreements (e.g., UN and EU) lead us directly or indirectly to therecourse to principles of universalization, particularly inspired by cosmopolitan, Kantian philosophy of right. My working hypothesis is that
this correlation reflects the most important original contribution to thereformulation of Kant’s philosophical problem of human nature, rehabilitating universalism in ethics and political philosophy and making theLIFE, WAR AND PEACE

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juridification of human dealings and relations highly defensible, insofar
as the liberal principles of constitutional democracy may be extended to
all peoples and ensure the promotion of human rights under international law. So we can show that the correlation between Kantian universalizability and humanity enables us to overcome all the suspicions against
Eurocentrism and imperialism (economic, political and cultural) in order
to corroborate a reasonable multiculturalism and pluralism, respecting
the criticisms raised by communitarianism, without succumbing to anihilistic and irresponsible relativism. Ultimately, it can be shown inwhich sense a cosmopolitan conception of human rights leads us, on the
one hand, to endorse the correlation between freedom and equality and,on the other hand, to maintain the Kantian correlation between universalizability and humanity, and how it can enable an identification
between human rights as moral norms (Menschenrechte) and as basic
rights (Grundrechte), positively valued by the constitutional law andlegal procedures that take human dignity (Menschenwürde) seriously,
whether identified with humanity (Menschlichkeit, Menschheit) or withsome other broader, ultimate principle.

Ethical Problem: Why We Ought to Defend Peace?
Now, in order to reconstruct a hermeneutics of human rights, it is necessary to recapitulate the anthropocentric language and the historicityof the Eurocentric, modern natural law that paved the way for thereformulation of a universal declaration of human rights in the twentieth century. Since natural law postulated a state of nature as aninevitable state of war between members of a society, the challenge of
attributing rights of all human beings to ensure a peaceful co-existence
has become increasingly complex and more difficult to be satisfied,given the cultural relativism and the growing diversity of conflicting
positions both in the domestic scale and on the level of international
relations. The idea of a “human nature” that emerged within nature todominate it by controlling and directing their humanizing and civilizing potential to preserve homogeneous units of social groups, primarily in tribes, villages and boroughs, leading to the civilizing processesof modern nation-states, has been visibly marked more by war than bypeace treaties. “War and Peace” is not, moreover, only a literary theme
for historical novels and romances, but can be taken here as the subject-matter par excellence of human history. Certainly when we talkabout War and Peace (Russian Vojnai i mir), we immediately think of
the title chosen by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy for his epic novel

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published between 1865 and 1869 in four volumes and of the settingof the Napoleonic wars where social and personal conflicts marked thelives of five aristocratic families. The contradictions of human experience with all the surprises, successes, and failures are contrasted withthe apparent determinism of universal history. This great literary
theme also occupied the thinking of many philosophers, notably Hugo
Grotius, with the publication of his famous treatise on the Law of War
and Peace (De Jure Belli ac Pacis), 1625, and Carl von Clausewitz ,author of a monumental study On War (Vom Kriege), 1832. From thewritings of Greek historians like Thucydides and Herodotus on the
Peloponnesian Wars and the battles of the Hellenistic world, particularly against the Persians, until the recent writings of Michael Walzer,
Eric Hobsbawm and Samuel Huntington on theories of just war, theAge of Extremes and the clash of civilizations in our century we havewitnessed an endless cycle of wars that make “war and peace” paradoxically the most human of all the basic correlated features ofhumankind.5 As they have been variously defined as Homo sapiens
sapiens, homo faber and homo oeconomicus, human beings have
proved themselves the homo bellicus par excellence, because no otherknown species in the evolutionary history of our planet depends onwarlike conflicts against its own kind in order to assert itself in its survival. In effect, only the human animal is paradoxically characterized
as the one that justifies its own survival by the killing of members of
its own species—for various reasons: economic, political, social, religious, moral or even philosophical. This definition would, moreover,favor an interdisciplinary research on war in history, social sciences
and philosophy.6 To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we remarkthat there is nothing, at once, more human and more inhuman in
humanity than the perpetual conflict and cessation of hostilities in endless processes of war and peace: “War is the price we pay for living
in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish allstates. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil
is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us
from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand
foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The
state is called upon to check these impulses—but it generates others of
its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it
throws them all in a single direction—and that is war.”7 The importance of a philosophical reflection on the theme “War and Peace” isprecisely to rescue an ethical, normative argument to justify why weought to defend peace and condemn war, and why, despite this posi-

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tion, humans end up defending some legitimate use of force and violence by the state and, under certain conditions, a just war so as topromote peace.8 Thus, we can reconsider the proposal in the sense that
ethical and normative contractarian arguments, more precisely, Kantian, remain some of the most defensible justifications to prevent war
and promote peace among peoples, particularly as they pave the way
for a veritable hermeneutic reformulation of human rights.

