ABSTRACT
Across the past two chapters, I identified and discussed a number of theoretical challenges and practical obstacles to balancing human rights. In evaluating the theoretical challenge of incommensurability, I adopted Jeremy Waldron’s distinction between weak and strong incommensurability. I acknowledged that rational balancing is impossible in the face of strong incommensurability of human rights. Yet, such strong incommensurability will only rarely occur. Most instances of incommensurability are of the weak variety. Crucially, such weak incommensurability does not imply incomparability. Instead, it ‘merely’ entails the absence of a common metric to adequately express the relationship between items, such as human rights in conflict.
