Against Human Rights Skeptics

The main goal of my text is to generalize Alexy's explicative argument against human rights skeptics in order to minimize the overall room for their escape. This argument tries to show that any attempt to intersubjectively justify the nonexistence of human rights as moral rights necessarily commits the so‐called performative self‐contradiction. Alexy worries that the effect of his argument can be weakened by a group reduction of discourse. But I will argue that this worry is overstated because the price of such a reduction is much higher than Alexy estimates. I will then turn to the issue of moral relativism. I will try to show that the explicative argument, if suitably generalized, can cope even with human rights skeptics who think in terms of moral relativism.