Article:
Warum Rechte? Eine Bemerkung zu Malte-Christian Gruber

Author(s): Menke, Christoph

Abstract

The legal system assumes that human beings – and only human beings – are natural persons. That is erroneous, argues Malte-Christian Gruber, because legal subjectivity isn’t founded in humanity alone. It is moral autonomy that makes man into a “subject whose actions are capable of attribution” (Kant) and thus into a person. Personhood is not identified with being human as such, but by the attribution of actions and legal ownership. Besides human beings, such a functional concept of legal subjectivity can in principle also be applied to other autonomous agents as holder of rights and obligations, e.g. techno- logical artifacts and other non-human agents. Christoph Menke in turn points out that the invention of new rights was the actual law of motion of political emancipation in modern times. This began with the bourgeois revolutions and is still the general model with which politics and theory operate to claim new rights for non-human creatures and artifacts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, the legal emancipation initially led beyond the limits of bourgeois subjectivity and in- vented social and cultural rights, so should we make a further consequent step and break with the dependence of juridical recognition on the category of human subjectivity. Also bio- and artifacts are to be reconstructed as independent legal entities. However, they lack something that was absolutely fundamental in the emancipatory struggles of the past: to be a subject of rights meant to have demanded rights, indeed, to have been a fighter for rights. One could not be a legal person and holder of rights without having been a political subject as fighter and thinker of rights. To suspend the dependence of legal personhood on human subjectivity so that there may be bio- and artifact-rights also means to dissolve the unity between legal personality and political subjectivity that once defined the modern idea of rights.

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BibTex
Menke, Christoph: Warum Rechte? Eine Bemerkung zu Malte-Christian Gruber. In: ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, Jg. 7 (2016), Nr. 2, S. 71-76. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18654.
@ARTICLE{Menke2016,
 author = {Menke, Christoph},
 title = {Warum Rechte? Eine Bemerkung zu Malte-Christian Gruber},
 year = 2016,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18654}",
 volume = 7,
 address = {Hamburg},
 journal = {ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung},
 number = 2,
 pages = {71--76},
}
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