attributing rights

Human Rights have been hailed as humanity’s last-standing hope (Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia, 2010). They are ambitious in potential and broad in scope. Yet, as has been iterated by Prof. Beaseley-Murray in this week’s lecture, the remain “far from ‘self-evident.’” This is because rights are a discourse, not an absolute (expressed by Ronald Dwarkin: “rights as trumps”). Instead, rights must be understood as needing weighing, not hierarchizing (Pildes, The Structural Conception of Rights and Judicial Balancing, 2002). As such rights discourse holds no inherent morality, instead morality must be…read more