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HERBERT HANREICH
CONCLUSION
Human rights demand a rational foundation, particularly within political
discourses; they must include all human beings per definitionem. We have looked
into two, politically important human rights concepts that implicitly claim to
comprise all people. But their concepts of humanity are socially and culturally
indexed, amenable, therefore, only for a limited group of people. Propagated as
human rights they are a contradiction in terms; they are ideologies.
There is a third model, the United Nations" UDHR of 1948. Its core value is
the claim of an individuals dignity that must be preserved at any circumstances.
Contrary to cultural or social indexations, ‘dignity’ cannot be fixated on given
contingencies, for it is a vague term, a stopgap solution that must not be replaced
by contents that would transform its vagueness into just another contingency that
can be exploited by those who are in power to define such contingencies to their
political advantage.
Immanuel Kant prepared a theoretical background for such a view. He tried
to proof that non-empirical claims — defining humanity, dignity, freedom, etc. —
cannot be known in a strict sense: what human beings ‘are’ must remain open, to
be filled only by individuals themselves. This openness in principle can, and should
be, conclusively translated into legal and political realities: granting a maximum
of freedom, guaranteeing a minimum of political repression for all individuals.
This is what human rights are about.
What human beings are by nature must, therefore, remain transcendent” —
this is what can be proved, be it just negatively.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ASLAN, Reza, Kein Gott ausser Gott: Der Glaube der Muslime von Muhammad
bis zur Gegenwart, trans. Rita Seuss, München, C.H.Beck, 2019.
GOSEPATH, Stefan, Das Problem der Menschenrechte bei Kant, in Reza Mosayebi
(ed.), Kant und Menschenrechte, Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter, 2018, 195-216.
HABERMAS, Jürgen, Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens — aus dem historischen
Abstand von 200 Jahren, in Jürgen Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen,
Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1999, 192-236.
HARRIS, Sam, The End of Faith. Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, New
York, NY, Norton, 2004.
2 Of course, this also can be said about fruit flies, planets or cargo trains — it just would not
matter.
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