ABSTRACT
Pragmatic evaluation means specifying the benefits and harms which might attend human rights initiatives in particular cases, under specific conditions, in particular time periods, and so forth. Those cases, conditions, times may be extremely specific or very general but they need to be articulated, and ultimately demonstrated, in concrete terms. Costs might include things which happen on the ground to potential victims and violators of human rights, or to other people. The costs/benefits vocabulary suggests that one could know at an abstract and general level what to count as a cost or a benefit of the initiative. Critics have linked the human rights project to liberal Western ideas about the relationships among law, politics and economics. Human rights encourage people to seek emancipation in the vocabularies of reason rather than faith, in public rather than private life, in law rather than politics, in politics rather than economics.
