Abstract
In his paper Human Rights and Human Animals, Bernd Ladwig assumes that whoever seeks to provide justifying reasons for human rights seems to be, in some way or another, committed to universal anthropological claims. Nonetheless, as Ladwig argues, it is clear that anthropology alone cannot provide sufficient grounds for human rights. In addition to an anthropological footing, we also need recourse to at least one valid moral principle—and, thus, to a source of reasons that cannot be derived solely from empirical claims about human nature. In his paper, Ladwig merely argues, therefore, that some anthropological arguments are necessary to justify some of the specific contents of human rights. To that end, he portrays humans as a special sort of animal endowed with two natures. This anthropological approach provides the argumentative framework within which we can derive some, but not all, of the specific contents of human rights, as Ladwig claims.
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There are, to be sure, phenomena related to cultural fluctuations that do seem to correspond to the model of “memetic” transmission through imitation, for example, fashion. But it is precisely because any particular prevailing fashion is hardly a rationally reconstructable phenomenon that its abrupt disappearance is hardly surprising. The arbitrariness of particular fashions corresponds directly to their unsteadiness.
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What I mean, in general, here is that any human form of life is confronted with the task of avoiding mistakes, and no form of life could have emerged without a vast number of actions that were based on true, well-grounded beliefs. Moral problems are only a special case of the generalized normative imperative of discovering the right and avoiding the wrong.
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“Drawing distinctions” and “choosing” are of course not meant in the sense of propositionally reflected modes of interacting with the world, but rather in the sense of knowing how, which we can ascribe to the chimpanzee without also ascribing knowing that.
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For a critical appraisal, see Jörke (2005, 98f).
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That is the famous critical example from Nozick (1974, 42–45).
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See Physicians for Human Rights (1998).
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Ladwig, B. (2014). Human Rights and Human Animals. In: Albers, M., Hoffmann, T., Reinhardt, J. (eds) Human Rights and Human Nature. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8672-0_3
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