Beyond Cultural Relativism and Naturalistic Fallacy
The problem of the philosophical foundations of human rights can be, it
seems, made possible by a hermeneutic conception of normativity, as it
reminds us of the ontological-semantic distinction between “understanding” (verstehen) and “explicating” (erklären) natural and cultural phenomena..Certainly every culture develops “inside” nature, from within,
as it were, and insofar as there is nothing “outside” of nature, naturalism
in the broadest sense can be easily reconciled with hermeneutics, as it
has been articulated through concepts of moral phenomenology and analytical normativity of ethics. But everything depends ultimately on how
we define “naturalism” and what is at stake in a normative approach tothe problem. After all, what is naturalism? We can speak of a methodological naturalism or scientific naturalism in the sense proposed by aprogram of naturalized epistemology, following the lapidary formula of
W.V.O. Quine, for whom the hypotheses are formulated so as to explain,predict and control events by observation of natural causes and may be
confirmed or refuted. The so-called hard-line naturalism, following thework of Quine and more recently of the cognitive sciences, neuroscienceand sociobiology, has implications not only for the reductionist philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, but also for psychology andmoral-ethical, normative conceptions.
We can also evoke a metaphysical or ontological naturalism, whereby the existence of things, events or properties is what ultimately
determines the nature of reality. Authors such as Habermas, Apel,
Ricoeur and contemporary moral thinkers sought to rehabilitate an ethical universalism, between the abstract universalism of Kantian conceptions and the relativism inherent in naturalists, contextualist andcommunitarians, avoiding thus the reductionism of cultural relativism
and variants of the naturalistic fallacy (inferring actions from the prescription of describable facts). Interestingly enough, life is also something to be described in terms of naturalism, to the extent that life isa natural phenomenon, but human life and life in general as it has

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been thematized by human beings is something that should be prescribed, for instance, as something to be preserved and deemed sacred,as we say that to live is often better than cease to live and that weshould live well (in Greek, eu zein). Life can be described in terms ofbattles, wars, and selection processes that eventually reward thestrongest or the fittest to survive. Competition turns out to be as fundamental and conducive to the preservation of our species as mutual
cooperation. From Hobbes to Rawls, the idea of socialization throughsocial cooperation and competition determines the roles to be playedby different players within the contractarian model. In this sense,
peace can be pursued rather than war, because only in a state of peace
can we cultivate the arts and sciences, politics and law, enjoy life toits fullest and to envision a morally good life. In the words of Daisaku
Ikeda, “the recognition of human rights is the foundation of peace.”
The hermeneutic circle of human rights finds thus its normative reasoning in our own experience of peace: beginning, middle, and end.
To understand life and to appreciate life, especially by taking humanlife as an end in itself, a supreme good to be pursued, cherished andcultivated, as something priceless and of matchless value, such has
been a constant concern for moral thinkers from Aristotle to Kant,
Plato to Gadamer. Moreover, it seems that Gadamer’s hermeneutics
provides a more compelling proposal than the Habermasian one, insofar as it favors an interpretive reading of the exciting relationshipbetween nature and culture, life and normativity. The term “culture”
may have a wider meaning than “civilization” in order to also coverpre-literary cultures with a level of relatively “primitive” practices.
Citing Spengler and Toynbee, historian Edward McNall Burns sought
to explain cultural evolution through the civilizing process, precededby cultural and technological developments widely known as the Stone
Age and the Bronze Age, the two periods extending over about two
million to 2,500 years before the Christian era.9 The emergence, consolidation and transmission of the spoken language, knowledge of fire,social practices such as burying the dead, the invention of the wheel,
weapons and stone tools (during the Paleolithic below), needles, harpoons, fishhooks, magic, art and the gradual development of socialorganization (Upper Paleolithic), agriculture, animal husbandry, navigation, and improvement of social institutions (Neolithic), all theselong processes of cultural evolution have contributed to the formationof so called “civilized man,” the Homo sapiens sapiens dominating
techniques of working with materials from nature such as bronze, copper, steel and iron, as well as to the development of writing and theLIFE, WAR AND PEACE

