The chapter addresses the constructive elements of a theory of human rights: a theory of goods (important enough to satisfy a threshold criterium), a political theory of human rights and the normative foundations of the legitimacy of human rights. The chapter develops a political theory of human rights. To this end, it surveys the most prevalent critiques of human rights, including arguments that human rights are inefficient, that they lack instrumental rationality, that they are means to economic disempowerment and that they legitimize illegitimate structures of power. Postcolonial theories of human rights are discussed, as are feminist accounts. The democratic function of human rights is reconstructed. Arendt’s aporia of human rights is the focus of further thoughts. Part of the political theory of human rights is a theory of entrenchment, their role in protecting the political subjectivity of persons and their role in constituting communities. A central thesis is that a political theory of human rights must be firmly anchored in the lessons that the Holocaust taught about the importance of the protection of human rights.

We set forth and defend a natural law account of the fundamental dignity of persons. The basis of fundamental dignity--and of the possession of fundamental rights--is being a person: a being with a rational nature. What distinguishes human beings from other animals, what makes human beings persons rather than things, is their rational nature, that is, their having a nature oriented towards enabling them to shape their lives by their deliberate (rational) and free choices. One’s dignity and status as a person derives from the kind of substantial entity one is, namely, a human being, and, as such a creature whose nature is a rational nature. Because personhood is based on the kind of being one is – a substantial entity whose nature is a rational nature – one cannot lose one’s fundamental personal dignity as long as one exists. Although not all persons need be human beings (if, say, there are angels or intelligent Martians, they too are persons), all persons have a rational nature. And so every human being, from his or her coming to be until he or she ceases to be, is a person, and as such a bearer of inherent dignity and fundamental rights.