38. Why there Cannot be a Truly Kantian Theory of Human Rights-end推荐.pdfVIP

38 Why there Cannot be a Truly Kantian Theory of Human Rights Andrea Sangiovanni Many human rights advocates seek inspiration in Kant, which explains why refer- ences to Kant are legion in the literature on human rights. Indeed, it is commonly argued that the most promising foundations on which to construct a secular account of human rights are to be found in Kant. I shall pose a challenge to this idea, argu- ing that there can be no truly Kantian theory of human rights. Any careful reading of Kant will reveal him to be not just indifferent to human rights claims but actively skeptical of them. A few preliminaries. First, by ‘truly Kantian’, I do not mean that there can be no philosophical theory of human rights that has Kantian elements, or that grows out of some part of Kant’s opus. What I mean is that there can be no defense of a Kantian theory of human rights that remains faithful to three constituent planks of Kant’s practical philosophy, namely, (1) Kant’s division between the domain of morality and the domain of right, (2) Kant’s arguments for our moral obligation to exit the state of nature, and (3) Kant’s arguments for unitary sovereignty. This leaves open, of course, for a less ‘truly’ Kantian theory of human rights that drops one or more of his argu- ments for each of these central tenets. But such a theory will not be faithful to Kant, for whom the three tenets stand at the very core of his practical philosophy. In this volume, Katrin Flikschuh writes: ‘it can be genuinely upsetting—philosophically, not psychologically—to see great works in the history of philosophy ransacked for this or that titbit to be used in order to patch up a justificatory gap in some contemporary theory that bears little resemblance to the position from which the item is lifted’.1 This strikes me as a useful reminder that, if we are to