The last chapter introduced some of the philosophical and legal literature on the concept of rights and the use of rightslanguage. The idea there was to clarify and elucidate that concept and language, partly as a response to an initial kind of scepticism which would accuse rights-language of being incurably vague and indeterminate. The clarification and elucidation of rights-language is of importance in philosophy and in theology, given the regular use of this kind of language. Obviously if moral arguments are to hinge on the concept of rights, that concept must be clear and determinate.

In this present chapter, I continue to face up to arguments against the value of rights-language, in particular those arguments which hold that the concept of rights is ‘logically redundant or epistemologically ungrounded or both’. It seems to me that Christian ethicists have not paid much attention to this question, but have taken for granted the basic logical respectability of the rights concept. Obviously, if philosophy could establish that the use of this concept is logically redundant or epistemologically ungrounded, this would cause some embarrassment in moral theological circles. It is my task here to examine the arguments for conceptual scepticism in order to show how they fail, and in order to establish the logical and epistemological respectability of rights-language in general.

In the following pages I shall deal with these questions of scepticism mainly as they are presented in Alan Gewirth's essay ‘Why Rights are Indispensable?’. He deals with two kinds of scepticism in this article – conceptual and moral – but I limit myself to the conceptual type in this chapter.