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HERBERT HANREICH
morally, as free beings. Kant’s ‘transcendental’ concern (“a priori proposition”)
focuses on morality, whereas ‘proving’ legal (= human) rights results from ‘merely’
common sense considerations: we’d better organize our social world in a way that
guarantees best our moral (transcendental) determination. Legality is the means
to moral ends (Kant: ‘hypothetical imperative’).
Taking this constellation into account, one cannot positively claim that Kant
‘proved’ the existence of human rights. What he ‘proved’ is the importance of
the function of (human) rights, namely to politically and legally protect human
beings as moral beings: our humanity is essentially our morality, to be secured
by subjective (human) rights.”°
But: how can we, strictly speaking, ‘know’ morality, a transcendent entity that
is to be positively protected? How do we ‘know’ our genuine subject for which
human rights should be instrumental?
IV. WHY ARE HUMAN BEINGS NOT WHAT THEY ‘ARE’?
I wish to turn to a quite different mode of a ‘Kantian foundation’ by resorting to
some of his theoretical — transcendental — thoughts. It proposes a foundation ex
negativo, i.e. a reflection on the impossibility of defining satisfactorily what things,
or, for this matter, human beings, truly are. I begin with some general remarks on
truthfulness and knowledge.
Theories — we have nothing but theories available, implicitly or explicitly —
guide our actions as they make reasonable assertions about reality. They depend
on beliefs inscribed into theories we reasonably believe to be true whenever
interpreting ‘world’. Any human rights concept is such a theory (or idea) that
supports its purported truthfulness with reasons.
We know, however, that reasons — the argumentative stuff of theories —
are biased in various ways, deriving from one’s own experiences or from other
contingent circumstances, but not from the world itself, especially when reasoning
about concepts or ideas. Hence, our reasoning is indexed with ‘facts’ stemming
from a biographically, intellectually, and historically limited understanding of the
world." ‘Hard’ truths are not available, only debatable interpretations of ideas on
the basis of more or less convincing reasons. ?§
26 Some variations of that inner-outer freedom deliberations can be found in Mosayebi (ed.),
Kant und Menschenrechte.
27 Just to mention some recent approaches in this aspect: modern hermeneutics, cognitive
psychology, and systems theory.
Except for common knowledge — every-day experiences or some scientific truths — for which
doubts are not appropriate.
28
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