Who is Concerned by the Existence of Human Rights?

Vol.29,No.4(2021)

Abstract
The paper responds to Marek Káčer’s text „Why Should We Bother with the Question of Existence of Human Rights?“ It criticizes him for not distinguishing sufficiently between various kinds of rights (for example legal and moral rights, institutional and critical moral rights), which in turn leads to some confusions. It further criticizes him for focusing on a question that contemporary human rights philosophers do not ask. Indeed, in contemporary philosophy, human rights are not understood as bizarre objects existing in some analogy of the Platonic realm of ideas, but as norms that are valid on the basis of moral reasons. It is this position that is more thoroughly presented and analyzed in the paper (including the identification some of its advantages over the pragmatic thought framework, in which Marek Káčer recommends thinking about human rights).


Keywords:
Human Rights; Legal and Moral Rights; Institutional and Critical Moral Rights; Legal and Moral Reasons; Validity; Critical Morality; Justification; Normative Ethics.

Pages:
801–812
Author biography

Martin Hapla

Department of Legal Theory; Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno

Assistant professor
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