ABSTRACT
“Rights” have bedeviled legal and political philosophers for centuries, and the addition of “human” has only caused further uncertainties. There are volumes on the meaning of rights, their source, what gives them authority. The conception of human rights as an individual’s political-legal claims, implying limitations and obligations upon society and government, is a product of modern history. It reflects particular political theories and rejects others. Both the recent history and the prevailing theory reflect their antecedents. The origins and ancestry of ideas are rarely single or simple, or readily disentangled. Many can claim patent to the ideas of human rights, with some warrant, yet all claims include some exaggeration, for the various elements of human rights have different ancestry, and attempts to correlate contemporary with ancient concepts court anachronism and other distortion. Immediately, human rights derive from “natural rights” flowing from “natural law.”.