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transmission from one generation to another of its cultural legacies ofart, technology, science and literature. According to this historiographical or ethnographical perspective, technique and culture would be likethe matter and form of civilizing processes: a culture deserves thename of “civilization” when it reached a level of progress in which
writing had a wide use in the arts and sciences achieve a certain
degree of progress and social, political, legal, and economic institutions set the background to the development of problems of order,
safety, and efficiency facing a complex society. While history, anthropology, sociology and psychology have contributed over one hundredof consistent definitions and insights on the meaning and scope of culture, as Mukerji and Schudson observed, “no single discipline has amonopoly of the word culture.”10 The traditional opposition, especiallyin English, between culture and civilization (as a more or less broadand vague way to account for the processes of historical development)
becomes even more problematic when one considers the similarities
and contrasts that we find in the use of terms Kultur, Zivilisation and
Bildung in post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte, Hegel, Schelling,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, following the Enlightenment opposition
between nature (Natur) and freedom (Freiheit) or spirit (Geist).
Gadamer’s hermeneutics favors a reading of these traditions that promote genuine culture as values, beliefs and judgments shared by acommunity, usually closer to the arts (especially music, literature, theater, and rhetoric) than to science and emerging technologies, following the tension between enlightenment and romanticism, high culture
and popular culture, avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism. We
get a clear broader and narrower senses of that will be culture, which
inevitably leads us to processes of self-understanding and interpretation of cultures. A cultural identity, in fact, cannot be reduced to a single tradition or scope of cultural significance, e.g. an ethnic, racial,religious, national, sexual, gender or any particular cultural significance. Besides being porous, fluid, dynamic and susceptible to mutations or radical transvaluations, every culture can be combined with
one or more other cultures in a complex process known as cultural
hybridity. Thus, a Brazilian can be differentiated as a Nisei, AfroBrazilian, German-Gaucho, Italian-Paulista or Tupi-Guarani, and could
be, at the same time, Jewish, Spiritualist, leftist, and gay activist. A
political culture, a Jesuit culture and a culture of prevention, define
heteromorphous spaces of meaning that may take on more or lessbroad, intertwined senses in order to defy rigid, fixed definitions. The
current research in philosophy of culture tend to consolidate more and110

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more as inter-, multi- and transdisciplinary approaches in their various,
possible ways of accounting for inter-, multi-, and cross-cultural features. Ultimately, as stated by Jay Newman, culture can not be confined to their cultural products, “artifacts” and “objects” resulting fromits subtle processes of reification, as opposed to the positivist failureand frustrated attempts to arrive at a value-free definition and supposedly scientific take on culture, regardless of their reflective interpretations.11 If we are to avoid reductionism inherent in generalizing contrasts between naturalism and culturalism, following the neo-Kantian
opposition between fact and value or the quarrel between innate “psychological” and acquired “behavioral,” between what is natural andwhat is culturally and socially acquired (nature-nurture), we recourse
to a hermeneutic conception of culture as the most promising andcapable of coping with the growing conflict of interpretations of the
fruitful diversity of cultures, pluralism, and cultural identities. According to naturalist media psychologist Susan Blackmore, culture is nothing but “a mass of memes,” reminiscent of Hume’s definition of theself as a bundle of perceptions: “Culture is carried forward by memes,[which are] units of ideas, habits, skills, stories, customs, and beliefs
that are passed from one person to another by imitation or teaching.
Memes are, in effect, self-replicating, changeable units of information.”12 So how genes shape and inform the living organisms and theirvital functions, myths, inventions, languages and political systems
comes down to structures made of memes. But not everything is ameme. For example, playing football, to use tactical schemes andtechniques to play soccer can be a meme, but players’ skills, the bodylanguage, swings and bodily experience of playing football are notmemes. Personal experience and awareness of one’s own body (corps
propre) demand, in effect, a phenomenological analysis and ahermeneutics of subjectivity. This would be, moreover, a point of rupture with the naturalism of analytical thinkers like Daniel Dennett andFred Dretske, who deny the importance of phenomenology for an
account of the interaction between genes and memes in evolutionary
processes of nature and humanity. We believe further that a moral phenomenology can contribute to an analytic hermeneutics of social phenomena in search of a justification of normativity. A hermeneutics ofhuman rights can rescue the semantic-pragmatic dimension of sociocultural correlates that tends to be overshadowed by the predominanceof the ontological dimension of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, making it more defensible in its practical and normative intent.

