ABSTRACT
Introduction There is something deeply attractive in the idea that every person anywhere in the world, irrespective of citizenship or territorial legislation, has some basic rights that others should respect. The moral appeal of human rights has been used for a variety of purposes, from resisting torture and arbitrary incarceration to demanding the end of hunger and medical neglect. At the same time, the central idea of human rights as something that people have, even without any specific legislation, is seen by many as foundationally dubious and lacking in cogency. A recurrent question is: where do these rights come from? It is not usually disputed that the invoking of human rights can be politically powerful. Rather, the worries relate to what is taken to be the “softness” or “mushiness” of the conceptual grounding of human rights. Many philosophers and legal theorists see the rhetoric of human rights as just loose talk-perhaps kindly and wellmeaning forms of locution-but loose talk nevertheless. More ardent critics of the notion of human rights argue that it is no more than “bawling upon paper.”1 So, where do human rights come from? Are human rights universal or are they relative? What is the basis of the belief that people have unconditional rights simply by virtue of being humans rather than contingent on the basis of certain qualifications? This chapter grapples with these questions by tracing the trajectory of philosophical debates about the theoretical grounding of the concept of human rights with particular focus on two dialectical schools-the Universalists and the Relativists. The overall purpose is to establish justification for the high moral ground occupied by human rights in contemporary societies.
