THE CRISIS OF THE REASON IN THE XX CENTURY AND THE DISCOURSES OF LEGITIMATION OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS: OVERCOMING THE DISPUTE BETWEEN UNIVERSALISM AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE AFFIRMATION OF A COSMOPOLITAN PROJECT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract

Philosophy, during the history of the western civilization, was supplanted by the techno-science relatively to the explanations of the world and by the Christianity relatively to the sense of life, under the point of view of the masses. However, modernity takes it to the disenchantment of the safety that was provided by the metaphysics - especially the one of the Christianity - and the science stops being the safe harbor that it promised to be in the XIX century. Facing that, the philosophical skepticism, that had been relegated to the ostracism, returns with energy in the XX century, fact that becomes relevant for the analysis of the individual and the culture, especially concerning the cultural relativism. Nevertheless, when applying the relativism to the cultures, where peoples or small groups would have the right of maintaining autonomy in relation to moral norms of conviviality; even if that represents the acceptance of violative practices concerning the rights established as fundamental to the human dignity by the remaining of the population; it comes across the questioning of how pressing is the debate about the necessity or not of establishing universal ethics, fact that culminates in the debate concerning the human rights. In this sense, two main philosophical currents rise: the universalism, whose theorists defend the existence of universal moral judgments and, therefore, of human rights with global validity; and the cultural relativism, whose followers defend that the values – so that the human rights – can only be culturally valid. Those discourses do not dialogue amongst themselves, so they end up representing an impediment for making the human rights effective, so that it is necessary to overcome the simplistic dispute between relativists and universalists to guarantee the widest effectiveness for these rights and to guarantee the development of a cosmopolitan project of human rights. Key-words: Crisis of the Reason; Skepticism; Cultural Relativism; Universalism; Human Rights.