ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why the prevalent strategy of many social rights supporters seems to miss the crucial explanatory cause for the perceived rights neglect: the lack of consensus on their justification and content, that is their indeterminacy. It argues that an important difficulty faced by social and economic rights is the lack of a stable consensus about the interrelated issues of their actual justification and content. The chapter discusses two potential candidates for conceptions of social rights that address those fundamental questions of justification and content and could potentially generate the badly needed consensus over these rights: the basic needs conception and the equality conception. It also argues that the latter is superior to the former and should be embraced by social rights supporters as a potential good strategy to give these rights teeth. The chapter suggests a way in which the indeterminateness might be at least mitigated and social rights might be more precisely defined under the equality conception.
