ABSTRACT
Marie-Luisa Frick discusses the connection to human rights, defined as rights that people are entitled to simply because they are “human.” Although opening up a wide array of moral deliberation on the content and scope of certain rights—their mutual restrictions and the duties they imply as well as their concretization for certain groups of people—the principle right to have rights cannot be questioned without undermining the concept of human rights as such. Practices of and rationales for treating others as not (fully) human amount to exclusions preceding any infringements of particular human rights, stripping certain (groups of) individuals of their very human rights subjectivity. Being able to discern manifestations of such fundamental exclusions and to distinguish them from other (“lesser”) forms of rights violations is indispensable for purposes of human rights protections and advancement. Frick is particularly interested in the following question: When are people genuinely dehumanized and not merely discriminated against? Assuming that potential threats of dehumanization do not only come from “outside” human rights but already are invested in the idea of human rights as such, she also investigates the modes of dehumanization tied to definitions of the “human” in human rights.