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111“Justice as Fairness” to Guarantee Human Rights
The theme of war and peace served as a conceptual reason for the formulation of various theories of social contract, since the formulation ofnatural law theories by Althusius, Pufendorf and Grotius to the neocontractualism of Rawls and Scanlon. The contractarian model posits ahypothetical way, a way out of a permanent state of war (bellum omnium
contra omnes, the inevitable “war of all against all” in the state ofnature) to a state of peace (Commonwealth, State law or civil society)through the transfer of natural rights to a sovereign, so as to regulate thelegal-political relations (initially the recasting of the executive and legislative branches, later, especially after the work De l’esprit des lois byMontesquieu, the constitution of a third power, the judiciary). Contractarian models in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, in their respective formulations of absolutism, liberalism and radical democracy, graduallyconsolidated the pillars of the democratic and constitutional model, as
we know it today in most countries that subscribe to a constitution andensure human rights (especially political and social) to its citizens. As
we can see, despite all criticisms stemming from Vico, Hume and Hegel,the contractarian model can still be restored in our days, according to
Rawls, to justify political institutions and the legitimate use of force by
the state, especially when it is evoked as a proceduralism which
accounts for the stability of social, economic, and political institutions
that determine the criteria of public justice, namely, as a model of liberal
democracy, which guarantees freedom also extended to all citizens inthat it promotes an equal and fair distribution of fundamental rights andduties to everyone. The aim of a theory of “justice as fairness,” forRawls, is precisely to guarantee the inviolability of basic human rights(physical integrity, self-esteem and self-respect, basic freedoms andrights to education, work, health, moral and political autonomy) while
ensuring a fair equality of opportunity for all (allowing for quota systems and other public policies of affirmative action) and only permits
inequality to the extent that they are acceptable for the disadvantaged.13
The political liberalism of Rawls’s egalitarianism and versions of liberalsocialism (or social liberalism) cannot be reduced to welfare or statesocialism nor be confused with a kind of neo-economic liberalism orlibertarianism of the minimal state. In this sense, such an ethical-political view of life and human rights contributes to a culture of peace and toa permanent critique of state policies that promote war.

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War Should be Ruled Under Law
Already in Grotius, war is conceived as a legal procedure to protect
rights and punish infractions. Hence the need to seek a rational philosophical foundation for the so-called “just war” for what would be considered a necessary evil, having to be regulated. In Book I of his magnum opus (De Jure Belli ac Pacis), Grotius refers to Cicero to recall thatthe use of military force was justified for fighting the simplest to themost complex battles. Indeed, Grotius reminds us that the proper Latin
word bellum (war) comes from the ancient word duellum, a duel, a contest between two people, as well as peace between people evokes theidea of unity, unitas, like its opposite . Hence Grotius reminds us that theword in Greek, polemos, leads us to the “multiple,” “the many” (hoi polloi) that form the polis, the ancient city-state. As Heraclitus in the fifth
century BC had already mentioned in a famous fragment (D. 53), “war(polemos) is father and king of all things,”14 a cosmological conceptionof the conflicts inherent in the process of becoming the contrary, war for
Grotius is compared to a process or ritual, enabling the formulation of a“just war” under the principles of military law, anticipating the transition from natural law morality toward positivist formulations, reducible
to specific regulations or technical procedures of international law.
According to Grotius,“That war is a solemn right of people under the two conditions are necessary: first, that both parties participants are invested in their nations by
the sovereign, and, secondly, that certain formalities are observed.”15

Like all human activities under the rule of law, war should also be ruled
according to criteria set out publicly, as well as law and policy would be
gradually transformed in their philosophical arguments increasingly secularized, to replace the religious and theological arguments supposedly“justifying” the “holy war” (e.g., the people of Israel against their neighbors in Deuteronomy 7, 1–3). The constant changes, according to several models of theories about wars, in fact take us back to the “perennial”
problem of political philosophy and philosophy tout court, namely, therelationship between praxis and theoria. I think it would be fair to assertthat a good social theory should be capable of accounting for whatever
happens in der Praxis, through the historical practices and concrete,material human relations, as well as through the observation of natural
events. The classical concepts of war unite us somewhat to the contemporary reformulations of this theme. However, as rightly pointed

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Bonanata Luigi, “the doctrine of ‘just war’ declines, it is because, in theory at least, has the right to occupy the place of morality, the legal reason is, by definition, universal.”16 Thus we come to the famous definitionof von Clausewitz, considered the most important theoretician of modern war: “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. Each [party]
strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: hisfirst object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable offurther resistance.” The three plans that determine the trihedral of war,according to Clausewitz, are the outcome of “(1) the original violence of
its elements, hatred and animosity, which may be looked upon as blind
instinct; (2) the play of probabilities and chance, which make it a free
activity of the soul; and of (3) the subordinate nature of a political
instrument, by which it belongs purely to the reason.”17
His best-known formulation by the maxim that “war is merely thecontinuation of politics by other means” to legitimize the hegemony ofpower, would be reversed a century later by Michel Foucault, assertingthat “politics is the continuation of war by other means” so as to emphasize the endless power games, of veridiction and jurisdiction, in theinterstices of our unsocial sociability.18

