ABSTRACT
I. FUTURE PROSPECTS AND PRESENT LIVES
"It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, the same year in which her friend Thomas Paine published the second part of the Rights of Man. Both were concerned with giving everyone women and men-power over their own lives and opportunities to live the way they had reasons to value. One particular feature of their common approach is particularly worth emphasizing in the context of policy discussions today, viz. the implicit "universalism" that characterizes both the approaches. The domain of concern is not arbitrarily restricted to, say, men, or men of a certain class or background. This shared aspect of the original contributors to the human rights approach is of specific interest in interpreting the task of "human development" in a world that is marked, on the one hand, by enormous inequities in contemporary living conditions, and on the other, by real threats to the prospects of human life in the future.
