Innate rights and just relations 1

Abstract

Currently the terms rights is and human rights are used to refer to two types of entities. One is a kind of legal claim or guarantee given in positive law. The other is a purported moral claim or interest implicit in the nature of human persons. A peculiar feature of modem discussions of rights is that these diverse things are commonly treated as if they had some necessary relation to one another. In fact, historically and conceptually, they do not and the frequent attempts to relate them can have inimical results. It can confuse substantive human rights with the promulgation of an individualist view of the person. The defence of human rights (of the types now mentioned in international treaties) would be helped by divorcing these from a notion of innate rights and, instead, understanding rights as legal guarantees of just political relations.