Beyond the Political–Orthodox Divide

This chapter urges us to abandon the belief that there is a single human rights practice. Belief in what is called the Single Practice Assumption gives rise to the misguided idea—common to both Orthodox and Political views of human rights—that a philosophical theory should aim to reconstruct the moral core to this practice, derive a ‘master list’ of human rights from that core, and then use that list as a critical standard to reform and improve the practice. It is argued instead that we need a concept of human rights broad enough to capture the diversity of ways in which the term ‘human rights’ is used across the world today. The chapter defends what it calls the Broad View—which subsumes Political and Orthodox views as special cases, deployed for different ends in different contexts—and ends by delineating a systematic methodology for deriving particular conceptions of human rights for the very different contexts in which human rights are invoked.