In the preceding chapters I identified and analyzed a number of problems with the widespread conception of human rights as universally valid a priori. Part of the problem, I argued, has to do with exactly how authors attempt to ground the most ambitious form of moral authority imaginable. Chapter 1 identified problems inherent to theological efforts; Chapter 2, those intrinsic to metaphysical endeavors. Despite their many differences, theological and metaphysical approaches both invoke otherworldly sources. In this chapter I turn to my alternative. Entirely this-worldly, it grounds human rights in their own addressees. Relevant norms are then valid because they are authored by their addressees. Eventually universally valid human rights would be the product of any number of communities across the globe each of which generated, for itself, human rights norms that would be locally valid initially. Later, in Part III, I show how locally valid human rights might be advanced in ways that would bring them ever nearer to universal validity, a validity not a priori but one achieved by ordinary men and women first of all in their communities.

Theological and metaphysical approaches might counter that my alternative cannot render human rights universally valid but valid only idiosyncratically and parochially, as rights that cannot rise to the level of human rights. Nonuniversal norms cannot do the work of human rights, metaphysical and theological theorists might argue. Curiously, such critics would find unexpected support from a viewpoint neither theological nor metaphysical: in anthropology. This is not to say that anthropology seeks norms universally valid a priori; it doesn’t. Rather, anthropology, or at least prominent strands within it, argues that local norms are unlikely to have any extralocal purchase and certainly no universal purchase – short of their coercive imposition in an act of “cultural imperialism,” that is, one belief system's coercive imposition on another.