Abstract

In his final collection of philosophical papers, Richard Rorty continued his attack on the traditional conception of philosophy by arguing that many of our debates should be thought of as matters of cultural politics rather than about ontology or truth. Consistent with that view, Rorty had argued that we come to see debates about human rights not as an attempt to ground rights in human nature but rather as attempts to expand our moral imagination. I extend this claim to an account of human rights as political rather than metaphysical, an account that treats human rights as a political innovation to be justified in terms of the work of human rights