On Human Rights

Abstract What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. This book offers answers in its investigation of human rights. The term ‘natural right’, in its modern sense of an entitlement that a person has, first appeared in the late Middle Ages. When during the 17th and 18th centuries the theological content of the idea was abandoned in stages, nothing was put in its place. The secularized notion that we were left with at the end of the Enlightenment is…