Abstract
Yet to dismiss the moral impulses driving human-rights promotion-the desire to moralize politics, and thus prevent human suffering-and not grant those impulses a place at the international table, is to turn our back on one of humanity's most precious and unexpected achievements: the existence of even a minimal international consensus and commitment, rhetorical in some places but genuine in many others, that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity," and that that endowment must find expression in the concrete workings of government and law. [...] for ill-and for good-we are left with politics.