I shall argue that public reasoning for any list of human rights at the global level is in a relation of interdependence with what I am going to call the ‘culture’ of human rights. There is, however, a need for conceptual clarification on both sides of this relationship. On the one hand, I shall outline a formal account of the sorts of reasons – including but not limited to justificatory reasons – global public reasoning has to provide. On the other hand, I shall show how these sorts of reasons count as the constitutive elements of the culture of human rights. Based on this formal account I discuss certain deficiencies of two models of public reason for achieving an agreement upon a list human rights in a pluralistic global society: The “practical”, consensus-based model proposed by Jacques Maritain (Human Rights. Comments and Interpretations. A Symposium Edited by UNESCO, 1948), and the idea of applying Rawls’ “overlapping consensus” Political Liberalism to human rights discourse at the global level."
