Muguerza, Javier - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

98 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human Valueswhich there are certainly as many access roads as there have beentranscendental philosophers throughout history, but not one returnroad, because none of these philosophers has ever returned. Orit might be compared, as I once did, to the “communion of saints,”beyond the reach of any mortals except those Tibetan monks towhom Kant attributed a certain familiarity with the Versammlungaller Heiligen. 44Or, finally, one might allege the unlikelihood ofdiscovering the grounding we seek for human rights in that sortof angelic community, where it is by no means clear that we arelikely to find anything truly human. But Apel’s allegation againstconventionalism must be taken seriously, which really means “takingethics seriously,” inasmuch as it is no less deserving of seriousnessthan rights or the law. For, all irony aside, the moral of histexts is conclusive. If our conventions will serve equally to supportjust and unjust norms, they will also serve to ground humanand inhuman rights, from which it follows that such conventionswill not serve our purposes.45 And, as for the accusation of idealism,it should not be forgotten that in those texts Apel alsospeaks of quite realistic and even material things, such as “interests’’and “needs,” even though he reminds us that both requirelinguistic expression in order to be shared in communication.But this last is something that even so prominent a theoreticianof needs as Agnes Heller makes no bones about recognizing, indialog, furthermore, with an equally prominent theoretician ofthe ethics of discourse, or communicative ethics, Jürgen Habermas,when she writes that even though the Habermasian theory cannotspeak to people with any more authority than its rivals about whattheir “interests and needs” are, at least “it can tell one thatwhatevertheir interests and needs - people must argue com-44 Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, Werke, 8:359–60n.45 For a more detailed evaluation of Apel’s critique of conventionalism, seemy contribution, “El aposteriori de la comunidad de comunicación y la ética sinfundamentos,” to Estudios sobre la filosofía de Karl-Otto Apelí ed. Adela Cortina(in preparation).