Abstract
This chapter deals with Habermas’s account of rights in Between Facts and Norms. In such an account he addresses the issue of legitimacy by avoiding the tendencies to ground the legitimacy of law either in human rights or popular sovereignty alone. He does this by overcoming the competition between human rights and popular sovereignty through the affirmation of their mutual presupposition in a system of rights within a constitutional democracy. He provides a theoretical groundwork that allows us to develop a conception of human rights by describing categories of rights that give equal weight to both private and public autonomy of legal citizens so as to regulate their life in common by means of positive law. He introduces a discourse principle, which is intended to assume the shape of a principle of democracy only by way of legal institutionalization. Human rights remain abstract concepts if they are not implemented in a legal system that gives them a shape and content. Such an implementation is legitimate only if it is done through a democratic procedure through which citizens regard themselves both as addressees and authors of the law that regulates their living together.
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Notes
- 1.
BFN, 449.
- 2.
Ibid., 82.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, 133.
- 5.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 5.
- 6.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed., J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 14 (1), p. 86.
- 7.
Ibid., chap. 26 (43), p. 192.
- 8.
Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 26.
- 9.
Subjective rights are thought to be inherent in each individual person by nature. They are known as the outgrowth of natural right or the right of nature.
- 10.
I.O, 246.
- 11.
Ibid., 239.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
I.O., 243.
- 14.
Ibid. 240.
- 15.
I.O., 243.
- 16.
Ibid., 247.
- 17.
Ibid., 244.
- 18.
I.O., 241.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
I.O., 241.
- 23.
BFN, 99.
- 24.
Ibid., 100.
- 25.
Ibid., 99.
- 26.
Ibid.,100.
- 27.
BFN, 103.
- 28.
BFN., 457.
- 29.
Ibid., 170.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
BFN, 104.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
BFN., 104.
- 35.
I.O, 258.
- 36.
Ibid., 259.
- 37.
BFN, 451.
- 38.
I.O, 71.
- 39.
Ibid., 261.
- 40.
BFN, 408.
- 41.
BFN., 408.
- 42.
Ibid.,
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
BFN, 107.
- 45.
Ibid., 121.
- 46.
BFN., 111.
- 47.
Maus, “Liberties and Popular Sovereignty: On Jürgen Habermas’s Reconstruction of the System of Rights,” 834.
- 48.
BFN, 121.
- 49.
BFN., 122.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
BFN., 123.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 85.
- 54.
Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 96–97.
- 55.
BFN, 125.
- 56.
“Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 24).
- 57.
The practical approach to human rights is one of the two main ways of looking at human rights in current philosophical debates. The first way is the traditional approach also known as orthodox approach that “is mostly concerned with core philosophical questions regarding the nature, grounds and substantive content of the concept of human rights.” (Cristina Lafont, Global Governance and Human Rights, The Spinoza Lectures. Lecture I: Can Practical Conception of Human Rights Offer any Guidance to the Human Rights Projects? (University of Amsterdam, May 2011, p. 13). The second approach, the practical approach, also known as the political approach, “takes contemporary human rights practice as a guide in order to figure out what human rights actually are.” (Lafont, p. 14) Whereas the traditional approach attempts to ground human rights on some authoritative account of human nature and human freedom, the political or practical approach takes contemporary human rights practice as being authoritative for an understanding of what human rights are. (Lafont, p. 15)
- 58.
Lafont, “Can a Practical Conception of Human Rights Offer any Guidance to the Human Rights Project?” p. 40
- 59.
BFN, 126.
- 60.
Ibid., 125–6.
- 61.
BFN., 174.
- 62.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Joseph Fahey and Richard Armstrong, A Peace Reading: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order, ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 221. A similar expression is found in the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts” (Gaudium et Spes, #1).
- 63.
Todd Hedrick, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 176.
- 64.
BFN, 419.
- 65.
BFN., 126–7
- 66.
Ibid., 129.
- 67.
BFN., 133.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid., 133–4.
- 70.
Ibid., 134.
- 71.
BFN., 134.
