It is quite remarkable that the notion of human rights has played such a large role in western history, and now in international relations since 1945, and yet no one has been able to definitively settle questions about the origins and “true” nature of these rights. Despite continuing debate over such philosophical matters, the international community – mostly through the United Nations – has agreed on a modern version of human rights. States, the most important actors in that community, who supposedly follow “realist” principles of harsh self-interest, have used international law and organization to adopt “liberal” standards requiring attention to individual and collective human rights. Internationally recognized human rights, as social construct, are a fact of international relations.

A philosophy of rights?

We do not lack for differing theories about human rights. Even among western philosophers there is great variation. For Edmund Burke, the concept of human rights was a monstrous fiction. For Jeremy Bentham, it was absurd to base human rights on natural rights, because “Natural rights is simple nonsense…nonsense upon stilts.” The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre tells us there are no such things as human rights; they are similar to witches and unicorns and other figments of the imagination. Karl Marx, for that matter, was not born in Beijing. He too was western, both by birth and by principal area of concern. At the risk of oversimplifying his many and not always consistent writings, one can say that he regarded many civil rights as inherently good and tactically helpful in achieving socialism, while regarding property rights as contributing to the social ills of the modern world.