ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the doubts about some of the usually offered foundations or underpinnings for human rights claims, and other doubts tied to both the political and the moral conceptions of human rights. If people are a utilitarian then seeing human rights as tools to increase or advance the general welfare is a moral understanding of human rights. The chapter also focuses on doubts about the ease with which any type of human rights dominated worldview and programme for future action can co-exist with a worldview that puts democracy front and centre. It concludes with a consideration of Charles Beitz's approach in his The Idea of Human Rights to weigh up whether Beitz successfully wards off or redirects these doubts of mine. What Beitz offers instead is a model that first looks to what happens actually to exist as far as the existing practice of human rights is concerned and then extrapolates from that.
