Two notions of humanity and the judgment argument for human rights

Never before has the need for a universalistic notion of international or global justice been more  acutely felt and yet at the same time perceived as an elusive chimaera. On the one hand, the long  awaited freeing of international politics from the strictures of the post-Yalta bipolar order, the ever  accelerating process of globalization, and the intensification of migratory flows have all increased  the sense of urgency associated with our aspiration to a transculturally shareable notion of justice.  On the other hand, the effects of the linguistic turn have contributed to a growing awareness of the  constitutive role of lifeforms and vocabularies vis–vis our conceptions of justice. The difficulties  of articulating a single persuasive view of justice for the globalized yet pluralized world are rooted  in this combination of factors. Were the perception of an irreducible plurality of lifeforms,  conceptual schemes, paradigms, traditions and cultures not accompanied by a belief in their  constitutive role for our thoughts, or were such belief in turn associated with an unshaken faith in  the identifiability of a core of universals underlying all cultures, no difficulty would arise. Instead,  our philosophical difficulties stem from the persistence of our universalistic aspirations combined  with the feeling that such aspiration can no longer be satisfied through traditional philosophical  means, namely through recourse to crosscultural principles established as valid antecedently to their  being rooted in one of many lifeforms — the so called principles “from nowhere”. The justification  of human rights is one of the areas in which this problematic constellation has made its effects most  visibly felt. I will begin by briefly reconstructing some difficulties in Rawls’s and Habermas’s  accounts of human rights and then will suggest a tentative alternative solution to the problem of  justifying the universal cogency of human rights also in those local legal contexts where they are  not codified into positive law — an alternative solution based on the judgment view of justice that I  have outlined in Justice and Judgment.

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