ABSTRACT
Michael Ignatieff, in his book The Rights Revolution (2000, 43) writes: “The purpose of human rights is not to make those in danger the wards of conscience of those in zones of safety, but to protect, defend, and restore the agency of the defenseless so they can defend themselves.” This quote relies on a number of assumptions that raise difficult questions about both the nature of human rights as well as their relative distribution in a highly diversified democratic society. In the process, it also implicates human rights within the wider conversation of the nature of care and responsibility. The very idea of the need for human rights presupposes both a population endangered by such an absence as well as those in a position to respond to and remediate this danger. As such, the commitment to human rights serves as a window on the complicated conversations surrounding questions about both the origins and the limits of care as an orientation between both people and cultures.
