Reasonable Disagreement and Metaphysical Immodesty: A Comment on Talbott’ s Which Rights Should be Universal? Jeppe von Platz Published online: 8 February 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract Talbott grounds human rights in a moral epistemology that supports metaphysical immodesty but requires epistemic modesty. Metaphysical immodesty provides prescriptive confidence, while epistemic modesty prevents moral imperialism. I offer some reasons for doubting that Talbott’ s moral epistemology yields the desired result. Insofar as Talbott aims for a determinate conception of human rights that could serve as the backbone of a system of international law, Talbott must deal with issues of reasonable disagreement, and for these issues, epistemic modesty provides no guarantee against moral imperialism. In particular, I outline two sources of reasonable disagreement, that no social world is without loss and the complexity of the concept of autonomy, which illustrate how Talbott’ s prescriptive confidence borders on moral imperialism. Keywords Human rights . Talbott . Autonomy . Reasonable disagreement Introduction In Which Rights Should be Universal 1 , William J. Talbott grounds human rights in a novel and bold moral epistemology. This is supposed to achieve several related objectives: to support the conception of human rights he provides; to show how we can make reliable, but not infallible, moral judgments; to answer both the moral skeptic and the cultural relativist; and to do all this while staying clear of both moral wishy-washiness and moral imperialism. 2 Talbott’ s moral epistemology is metaphysically immodest yet epistemically modest. There are two levels in Talbott’ s metaphysical immodesty. First, some Hum Rights Rev (2008) 9:167–179 DOI 10.1007/s12142-007-0037-z 1 Oxford University Press, 2005. 2 Moral wishy-washiness is Talbott’ s term for the prescriptive impotence that flows from inability to assert moral claims as reliable claims to truth, cultural relativism is paradigmatically wishy-washy. See Talbott, Which Rights Should be Universal?, p. 16. J. von Platz (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, Logan Hall Room 433, 249 S. 36th Street, 19104 Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: jeppe@sas.upenn.edu