Today’s Greatest Challenge: Wars of Intolerance
The theme of just war (bellum justum) was, in effect, approached byseveral classical and medieval thinkers in the West even before Grotius,
such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and is already found in several
passages of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament. It wasoften regarded as a moral argument in order to justify wars, especiallywith a view to defending the people of God according to the divine planfor humanity, so that the horrors and hardships of a given situation of
war were justified in light of a greater good or peace to be realized in theimmediate future. War was thus conceived as a kind of necessary evil.
The rules that govern the justice of war (jus ad bellum) should therefore
be differentiated from those that govern a just and fair conduct in war(jus in bello), as we find today in the Geneva Convention. John Rawls
revisited this tradition in the twentieth century, in his attempt to extend atheory of justice to international relations. The ideal of perpetual peace
advocated by Saint-Pierre, Rousseau and Kant in the eighteenth century
are rescued by Rawls into what he calls a “realistic utopia” as a concrete
alternative to the pax americana that, like the pax romana two millennia
ago, lacks normative basis for the imposition of their own particular economic, geopolitical interests. Rawls was ruthless in his criticism of

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American foreign policy since the use of atomic bombs against the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the disastrous intervention against democratic regimes like Allende, by economic and ideological interests of “national security.” Rawls also did not hesitate to link the
Holocaust to the culture of anti-Semitism, just like the problem of wars
of intolerance, revived in Northern Ireland and the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, remains the greatest challenge to modern ethical and politicalnormativity, namely, how can different, incompatible comprehensive
doctrines (religious, moral, ideological, etc.) live together peacefully inorder to enable sociability? The question of tolerance, discussed by
Rawls in the context of the emergence of political liberalism, in the
midst of religious wars, it also brings us to the fundamental problem of
human rights.
After all, what are human rights? An encyclopedic definition can help
us: “Human Rights: powers, conditions of existence, and possessions towhich an individual has a claim or title by virtue of being human.”19 A
simple empirical observation, through the Universal History can help us
but does not seem conclusive to understand what “human being” refers
to or what authorizes us to grant such rights to an alleged “humannature.” This seems to be, as we suspected, a philosophical question that
requires an interpretive work not only of texts and cultural traditions, but
a self-understanding of how we become who we are today, modern individuals, heirs of the Enlightenment and the emancipatory ideals of liberal democracy—what Foucault called a hermeneutics of subjectivity.
While not necessarily prior to historical events or the observation of
empirical phenomena, moral philosophy has always sought to justify thecustoms and beliefs of people beyond the mere instrumentalization of
mythologies and the institutionalization of religious sacrament. Thus,
we can revisit the history of universal human rights and seek to understand why we defend those rights, what is the legitimacy and whether
we can rationally justify its purported universality. Thus, philosophicalhermeneutics can help us better define what are, after all, “humanrights.”Extension of Rights: From “Inside” to “Outside”
We usually attribute to ancient Babylonians the encoding and the first
formulations of human rights, notably in the celebrated Code of Hammurabi (18th century before the Christian era). Various cultures, religions and ancient civilizations attest to the importance of sedimented,
standardized and codified practices of social coexistence, so as to safe-

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guard the lives, possessions and relationships between members of acommunity, tribe, clan or city. The Torah itself, the ancient Jewish law(also called the “Pentateuch” in allusion to the first five books of the
Bible), has contributed decisively to the consolidation of these rights in
our civilization processes. Particularly, in the Ten Commandments (theDecalogue) we find a moral foundation for the community life of a people. As we find the so-called “golden rule” in Judaism, Buddhism andChristianity, in its negative versions (“We should not do unto others
what we do not want to be done to ourselves”) and positive variants(“Do unto others as you would have do unto you ”), the principle of universalization of Judaism (“In thee shall be blessed all the nations of theearth”) and Christianity (“In Christ we are all one”) would constantly
challenge the intolerance of people, especially in the persecution ofminorities and religious wars. In Greece and ancient Rome, we find several examples of such encodings in legal writings and philosophicaltexts. The Stoic philosophy and philosophical anthropology of Plato andAristotle made an important contribution to the discussions that resulted
in medieval and Renaissance humanism in the reformulation of the socalled natural rights. Thus, it can be to assert that universal rights, within
the incipient meaning of what we now call “human rights,” find theirsources in Roman law and natural law in the classics, although the current political and legal conception is certainly due to the universal adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General
Assembly of the United Nations, on 10 December 1948, following the
major revolutions of 1688 and related statements (English Glorious Revolution), 1776 (Declaration of Independence) and 1789 (“Déclaration
des droits de l’homme et du citoyen,” during the French Revolution).
We may as well go back to the times preceding William of Ockham,
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, as we have witnessed an interactive
transformation of traditions and conceptions of human nature andhuman rights, as evidenced by important documents like the Magna
Carta (1215), the “Petition of Right (1628) and “Bill of Rights (1689) in
Britain, predating the U.S. Constitution (1789), its Bill of Rights“(1791) and the numerous texts of abolitionists that resulted in the abolition of slavery in the Americas in the second half of the 19th century.
We recall that Brazil was the last country in the hemisphere to abolishslavery in 1888. In general, one can see that there was a constant conjunction between the liberal concern to determine the boundaries of themodern state, related to the extension of universal rights and duties(basic freedoms, rights) to all citizens, and the evolution of our own perception of the Other, that have not yet won full citizenship—always

