Speaking of human rights

Baby, you can drive my car — just not in Saudi Arabia, the only country with a prohibition on women getting behind the wheel. More than a thousand Saudis have signed a petition opposing the informal ban — a ban that some very conservative clerics consider necessary to segregate women from unrelated men.

If you can get over your initial disbelief, you might ask how this situation is possible and whether it violates human rights accords. It turns out that the ban does violate Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which guarantees the "freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state." The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), of which Saudi Arabia is a member, however, rejected the UDHR as fundamentally at odds with Sharia.

The OIC instead adopted its own human rights framework in 1990: the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). This declaration does guarantee the right to freedom of movement — but only movement "within the framework of the Shari'ah." Since some conservative clerics see female drivers as incompatible with Sharia, the ban does not violate Saudi Arabia's commitment to the CDHRI.

That being said, is not the very idea of a human rights framework specific to a particular religion a serious non sequitur? We tend to think human rights are or at least ought to be universally agreed upon — for if to be human is the same in any society, then human rights, the rights we possess qua humans, are the same universally. Thus, whatever the correct framework for human rights is, that framework has to be universally valid.

We also tend to think that human rights can be justified and articulated without appeal to religious doctrines. Though the development of human rights in the West has certainly been influenced by religious thought, the UDHR is still a secular doctrine that stands independent of any particular religion. Thus, we seem to desire two things from a human rights framework: universality and secularity.

This insight helps explain the difference between the West and Saudi Arabia on human rights: The West thinks that all universal frameworks are secular, and Saudi Arabia thinks that all secular frameworks are incompatible with conservative interpretations of Sharia. How do we escape this impasse and reach a universally accepted framework of human rights?

There is no easy answer. Taking the ban on women driving as an example, there are two ways that a westerner like me can come to agree with a conservative cleric on this issue: Either the cleric has to let my secular arguments trump his religious conception of rights, or I have to let his religious arguments trump my secular conception of rights. But for either of those things to happen, one of us is going to have to adopt what William James calls a dead hypothesis — we'd have to believe something that "refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all" and give up beliefs that we see as central to our identity and our place in the world. No matter how hard we try, we may never be able to agree.

This is a sobering situation, but it is by no means unique to the question of human rights; it is precisely the same situation with advocates of intelligent design and evolution, or abortion and choice or you and the firebrand in your precept. This is the fundamental quandary of the public square — the possibility of irreconcilable differences that no amount of dialogue can solve. Dialogue can, however, identify which differences are irreconcilable.

These considerations help put the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia in perspective. As justified as we are in criticizing it, we've got to realize that it may take a less conservative generation to overturn it. When we reach the limits of conversation, the only way to press beyond those limits is to engage more moderate voices in the discussion. Therefore, while we should genuinely hope that the West and the most radical conservatives in Saudi Arabia come to agree on fundamental questions of human rights, we need to realize that agreement may be impossible so long as radicals have power. Matt Hoberg is a philosophy major from Kennett Square, Pa. He may be reached at mhoberg@princeton.edu.