Muguerza, Javier - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

120 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human ValuesPerhaps today it is difficult to accept the idea that the moral subjectand the empirical subject do not entirely coincide, but theimpossibility of reducing the subject to its manifest properties wasat least part of what the Greeks meant when they termed the subjecthypokeimenon. 97<strong>The</strong> moral subject exemplifies par excellencethe subject understood in this way, and this is also the reason forthe distance separating the moral subject from the so-called “subjectof rights” (sujeto de derechos), which is, among others, avariety of the empirical subject. For the rest, not all subjects ofrights are moral subjects, since a moral subject is always an individual,while the subjects of rights might well be “impersonalsubjects,” such as collective bodies or institutions, from a businessall the way to the state itself. And even when, by analogy withmoral subjects, we allow one of these impersonal subjects such asa social class or a nation the capacity for “self-consciousness” andfor “self-determination,” we must not forget that in any case bothdepend on the self-consciousness and self-determination of thecorresponding individuals. Now then, moral subjects can, and infact do, aspire to recognition as subjects of rights. And of thoseaspirations one of the most fundamental is the aspiration to recognitionas “subjects of human rights.” In a certain sense, this wouldbe the first human right and even the quintessence of any otherhuman right; in other words, the right to be a subject of rights.But to the question of who or what would concede them thisright, prior to any possible recognition of rights, I would answerthat nothing and no one has to concede it to a moral subject infull command of his faculties but that it must be the subject him-“morality” as a necessary condition for the “(practical) identity of the self.” Forsuch an interpretation of Kant’s idea of man as “an end in himself,” see my“Habermas en el reino, de losfines,” 123ff.97 In a somewhat similar vein, Tugendhat speaks of a person’s “being oneself”(Selbstsein), which he identifies with one’s “existence” (Existenz), as a “quasiproperty”( Quasi-Eigenschaft), which according to him has to do - rather thanwith a substantial property that is different from the accidental ones -with theKantian notion of “end in itself.”