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starting from the “inside” towards the “outside,” for example, when we
first learned to tolerate non-Anglican Protestants (Calvinists, forinstance), among Anglicans in England and then extended to the tolerance of non-Protestant Christians (Catholics) before watching the political emancipation of Jews and other excluded groups, to the extent thatanyone could claim their rights as human beings. Thus, when the habeas
corpus was instituted in the eighteenth century, a Scottish philosopher
like David Hume could anticipate that it was to acknowledge a sense ofuniversality in our human nature, not because of any innate idea but justfor convenience, empathy and fairness. As Rawls put it so aptly, fromthe perspective of political pragmatism, we are continually learning totolerate one another and especially to deal with the intolerant (hence thetricky boundaries of democratic toleration) in society and between countries, representing national states.20“Impossibility of Justice” or “Realistic Utopia”?
Moreover, since the first day slavery ships arrived in Brazil, one cannot
help wondering that there was resistance to the violent domination,
oppression and exploitation of human beings, as we are reminded of thebrave activism of Zumbi dos Palmares. There was, moreover, a genocideof indigenous peoples in the first decades of colonization processes in
Luso-Hispanic Americas, promptly denounced by the Fray Bartolomede las Casas in the 16th centure, who would be later reputed as a precursor of liberation theology in the 70s and 80s. Genocide, racism and thesystemic discrimination of Jews, Indians, Blacks, Armenians, Roma,
Kurds and other persecuted groups (we think today of the delicate situation of Palestinians in the occupied territories in the West Bank in Israel,
as we think also of all refugees who suffer political persecution today)
only confirms the worsening of an inevitable “cycle of violence”—to
use the felicitous formula of Dom Helder Camara—that shames thehuman species, the only one among all animals which is capable of systematically torturing, killing, and exterminating other fellow creatures.
The worst part of this whole story is that many of these instances of barbarism and massacres are committed in the name of God, for the sake ofa religion or for some supposedly defensible ideal (moral, ideological orpolitical). Just as there was always resistance of dominated groups,
despite the law and all the repressive ideological apparatus. By law andcodifications of existing institutions, the tragedy of Antigone could
teach us something, as we dare to subvert and transgress the laws of thePolis in the name of an inherent right to our human condition, or some

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ethical ideal that transcends the legal order of political institutions andthe power that be. There are always those who dare to claim a right to an
invisible ethical ideal that transcends the existing order and positive legislations. It is always possible to envision and foster a culture of peace,even in a given status quo, supposedly legitimated by force and by military culture. In a post-Cold war, post-9/11 globalized world we need a
new conception of military identity, the identity of the peace manager,
as Volker Franke put so well, “that merges adherence to combat andnoncombat values in order to ensure cognitive preparation of militaryleaders for these challenges.”21 If Samuel Huntington has shown thatmilitary ethics results from the combination of political realism and conservatism, it is possible to call into question the very clash of civilizations that seems to deem our condition to warlike creatures in perpetual
conflict.
In light of UN documents, and notably the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, one can speak today of human rights in the sense of economic, political and socio-cultural rights of all human beings, to include
groups that have been systematically excluded from the very discourseof human rights. Throughout world history, we have seen new claims
being made by different groups such as women, children, ethnic minorities as well as groups with particular claims, such as gays, lesbians, people with physical or mental disabilities. The ideals of liberty, equality
and justice are now translated by the new discourses of an ever-increasing inclusion in participatory democracy. This is therefore the mostintriguing level of our philosophical and moral grounds of human rights,
as the non-essence of our human freedom has paved the way for the socalled third generation human rights (right to development, right to ahealthy and ecologically balanced environment, right to peace, right ofownership of the common heritage of mankind) and other expressions ofsuch rights, that were not at some point perceived as legitimate claims(for example, the union of homosexuals or a basic minimum income
program)—and who will judge, or rather, who is entitled to say what is,after all, right? After all, we must start from a political pragmatism on
the diversity of cultures and conceptions of the good, to follow our processes of collective learning, especially learning to tolerate and respect
each other accordingly. Basic human rights are those that enable thepeoples all over the earth to endure their existence and protect theirintegrity and their very lives (for example, guaranteeing them minimum
conditions of subsistence and their individual liberties). Let me conclude
by saying that it is possible to conceive of human rights in a non-ethnocentric approach that allows for the possibility of cultural exchanges and118

