Introduction

The basis of human rights remains in need of exploration. The effectiveness of the language of human rights is threatened by its widespread but uncritical use. This book is neither a sermon to believers nor an attack by a skeptic. It is a critical look at the basis of those few rights that are genuinely universal, for example, a right not to be tortured or a right to basic subsistence. A human right is a claim that every human being can make on the whole human race.

The rights that are specifically human arise from a human respect for all living beings. There is still a widespread assumption that human rights is just another name for the confused idea of natural rights from the eighteenth century, rights that were promulgated by and for adult white males.

The authors of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 assumed that they were reformulating an old idea. Instead, they were beginning a new idea. Human rights can be realized only through conversations across differences within gender, age, culture and religion. This book traces those continuing conversations that fill out the diversity within the unity of the human race.

The convergence of many particular traditions creates a human tradition that can sustain human rights as a standard of moral conduct for all nations.