This article discusses whether the international community is right to ignore the brutal human rights abuses in North Korea’s political prison camps in the name of cultural relativism, and explores the legitimacy of cultural imposition through universal sentiments and ethical standards.
From 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., they dig coal or chop wood. No food is provided, and all kinds of violence and malice are taken for granted. It sounds like hell according to many religions, but surprisingly, this is the daily life of 100,000 people in North Korea’s political prison camps. Their right to survival is threatened by food shortages, and they are denied the freedom to travel, participate in politics, or even hum a foreign song. The international community, including the United Nations, has consistently called on North Korea to stop these abuses, but the country’s attitude has been that it is unjust to impose “Western views of human rights” on their culture.
Cultural relativism, which recognizes that cultures have their own values and that it is not right to impose them, helps to resolve ethnic conflicts and protect ethnic minorities. In the past, European imperialists discovered and colonized the New World, enslaved indigenous peoples, and exploited their resources. To justify their actions, they imposed the idea of the inherent superiority of their own race on the colonized people, even using scientific findings to justify their actions. In response, cultural relativism was coined in the 1930s in American anthropology to point out the fallacy of judging cultures with their own value systems by Western standards and to call for tolerance of other cultures.
However, justifying all human rights abuses because each culture has its own values has led to far too many victims of cruelty and tragedy. The idea of “Asian values,” as espoused by Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew, that the East has its own unique set of human rights that differ from individualistic Western notions of human rights, has been used to justify brutal human rights abuses in autocratic countries like China and Malaysia. Globally, 200 million women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), which causes unbearable pain and complications, and even though the practice has been outlawed, it is still openly practiced due to cultural differences. Even in Korea, discriminatory sentiment against LGBTI people is still widespread and difficult for the average person to overcome, and anyone who points it out is often met with anti-LGBTI rallies by some religious groups.
Therefore, despite the undeniable fact that we should respect the values of other cultures for their own sake, I would argue that enforcing culture can be justified in certain cases. Specifically, I will argue that we can use factual research on universal human sentiment as a basis for enforcing cultural prohibitions. To do this, I will first show that universal sentiments exist in all cultures. Next, we will apply this universal sentiment as a criterion for judging cultures and answer possible objections. Finally, we’ll expose the “coercion is inherently wrong” bias as a justification for coercion and provide a rationale for coercion.
In order to justify coercing a culture, one must be able to explain why the culture of the coercor is better than the culture of the coerced, without relying on the values of that culture. Currently used concepts like human rights and freedom come from Western culture, so they are not sufficient to determine whether a culture is good or bad. However, if there is an emotion that all human beings have in common, it may be possible to use this emotion as a criterion for judging the goodness or badness of a culture. Therefore, I will first establish the existence of a universal emotion, and then argue that it can indeed be used as a criterion for judging a culture.
First, I will argue that we can find universal sentiments by studying the facts of the natural and scientific environment to which we all belong. For example, all human beings, without exception, have lived on a planet with a 24-hour cycle of night and day, consumed air, water, and nutrients, and acquired mechanisms of aggression and love that operate on a biological level by forming societies. While some of our emotions may be acquired, shaped by the customs of our culture, at least some of our emotions are shaped by innate biological factors, and these are traits that are common to all of us, regardless of culture.
In fact, several scientific studies have shown that at least some emotions are universal across cultures. Facial expressions corresponding to the six basic emotions of happiness, fear, sadness, and so on are common across all cultures, even in congenitally blind people who have never seen facial expressions in themselves or others. The phenomenon of spontaneously mimicking another person’s emotions is universal among all human beings, even primates, who are more distant from us than any two cultures.
An example of a universal emotion is the dislike of pain and threat. Pain avoidance increases the chances of survival from an evolutionary perspective and is found in many animals, including humans. In fact, it’s also found in cultures where violence is prevalent. In the villages of the Yanomami people, warfare is constant, women are routinely subjected to violence, and the victorious village kills the children of their opponents. However, many observations show that they do not enjoy violence: women flee in terror when they are in danger, and men are gripped by fear when war breaks out. In the end, their participation in attacks can be seen as a result of social pressure.
