ABSTRACT
Of the many ambiguities, tensions, and puzzles involved in the concepts of human rights, one is particularly important. The central tension of human rights is that they became politically significant precisely at the moment when it was no longer possible to justify them. The emergence of human rights in the 17th and 18th centuries, understood as natural rights or the Rights of Man, took place within the context of the rise of modernity. Modernity meant, among other things, a radical change in how we understood our selves, our world, and the values that regulated them. In modernity, values lost their foundation-either in God or in nature. It is precisely when this happens that human rights, grounded on the value and dignity of human life, are asserted in their modern political form.
