A human right to freedom of religion is not equivalent to a right to tolerance. Human rights and tolerance-rules serve for different purposes and are based on different justifications. Tolerance-rules serve to protect a peaceful living together with strangers who share no common values. Human rights serve to protect every individual’s personhood. Religion can only be a matter of human rights, if and so far as it is a condition of development and maintenance of personhood. Discussion about a human right (...) to freedom of religion makes sense only if we can identify a particular scope of protection which concerns only religion and if the freedom of religion is not embraced by wider-framed freedoms. The freedom of religious thoughts and the freedom of religious speech are embraced by the general human rights to freedom of thoughts and freedom of speech. Here, there is no need for a special human right to freedom of religion. The right not to be forced to act contrary to religiously founded moral rules is embraced by the general human right to freedom of conscience. And again, there is no need for a special human right. The target of religious practices in a narrower sense is to become flexible and porous and not to resist the threats of the sacral in order to avoid the destruction of personhood. Therefore, we have to recognize a human right to freedom of religious rites. It protects only the actions of accommodation to the overwhelming power of the sacral. It does not protect, however, any action with which it is intended to rule the world or to rule over others, to organize certain practical challenges, or to discover or to maintain scientific theories or technical means. (shrink)

Until recently, the prevailing view has been that moral duties to global aid can only be justified from the spirit of utilitarianism. Martha Nussbaum attempted to show that these duties can be developed from Stoic ethics. This essay shows that Nussbaum’s attempt has failed. What Nussbaum considers as stoic is in fact based on a religious myth.

The article compares the key elements of the so called Identity Theory of Human Dignity with the conception of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s foundation of the legal relationship. The main difference is that the identity theory does not claim to be able to reconstruct the legal concept of human dignity completely on the basis of a transcendental argumentation. Instead it uses empirical arguments. Another difference refers to the distinction between values and norms that is not sufficiently clarified in Fichte.