This chapter focuses on Maritain’s analysis of the ontological and epistemological foundations of human rights, and his wider hope for ‘practical agreement’ on the content of those rights. On the ontological front, I argue that such agreement is not forthcoming on the basis of natural teleology or eternal law. Neither of these secures assent across the world’s major religious or philosophical traditions. On the epistemological front, neither rationalism nor naturalism holds great promise. While Maritain upholds the naturalist alternative, his efforts devolve into a performative contradiction. For he hopes to rest agreement about human rights on ‘natural inclinations’, which, at the same time, he confines to the realm of the non-conceptual, non-rational and pre-conscious. This constitutes a markedly weak, even incoherent basis for agreement. The stage is set, therefore, for ‘new’ natural law theory, which proposes a non-ontological, purely rationalist foundation. I conclude that this too is an unpromising basis for agreement on rights. Instead, we need a new approach, one that privileges the deliverances of the social sciences and does not strive for universal consensus.

The subject matter of Chapter 6 is the exclusionary reason account. In engaging with the exclusionary version of the reason account of legal obligation, I will be almost exclusively concerned with the work of John Finnis. In my critical assessment of Finnis’s theory of legal obligation, I will argue that such theory marks a significant advance over the accounts discussed in the previous chapters. Nonetheless, it can be criticized on two grounds. On the one hand, it claims that the force of legal obligation is invariant. Contrary to that view, I will argue that the obligations arising out of the law are defeasible requirements, and that as such they have variable force. On the other hand, whilst Finnis is committed to the thesis that legal obligation can be adequately characterized in terms of the notion of an exclusionary reason, I will maintain that it cannot, since legal obligation stands in a dialectical (or inclusionary, as opposed to exclusionary) relation to the fundamental demands of practical rationality.