-
Introduction
- Georgetown University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction This book deals with the history of human rights and the problem of their justification. But it provides neither a comprehensive intellectual or legal history nor a new philosophical justification for the idea of universal human dignity and the human rights based upon it. Anyone harboring such expectations will be disappointed. This is not for essentially trivial reasons, such as the fact that—despite all the impressive preparatory work that has been done—further in-depth research is needed for any comprehensive history of human rights. Nor is it because any of the existing philosophical justifications, those put forward by Kant, Rawls, or Habermas, for example, have rendered any new effort of this kind superfluous. The approach I am taking here is characterized by a specific way of linking justificatory arguments and history, a linkage not found in this form in histories of human rights or in philosophical treatises, a linkage moreover that these approaches do not usually seek to achieve. The ambitious philosophical attempts to justify human rights make do without history. They construct their arguments in light of the (alleged) character of practical reason and of moral oughts, the preconditions found in thought experiments on the establishment of political order, or the characteristics of an idealized discourse. A strangely tense relationship inevitably exists between such constructions and history. From this perspective it must appear strange that the timelessly valid has so rarely been recognized as such in the history of humankind. Here, the history of ideas merely presents the steps on the way to the real discovery . It becomes a prehistory consisting of tentative and imperfect efforts. Empirical history, meanwhile, becomes the mere process of moving closer toward or farther away from an ideal, unless a model of progress enables us to think in terms of gradually moving closer to this ideal in the past and continuing to realize it in the future. Consciously or unconsciously, the writing of history is in turn often pervaded by philosophical justifications; it may also include a history of the various philosophical, political, and religious arguments 2 The Sacredness of the Person and debates on human rights and human dignity. As science, however , this history must limit its aspirations to the empirical level of an appropriate reconstruction of historical processes. Through their division of labor, then, the disciplines of history and philosophy reinforce the distinction between genesis and validity, which many consider to be one of the foundations of any genuine engagement with normative questions. On this model, we are concerned either with the validity claims of normative statements or with their historical origins; historical knowledge cannot help us reach a conclusion about normative validity claims, at least not in any definitive way. In this book, I attempt a fundamentally different approach. Perhaps historically oriented sociology, on which I repeatedly draw, can overcome this gulf between philosophy and history. The first reason for taking this approach is a negative one. I do not believe in the possibility of a purely rational justification for ultimate values. This way of putting things itself seems to me to be self-contradictory. If we are really talking about ultimate values, what exactly might any rational justification refer back to? What could lie deeper than these ultimate values and yet itself have a value-like character? Or are we to derive ultimate values from facts? These questions provide, of course, no more than a very rough indication of why I am so skeptical about philosophical attempts to justify values; I do not claim to do justice here to the great intellectual edifices aimed at the rational justification of a universalist morality. Even those, however, who share the skepticism I have expressed may shy away from its consequences because they assume that doing without rational ultimate justifications opens the door to a historical or cultural relativism or a (supposedly) postmodern arbitrariness. Human rights and universal human dignity are, however, such a sensitive topic that a shoulder-shrugging or playful stance is surely out of the question. But does giving up rational ultimate justifications really force us to embrace relativism? This concern is also inspired by the notion that genesis and validity are clearly separable. And it is this notion that I vigorously challenge here. If issues of genesis and validity cannot be separated so sharply with respect to values, then I may also state my intentions here in positive terms. On this premise, we may construct the history of the genesis and dissemination of values in...