ABSTRACT
Theories of human rights, which have become immensely influential in the 1970s and 1980s, also place little weight on meeting human needs. The libertarian vision of human rights sees all fundamental rights as liberty rights or freedoms from others' interference. Libertarian thinking takes the notion of liberty as fundamental and interprets this liberty in a quite restricted way as a matter of freedom from interference. An alternative approach to constructing a theory of rights is used by those who think that there are welfare as well as liberty rights. The project of constructing a determinate account of human rights looks unpromising. Even a libertarian theory of rights is indeterminate, and theories that include welfare rights face further difficulties in allocating the obligations that correspond to welfare rights. While rights without counterpart obligations are mere rhetoric, obligations without counterpart rights provide agents with solid reasons to act.
