ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I turn to the political conception of human rights and analyze specifically Charles Beitz’ account in The Idea of Human Rights.1 As we have seen, Griffin suggests that independent moral reasoning is sufficient to determine the grounding value of human rights, the list of rights and their correlative duties. In contrast, Beitz’s approach to the practice of human rights excludes the appeal to such reasoning. Beitz certainly intervenes in selecting the practices, in unifying them and in abstracting from them conceptually but does not appeal to a deeper layer of moral reasoning to build his model of human rights. It is therefore crucial to explain what justifies the adoption of this quite radical approach.
