In Chapter 1 we observed that the concept of human rights in modern Western culture has a particular authority for us, as an ultimate standard of justification, which is an essential feature of both our moral and our legal standards. Much of Western moral and legal understanding has developed in terms of this concept, and we value the claims of human rights sufficiently strongly for the developing international world order to make explicit reference to them in declaration and in policy. We have here treated such rights in terms of their status as claimed by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have presented human rights as if they set the overriding moral benchmark, and our major philosophical problem so far has been to examine the supposed independent and universal authority of these moral claims. We began with Plato, who presented us with an account of the independence and universality of a fundamental moral concept, such as “rights” purports to be, and through his arguments we isolated three features of such moral reality: that it is independent of us, that it is eternal or unchanging and that it is consistent. Each of these has been presented and assessed by reference to the major moral and political thinkers in the history of philosophy and by reference to Hohfeld's analysis of rights in the law. We have distinguished the human rights that raise our ultimate philosophical problems of justification from the moral or legal rights that may be contingently claimed within particular cultures and jurisdictions, and explained how the various kinds of rights relate to each other.