Reena Kumari

The question of whether human rights are natural, universal, or socially constructed remains central in contemporary philosophy. This paper examines John Searle’s theory of social ontology as a framework for understanding the ontological status of rights. Searle’s account of institutional facts, collective intentionality, and deontic powers offers a distinctive perspective on how rights emerge from shared linguistic and social practices. Within this framework, human rights are conceived not as metaphysical absolutes but as status functions grounded in collective recognition and maintained through institutional structures. This analysis highlights the strengths of Searle’s approach in explaining the social reality of rights while also engaging with its limitations, particularly regarding the universal validity of human rights and the challenges posed by cultural relativism and power asymmetries. By situating human rights within the ontology of social reality, the paper contributes to ongoing debates in philosophy and political theory about the foundations, legitimacy, and future of human rights discourse.

Practical reason is the use of reason to decide how to act and perform in a social reality. When someone deliberates about what to do, one puts all the reasons for the action, and then all the reasons against the action will determine the outcome of the action. In that situation, we can describe that practical action with reason because we will determine reason with the weight of different reasons not on the weighing reasons. In this paper, we analyze that reasons have weight against the theory that weights of reasons have no role in a theory of reasoning, and defend that reasons have weight with the evidence of practical reasons. The aim of this paper is to argue that weight of reasons has a role in the process of reasoning. In every situation of life, we can use have reason and weight of reason according to the practical situation of life.