I want to comment briefly on seven points in Professor Danto's discussion of my paper.

1. He says that according to my conception of the existence of human rights, their esse est demonstrari – that is, for human rights to exist is for them to be demonstrated. He also says that, according to my thesis, “what one argues for cannot be separated from … the argument itself…”

Now this is true in one sense but not in another. There is an ambiguity in Danto's use of words like “demonstrari” and “argument.” These words may refer either to particular, contingent attempts at demonstration and argument or to rationally necessary structures of demonstration and argument. Danto's remarks might suggest that it is in the former sense that I tie the existence of human rights to argument. But, on the contrary, it is obviously the latter meaning that I use when I say: “That human rights exist… is a proposition whose truth depends on the possibility, in principle, of constructing a body of moral justificatory argument from which that proposition follows as a logical consequence,” and that “for human rights to exist… means that there are conclusive moral reasons that justify or ground the moral requirements that constitute the Nature of human rights…” (emphasis added). The existence of such reasons is independent of whether this or that particular justificatory argument is successful; such reasons are discovered, not invented. Hence, what I argue for, that human rights exist, can be separated from my own or anyone else's attempts at argument.