Fichte on Human Rights

Abstract The paper reconstructs Fichte’s relational conception of human rights in the Foundations of Natural Right (1796/7) and brings it into conversation with the current debate on the philosophy of human rights. Fichte’s thus far underappreciated account is thereby made accessible, and its original and attractive philosophical features highlighted. I proceed in three steps. First, I argue that Fichte has a complex understanding of human rights. He defends ‘one true human right’ (das eigentliche Menschenrecht) to be part of a legal community in which two ‘original rights’ (Urrechte) are secured: a right to bodily inviolability and a proto-property right to secure access to a (sufficient) part of the world. Second, I show that, for Fichte, the substantive aim of original rights is to establish and secure a non-violent intersubjective relation called ‘free reciprocal efficacy’ (freie Wechselwirkung) which is normatively less demanding than a full relation of right and recognition in Fichte’s sense, or of justice. In this context, I unpack Fichte’s specific understanding of the human body (Leib) as a medium of free (reciprocal) efficacy rather than a biological entity in the original right to bodily inviolability. Third, I elaborate on the peculiar normative status of Fichtean human rights, in particular as non-positive and non-moral.