Before we end our discussion of universal sentiments, it’s important to note that while they are universal enough to apply to the entire human race, they are predicated on our natural and biological environment, which means that they can change if our environment changes. Modern science has discovered that the human blueprint is embedded in our DNA, and genetic engineering has confirmed the possibility of altering that DNA at will, meaning that there are no insurmountable technical obstacles preventing us from creating superhumans. If genetic engineering allows most humans to control their pain and fear at will, then universal sentiment will have to change accordingly.
Next, universal sentiment can be a criterion for judging the goodness or badness of a culture because it is part of their own value system, albeit an externally proposed one. We cannot judge a culture based on human rights and freedoms, for example, because these are values of our own culture. However, universal sentiments, by definition, are found in all cultures, so they must be part of their own value system. Therefore, the legitimacy of universal sentiments cannot be questioned because they are external to any culture.
Now, let’s look at some real-world examples and possible objections to this criterion. In the first example, we can conclude that dictatorships like North Korea that suppress the human rights of their citizens are bad because they violate universal sentiments of freedom and stability. Many studies have shown that lack of control over one’s environment induces an extreme biological stress response that can be harmful to health. This is true for rats, and it’s also true for primates and humans. These findings support the idea that cultures that create anxiety about being arrested at a moment’s notice and use force to limit what you can do are counterproductive to the emotions of their inhabitants. In fact, the constant pro-democracy movements in autocratic countries show that people want more freedom and stability.
In the second case, forced female genital mutilation (FGM) and honor killings in some cultures can be judged as bad based on the universal sentiment of not wanting to suffer. As we discussed earlier, the sentiment against suffering is universal at a biological level, which supports the idea that the practice violates the sentiment of its members. Some might point out that only some members of the society suffer, so it doesn’t violate the sentiments of all members. However, this is a result of the society’s failure to distinguish between perpetrators and victims as different subcultures. Even if they’re in the same culture, one has a culture of inflicting and the other has a culture of being inflicted upon, so it makes sense to distinguish between the two. If we follow this logic, we can argue that the perpetrators are imposing a culture that is contrary to the victims’ sentiments and therefore unjust.
The first possible rebuttal is that we should consider that violence and selfishness are also universal sentiments. In this case, the sentiment of violence is pitted against the sentiment of not wanting to be violated, and when two different universal sentiments are pitted against each other, it’s up to us to decide which is stronger. Since the sentiment to avoid violence is directly related to survival, while the sentiment to inflict violence is only indirectly related through the goal of becoming a higher ranked individual, it could be argued that the sentiment to avoid violence is biologically stronger. In addition, violence prevents the formation of stable societies, so it also runs counter to the desire for a stable life, which further weakens the relative strength of the violent sentiment.
As a second possible rebuttal, it can be pointed out that even if a culture does not guarantee universal sentiment, there may be cases where people do not want it to stop. Indeed, there are many people in dictatorships who wholeheartedly praise the dictator in every way, and there are women, albeit a minority, who do not oppose FGM. This misconception overlooks the fact that culture, by its very nature, applies to many people at the same time, not just individuals, and it is possible to clear up the misconception by distinguishing between whether some or all of the affected people want the culture to continue.
If only some of the victimized people want to preserve the culture, then the judgment that the culture is bad is justified because it is unjust for the other side to impose its violation of the universal sentiments of those who do not want it. However, this judgment does not imply a claim that voluntary participation is bad. The existence of unwilling victims means that the culture is coercing them, and judging a coercive culture to be bad means that they should be allowed to make their own choices.
