Why Not Everything Can Be Shades of Grey
Why all this contemporary craziness? One explanation is that the dominant narrative of the post-9/11 world is anti-imperialism. Bush and Blair prosecuted their wars with the language of human rights. Yet we also saw detention without trial, the use of torture and the mass killings of civilians. Politicians’ talk of ‘humanitarian intervention’ provoked reasonable cynicism, and yet justified outrage over the hijacking of human rights discourse shaded into a general contempt for the very concept of human rights.
Max Dunbar on Steven Lukes‘ Moral Relativism.