ABSTRACT
It is important to acknowledge epistemological constraints that limit our ability to say certain things about human rights. Often, when scholars or other commentators reflect on whether human rights still matter, they begin from the assumption that human rights did, once and for a while at least, make the world a better place, that they were effective in creating a world more or less whatever the commentator thinks it should or shouldn’t be. The problem with this way of framing the question—apart from the fact that we just can’t know—is that it turns the question of how human rights matter into a kind of normative question about whether we (whoever we are) still want the kind of world that human rights make (better), or whether we prefer some other (worse) world in which they no longer matter. The question is, obviously, loaded; it’s also profoundly conservative—that is, biased toward the status quo in a way that makes it harder to understand, empirically, the actual politics of human rights. Human rights can be seen as social constructs, not moral or philosophical truths. They reflect and embody a set of political values and commitments and provide a vocabulary for radical democratic politics. Thus human rights matter as tools for emancipatory social critique and political transformation.