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the dialogue of cultures, so as to include the values and contributions of
non-Eurocentric, non-Christian and non-Western peoples and cultures.
The question of the possibility of a normative foundation of a just war
theory, as we would refer to the problem of the impossibility of justice(so dear to Derrida) reveals also its correlation with the problem ofphilosophical foundations of human rights. Precisely because many try
to justify recourse to arms as the only form of “doing justice,” even incontexts that are obviously not constrained by religious arguments offanatics or fundamentalists. The unfortunate coincidence of a nation thatis one of the most successful democracies with the war-promoting foreign policies of the United States past administrations only confirms thetremendous ethical crisis of our day. And this is a problem that concerns
the entire world, including millions of Americans who are influenced by
the powerful war machine, arms industry and the military complex. We
all know today that “defense” has emerged as the most important sourceof GDP of the United States of America and of many developed countries, more than tourism, industry and financial speculation. In fact, scientific and technological research itself, in almost all fields of inquiry,
depend on all wartime applications. Thus, the conquest of space reveals
itself as the conquest of the earth, and every political gain, intra
nationes, involves some war or a peace agreement: hence the challenge
to discuss the relationship between war and peace, even from a perspective of ethics and political philosophy. The theories of just war were,from their classic formulations to our day, attempts to meet these challenges. The theories of just war serve, in effect, to clarify the transforming nature of war as an object of interdisciplinary theoretical research,especially after the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the ongoing “war on terror.” The problem of globalization has been, since
September 11, certainly complexified, as well as democracy itself andthe whole question of human rights were put in check. Also, the way
George W. Bush administration led the most controversial issue raisedin discussions of international policy forums, the UN and the world,even in academic circles. The war in Iraq also raised criticisms of themost eminent European philosophers like Habermas, Derrida, Hosler,
Tugendhat, Apel, and Kersting, as well as important American thinkers
or who teach in the United States, such as Putnam, Walzer, Pogge,
Chomsky and Richard Rorty. Both Rawls and Habermas provide us withtheoretical and conceptual resources to continue defending the possibility of a more just society and a world with less war and more peace without shame or any pejorative suspicion of utopia. The messianic andutopias failed precisely because of his Manichean vision of the world inLIFE, WAR AND PEACE

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which war itself is justified by the victory of good over evil. Beyond
good and evil, an attitude of sober nihilism, we can also consider situations in which conflicts are more acceptable although they are multipliedin proportion to the diversity of peoples and their interests, no matter
how different they are. This would just be an extension of strategic global justice, reflexively calibrated by ideal theory (for peace through the
UN and its bodies of international arbitration) and the non-ideal theory(in medias res, from our actual conflicts and wars, through bargaining
and international relations of Realpolitik). According to Rawls,
what is important for the Law of Peoples is the justice and stability ofliberal and decent societies, without regard to questions of distributive
justice, but such a reading would be quite defensible, as shown byThomas Pogge and exponent of cosmopolitanism. According to thesecriteria, the U.S. would not be justified in its attack on Iraq, to the extent
that they do not act according to criteria universal and not resort to anymeans recognized by other people, through the United Nations to combat terrorism. After all, the question will always be positioning themselves for or against the war, in certain contexts. The same realistic
utopia of Kantian inspiration that guided the research of Rawls, in
effect, had been based on three definitive articles for perpetual peace,
namely: (1) the establishment of a republican constitution (ie democratic), ( 2) basing the law of nations or people in a federalism of free states,and (3) limiting the cosmopolitan right to conditions of universal hospitality.22 Even though one cannot draw normative claims from the analyses of world history, military power, and regional and international wars,
one can always call into question human collective behavior and the
conduct of political figures and power relations in world history. Since
Hobbes and Kant called into question, by very different reasons, thestate of nature and war between humans and peoples by means of asocial contract, it seems that human sociality and sociability defy ourgiven conceptions of human nature so as to allow for the emergence of
normativity in moral, legal, and political terms. For Kant this is the very
ideal of practical reason, which subordinates empirical descriptions toprescriptive, normative claims that cannot be reduced to any descriptive
constatation in history. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, one might argue
that the “discovery of general laws in the field of [social sciences] ismade difficult by the circumstance that observed [social] phenomena areoften affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately.”23 For instance, class, gender, ethnic and racial identities, as well as
religious and diverse cultural features that determine value fomation andthe codifications of norms and laws, these are all empirically accessible

