ABSTRACT
The American philosopher Alan Gewirth has shown that moral norms possess no independent existence of their own. On the contrary, moral norms come into existence through and between agents, although ‘behind their backs’, as it were. Every agent logically must accept the supreme moral principle that every agent has the strict obligation to act in accord with the generic rights of her recipients as well as of her own. In order to show that every agent logically must accept a supreme moral principle, Gewirth has developed a sequence of dialectically necessary judgements every agent can only deny on pain of self-contradiction. It might be objected that it is important to take into consideration who the possessor of something is. One might greatly value one’s own million dollars, but attribute no value at all to the million dollars of some other person.
