What is the relationship between freedom of expression and libel, pornography and political speech? Between the right to life and abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide? Between the freedoms of religion and conscience and State-funding for religious schools, an official State church, and conscientious objections to military service? With few exceptions, international, constitutional and legislative charters of rights leave the relationship between rights and these (and other) moral–political questions open and unresolved. It is indeed a feature of charters of rights that they proceed largely in abstractions, seeking agreement on grand formulations in a way that avoids the great debates (and disagreements) animating rights. Constitutional rights are for the most part proposed and adopted without being wholly worked out and with their scope and content still to be determined. They are, perhaps, examples of incompletely theorized agreements on a general principle despite the absence of further agreement on the more specific moral–political questions.

Constitutional rights are formulated in a way that finesses reasonable disagreement about what should be within the scope and content of the right. In this way, those who disagree, for example, on the permissibility of libel and pornography, abortion and euthanasia, State-funded religious schools and conscientious objections can nevertheless agree on freedom of expression, the right to life, and the freedoms of religion and conscience. Through these underdeterminate formulations, constitutional rights can be taken to represent a free and democratic society's commitment to rights all the while concealing the extent of reasonable disagreement about how to specify these rights in relation to the great moral–political debates alive in the community.