Human Rights Beyond Naturalism

Abstract

The still popular idea that human rights are ‘natural rights’ is highly misleading. Although philosophical accounts of human rights have to be based on the presupposition of membership in the human species and also on an ‘axiom of human equality’, the purpose of human rights is not to transform pre-political or ‘inborn’ claims already given in a state of nature but to implement power restrictions that only become necessary if modern citizens understand themselves as the legitimizing subjects of political power. Therefore, human rights should be interpreted as ‘constitutional rights’ from the conceptual outset. The subject of human rights is not the pre-political or natural human being but the somehow anticipated, democratically transformed, and also revolutionary subject of his or her own future. Therefore, a plausible human rights approach can and should abstain from any substantial references to human nature, since a political system regulated by basic constitutional rights is quite artificial or even ‘against’ human nature.