Justice & Law Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Buttiglione is trying to do a neat rhetorical judo move: condemn relativism without sounding like a theocrat itching to police private life. He frames the fight as defensive, not punitive. The enemy isn’t difference, it’s the moment “relativism” becomes an alibi for violating “fundamental human rights.” In European political language, that’s a familiar escape hatch: you can praise pluralism, then draw a bright line around a supposedly non-negotiable moral core.

The subtext is doing heavy work. “We’re not relativists if...” reads like a preemptive rebuttal to critics who hear in his politics a rigid Catholic moral worldview. Buttiglione is redefining relativism as something only other people have: a corrosive ideology that dissolves shared standards, especially around human dignity. Meanwhile he claims the moral high ground of human rights, a vocabulary that carries liberal legitimacy and international authority. It’s a strategic borrowing: take the secular West’s strongest moral currency and spend it to justify limits on moral flexibility.

Context matters because Buttiglione’s career sits at the intersection of Christian Democracy and EU-era culture wars. Debates over bioethics, family policy, and LGBT equality routinely get argued in the language of “anthropology” and “human dignity.” His line “human being at the centre of society” sounds humanist, but it’s also a coded insistence on a particular account of the human person - one that can smuggle in contested norms while insisting they’re merely protective.

The quote works because it makes confrontation sound compassionate: coercion recast as care, certainty recast as respect.