Introduction

The idea of human rights is taken more seriously now than it has been for centuries. Not since the heady days of the American and French Revolutions have rights been used so widely as touchstones of political evaluation or as an idiom for the expression of political demands. In moral and political theory, where the idea was for a long time in disrepute, rights are again a serious subject of philosophical enquiry. Few of people want the language of rights to degenerate into a sort of lingua franca in which moral and political values of all or any kinds expressed. Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burkes and Karl Marx all attack human rights for what they call their abstraction; they all focus on the theme of individualism versus community, though their respective conceptions of community are of course very different and they all claim that the rights of man involve a radically impoverished view of the constitution of human society.