Reasoning about Human Rights

First things first. To fully understand the issues involved in controversies over the existence of human rights and the justification of human rights, we need to perform a conceptual analysis. In this connection the opening question can be interpreted as asking about the concept of human rights, as, for instance, in “What ideas or notions are involved in our talk, or discourse, about human rights?” For someone just beginning to participate in the

discourse, this last question could be rephrased as “How should we think about human rights?”