- 72.
Hedrick, Rawls and Habermas, 150–1.
- 73.
Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Malden: Polity Press, 2008).
- 74.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” in The Journal of Ethics, vol. 4, no.1/2 (Jan. – Mar., 2000)
- 75.
Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 58.
- 76.
Ibid., 64.
- 77.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 46.
- 78.
Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 60–61.
- 79.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 47.
- 80.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 48.
- 81.
Ibid., 49.
- 82.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 49.
- 83.
Ibid., footnote n. 8.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 50.
- 86.
Ibid.
- 87.
Ibid., 51.
- 88.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 52.
- 89.
Ibid.,
- 90.
Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” 55.
- 91.
This section will basically draw from Ingram’s book, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), from his article, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism: Toward an Alternative Theory of Human Rights,” in Political Theory, Vol. 31, no. 3 (Jun., 2003), and from a paper presented in Cracow on July 17, 2014, entitled, “Rawls and Habermas on Human Rights: Reconciling Political and Cosmopolitan Approaches Beyond Legalism.”
- 92.
See Ingram, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism: Toward an Alternative Theory of Human Rights,” pp. 359–374.
- 93.
David Ingram, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism,” 360.
- 94.
Ingram, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism,” 373.
- 95.
Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 177.
- 96.
Ibid., 170.
- 97.
Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 178.
- 98.
Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 66.
- 99.
Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 181.
- 100.
Ibid., 186–7.
- 101.
Forst, Justification and Critique, 39.
- 102.
Ibid., 38.
- 103.
Forst, The Right to Justification, 2.
- 104.
Ibid.
- 105.
Forst, Justification and Critique, 39.
- 106.
Forst, Justification and Critique, 45.
- 107.
Ibid., 46.
- 108.
Ibid., 52.
- 109.
Ibid.
- 110.
Forst, The Right to Justification, 109.
- 111.
Ibid., 101.
- 112.
Ibid., 110.
- 113.
Mahoney, “Right without dignity?” 21.
- 114.
Mahoney, “Rights without dignity?” 22.
- 115.
Ibid., 23.
- 116.
Ibid., 31.
- 117.
Ibid., 34.
- 118.
Mahoney, “Rights without dignity?” 34.
- 119.
Ibid., 37.
- 120.
BFN, 449.
- 121.
I.O, 191.
- 122.
Habermas, Time of Transitions, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Malden: Polity Press, 2006), 126.
- 123.
Todd Hedrick, Rawls and Habermas, 140.
- 124.
Ibid., 140–1.
- 125.
Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, 178.
- 126.
Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity, 60.
- 127.
Mahoney argues that though Habermas’s argument for a positivist understanding of rights is premised on the claim that law is not subordinate to morality, there are really two senses in which Habermas is a positivist. In one sense, he writes, Habermas claims there are no pre-political moral norms that serve as extra-legal constraints on law and politics. Neither divination nor practical reason unaided by resources of the modern world can summon up valid norms. From this perspective Habermas is simply denying the natural law conception of rights in both its Kantian and pre-Kantian forms (Mahoney, 35). He continues, there is also a second sense of Habermas’s positivism. Positively enacted right does not mean decided upon by some legislative process or contingent upon the outcome of unconstrained democratic deliberation. Rather, positively enacted right means created in the act of constructing a constitutional framework that is to set the terms according to which the democratic process must conform in order to be legitimate. Each of these senses of positivism supports the idea that rights are positively enacted in the sense that they do not follow from morality, but are nevertheless pre-suppositional requirements for any legitimate democratic state. Habermas concedes the awkwardness of this formulation of positivism by noting the difficulty of keeping the concept of legitimacy separate from morality (Mahoney, 35–36).
- 128.
Flynn, “Habermas on Human Rights,” 438.
- 129.
Habermas, “Law and Morality,” 247.
- 130.
Ibid., 267.
- 131.
I.O, note 51, p. 274.
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Moka-Mubelo, W. (2017). Habermas’s Account of Human Rights in Between Facts and Norms . In: Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49496-8_2
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