ABSTRACT
This chapter is about Alasdair MacIntyre's criticism of human rights and its connection with his theory of truth and rationality. In the beginning there is an account of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of human rights and a brief description of place this conception occupies in his philosophy. In one of his most famous aphorisms MacIntyre has no mercy on human rights: "there are no such rights and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns". Macintyre puts forward a conception of moral particularity which he considers to be alien to liberal individualism. In his opinion the social features of human existence are not contingent; on the contrary, he thinks they are constitutive of personal, moral, and intellectual life. MacIntyre adds that it is not necessary that adherents of such a tradition of enquiry recognize that failure; it is enough, he says, that they would have recognized it had they viewed matters in accordance with their own internal standards.