Next, if all victims want to be preserved, then it seems to me that this case, if it actually exists, would only serve as evidence that the factual judgment about universal sentiment is wrong. As mentioned earlier, universal sentiments are common to all humanity on a biological level, so while it is possible for two sentiments to be in opposition to each other, or for some people to have weaker sentiments, it is almost impossible for everyone in a culture to sincerely desire its violation. If we do encounter a case where this is the case, it can only be because the values of the culture that are in conflict with the universal sentiment that is being violated are related to other universal sentiments that are relatively stronger; in other words, the culture can be judged not to be bad by the standards of universal sentiment, which is not a counterexample to the standard of universal sentiment.
So far, we’ve used universal sentiment to judge the goodness or badness of some cultures. However, a value judgment that a culture is undesirable is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a value judgment that a culture can be coerced into ceasing to exist. Therefore, in this section, we will discuss whether a culture can be coerced into ceasing to exist, assuming that we find it undesirable. To do so, I will first refute the common misconception that coercion of a culture is inherently unjust, and then present a rationale that justifies coercion.
First, I want to point out that the conservative response that cultural coercion is unethical stems from a misunderstanding of logical relations. Cultural relativism argues two things. The first is the factual observation that there is no common value system between cultures, and the second is the claim that because the first observation holds true, we should be tolerant of other cultures. While this seems to make sense at first glance, they overlook the logical fact that the value judgment “we should be tolerant” cannot be derived from the factual judgment “there is no common value system”; the latter value judgment must involve a value system other than the former.
This can be easily understood by analogy. If you see a high school student smoking a cigarette as you walk by, it’s a moral decision to stop them, just as it’s a moral decision to look the other way. Just as people in some cultures may think their culture is good, but it may go against universal sentiment, they may like smoking, but it’s a verifiable fact that smoking is bad for their bodies. Assuming that there is no retribution for restraint and that restraint can be accomplished with the push of a button, no one would argue that restraint is warranted, even though some people might choose to do so. Indeed, there are many criticisms of broadcasters and Wikipedia for maintaining mechanical neutrality on the part of bystanders, even on non-objective values.
Next, imposing a culture can be justified on the grounds that you don’t want to be treated that way. There is a methodology for determining whether a system is just, called the “veil of ignorance,” which states that a system is closer to justice if it is established through free contract without knowing what society and class you belong to. According to this, pushing a button to stop a high school student smoking a cigarette as you walk by can be justified by your concern that it could be you or someone in your family who is addicted. Similarly, pushing for the end of a culture that oppresses universal sentiments can be justified by the fear that you might be oppressed in that culture yourself.
Some might argue that these definitions are not universal. However, this is a misreading of the situation: we are the ones doing the coercing, so we must justify it in terms of our own value system. The reason we considered universal standards earlier is because the behavior of people in other cultures is guided by their value system, and we can’t judge our own behavior by theirs. If we want to stop a high school student from smoking harmful cigarettes, shouldn’t it be based on our values, not theirs? If a culture that doesn’t have such a standard of justice says that our culture is wrong and we want to force them to stop, we will need a different justification based on their values.
The legitimacy of cultural coercion, sometimes at the hands of scholars who deplored the oppression of minorities, sometimes at the hands of dictators who trampled on human rights, has been a major point of contention for many human rights activists and those in power over the past 100 years. While the discovery by anthropologists that each culture has its own unique value system has helped the world recognize the need for tolerance of other cultures, it has also been used by abusive politicians to justify brutal human rights abuses.
In this article, we look for evidence to justify the imposition of culture through universal sentiments shared by all humanity. First, we show that we can identify universal sentiments among Homo sapiens through natural science research. Next, we examined whether these universal sentiments can be used to judge culture. Finally, to justify the act of coercion, we pointed out that not coercing is not value-neutral, and provided an ethical basis for justifying coercion.
It is not right to dislike someone because they are from a different culture or because their behavior is strange in light of your own values. But equally, it is not right to tolerate inhuman acts of cruelty simply because they are of a different culture. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a historic milestone in the struggle for human dignity, strongly warns in its final article, “Nothing in the present Declaration shall be construed as giving any State, group or individual the right to engage in any activity or to take any action aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration.”
