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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 «280 +