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and yet they all seem to fall short of establishing normativity as such. In
Neo-Kantian terms, natural facts can be contrasted with moral values
and normative claims, just like systemic mechanisms and empirical conditioning can be fairly described but are not prescribed in a morally normative way, say, as the Golden Rule and “ought” claims.
In conclusion, I should like to wrap up with two quotes from contemporary thinkers from the Western and Eastern pacifist traditions who
were dedicated to cultivating peace and the informed dialogue between
peoples and different cultures. First, I would like to recall an instigating
excerpt from Albert Einstein’s Mein Weltbild, as he compared Kant’s
perpetual peace to the peacemaking projects of Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi:“As long as the possibility of war remains, nations will insist on being
as perfectly prepared militarily as they can, in order to emerge triumphant from the next war. It will also be impossible to avoid educating the youth in warlike traditions and cultivating narrow national vanity joined to the glorification of the warlike spirit, as long as people haveto be prepared for occasions when such a spirit will be needed in the citizens for the purpose of war. To arm is to give one’s voice and makeone’s preparations not for peace but for war. Therefore people will notdisarm step by step; they will disarm at one blow or not at all... Anyone
who is not prepared to make the fate of his country in case of a disputedepend entirely on the decisions of an international court of arbitration,and to enter into a treaty to this effect without reserve, is not reallyresolved to avoid war. It is a case of all or nothing.”24

The second quote comes from a dialogue between the President of Soka
Gakkai International, Daisaku Ikeda, and Brazilian intellectual Austregésilo Athayde, when the Buddhist philosopher forcefully defended
the right to live in peace as the foundation of human rights:“This peace does not only indicate a situation without war: it frees fromthe fear of destruction by nuclear weapons and also the woes caused byclashing nationalist interests. This indicates the full flourishing of peaceand full human dignity.”25

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Notes
I should like to thank Mr Wallace Moura for his invitation to attend the First Symposium on Oriental and Western Philosophy, as well as to congratulate the Japanese colleagues and members of the Brazilian branch of Soka Gakkai International for carrying
on this debate on “Contemporary Civilization and Philosophy.”2
Cf. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
[1979].
3
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1986 [1960], p.
xxii.
4
See my “Zu einer hermeneutischen Begründung der Menschenrechte,” Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie 54/6 (2006): p. 829-840.
5
Cf. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical
Illustrations. London: Allen Lane, 1978; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The
Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. Time Warner Books, 2002; Samuel Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996.
6
Cf. Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War. London: Routledge,
1998; The First World War: To Arms. Oxford University Press, 2003; Financing theFirst World War. Oxford University Press, 2004.
7
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2000.
8
Cf. Terry Nardin (org.), The Ethics of War and Peace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996.
9
Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, W
W Norton & Co, 1998.
10
Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson, Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary
Perspectives in Cultural Studies. University of California Press, 1991, p. 35.
11
Jay Newman, Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997, p. 121.
12
Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think
about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human. Oxford University Press,
2006, p. 24.
13
Cf. my Rawls. Coleção Passo a Passo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2003.
14
Cf. Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge University Press,
1979, p. 205–210.
15
H. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis I, iii, 4.
16
Cf. L. Bonanate, A Guerra. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2001, p. 133; N. de
Oliveira, Tractatus practico-theoreticus. Porto Alegre: Edipucrs, 1999.
17
C. von Clausewitz, Da Guerra I, i, 28.
18
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980, p.
90.
19
The Random House Encyclopedia. New York: Random House, 1990, p. 2289
20
Cf. Rawls, op. cit.
21
Volker Franke, Preparing for Peace: Military Identity, Value Orientations, andProfessional Military Education. Praeger, 1999, p. 39.
22
Cf. Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), em port. À Paz Perpétua. Trad.
Marco A. Zingano. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 1989.
1

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Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?,” Monthly Review (May 1949), p. 123.
Albert Einstein, The World as I See It. New York: Citadel, 2001, p. 87.
25
In Austregésilo de Athayde and Daisaku Ikeda, Diálogo: Direitos Humanos no
Século XXI. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000, p. 196.
23
24