Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify how the ethical-political foundation of human rights in John Rawls’s theory of justice makes use of a coherentist model of moral justification in which cognitivism, liberalism, pluralism, non-foundationalism, and mitigated intuititionism stand out, leading to a pragmatic model of foundation with public justification in The Law of Peoples. The main idea is to think about the reasonableness of the universal defence of human rights as primary goods with the aspects foliows: its political nature, not metaphysical; its theoretical coherentist model, non-foundationalist; its pragmatic function and its public justification.