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In Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas stresses the essential role of modern law for social integration within modern complex societies. Tied to this modern concept of law is the notion of actionable individual rights. While Between Facts and Norms (BFN) deals primarily with the system of rights within the democratic constitutional state, in recent articles Habermas has addressed the controversial nature of international human rights.1 There, he argues that human rights are not simply moral rights, but are "Janus-faced," with one side related to law and the other to morality. In this paper, I draw on several of Habermas's discussions of human rights in order to construct a comprehensive interpretation of his position. While BFN deals explicitly with rights only within the democratic constitutional state, some aspects of that account can also be applied to international political contexts. Therefore, I utilize the theoretical groundwork developed in BFN to clarify and further develop the conception of human rights in Habermas's later publications. This strategy also helps to highlight tensions that must be addressed. This analysis of Habermas's position on human rights will explain the dualist conception of human rights, the intersubjective foundations of rights within a community of law, and the idea of a discursive elaboration of human rights into a comprehensive system of rights.
I begin by explaining Habermas's view of the duality in the concept of human rights. In the second section I attempt to clarify his dualist conception of human rights and explore some of the problems it faces by looking at objections related to both the moral and the legal side of human rights. The dispute over the legal side of the concept of human rights, which pushes toward the juridification of human rights, has received a great deal of scrutiny in the cross-cultural debate over human rights. Therefore, in the third section I focus on the supposed conflict between the individualism inherent in the concept of individual rights and the communitarian claims made on behalf of non-Western cultures. I argue that Habermas's emphasis on the intersubjective structure of law and rights reduces this conceptual tension. In the fourth section I conclude with some reflections on Habermas's conception of human rights in relation to the global realization of human rights.
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