One of the challenges for our culture is how to think human rights in a way that does not fall pray to cultural relativism, but remains open to intercultural dialogue and alert to historical contingency. This is why we need an ethics of human rights as a culture of thinking for which this paper will try to outline two basic threads. Loidolt will focus on man not as the bearer of human rights but as the being that can adjudge (zusprechen) and constitute ‘right’ at all. Hence, Loidolt will rather concentrate on human accomplishments and responsibility than on human needs. The philosophical background of the argument is a phenomenological one. With this approach Loidolt will try to embrace both a universal, transcendental level and a level of cultural awareness that tries to face the other as other. In this approach, universality remains something aspired after that keeps being constituted from the outside and that asks for a practical performative attitude.
Notes on an Ethics of Human Rights: From the Question of Commitment to a Phenomenological Theory of Reason and Back
JVF Conference Papers
