Human Rights in Western Liberal Thinking

Abstract

Although the various nations and regions of the world might have, equally sustainable conceptions of human rights, it is undoubtedly in Western societies that the human rights idea has been most popular, and in particular amongst Western scholars that the theory of human rights has been most clearly articulated. While it may not be correct to say that the West ‘invented’ the notion of human rights, it would certainly appear that Western thinkers were the first to contemplate the idea. It was back in the seventeenth century,for instance, that the English liberal scholar John Locke devised his celebrated theory of natural rights, which is widely thought to have laid the philosophical foundations for the contemporary liberal doctrine of human rights. The more general conception of a ‘right’ in Western thinking is believed to go back even further than this Mordecai Roshwald (1959), for example, identifies an understanding of legal rights in the articles of the twelfth-century Magna Carta.1Whatever the starting date for the idea of rights or human rights might be, the considerable amount of Western scholarly attention (both past and present) that has been devoted to this topic makes it possible to identify a broadly ‘Western liberal’ concept of rights, defined as such because it is grounded in a long and established tradition of liberal thinking. The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the most salient features of this concept, paying particular attention to the understanding of human rights.