Exiting the Hall of Mirrors: Morality and Law in Human Rights

This chapter explores, from the perspective of international human rights law (IHRL), the philosophical debate that has emerged in recent years between proponents of orthodox and political accounts of human rights. It treats IHRL as among the key phenomena which theories of human rights must help us to understand if they are to succeed in their aims. The chapter explains how to interpret the controversy between orthodox and political accounts of human rights: as a conceptual debate within a larger explanatory philosophical enterprise in which making sense of IHRL has a role, but not quite the dominant role envisioned by Allen Buchanan. Buchanan's attack on the orthodox account, and some versions of its political rival, assumes that proponents of both approaches are committed to the crude and indefensible Mirroring View of the relation between human rights and IHRL. A human right can exist as a matter of international law without its violating generating any legal justification case for intervention.