Includes bibliographical references (p. [277]-329) and index.

Pt. I. An Account of Human Rights -- 1. Human Rights: The Incomplete Idea -- 2. First Steps in an Account of Human Rights -- 3. When Human Rights Conflict -- 4. Whose Rights? -- 5. My Rights: But Whose Duties? -- 6. The Metaphysics of Human Rights -- 7. The Relativity and Ethnocentricity of Human Rights -- Pt. II. Highest-Level Human Rights -- 8. Autonomy -- 9. Liberty -- 10. Welfare -- Pt. III. Applications -- 11. Human Rights: Discrepancies Between Philosophy and International Law -- 12. A Right to Life, a Right to Death -- 13. Privacy -- 14. Do Human Rights Require Democracy? -- 15. Group Rights.

"This book is prompted by the widespread belief that we do not yet have a clear enough idea of what human rights are. The term 'natural right', in its modern sense of an entitlement that a person has, first appeared in the late middle Ages. When during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the theological content of the idea was abandoned in stages, nothing was put in its place. The secularized notion that we were left with at the end of the Enlightenment is still our notion today, in this respect. Its intension has not changed since then: a right that we have simply in virtue of being human. During the twentieth century international law has contributed to settling its extension, but its contribution has its limits." "The notion of a human right that we have inherited suffers from no small indeterminateness of sense. The term has been left with so few criteria for determining when it is used correctly that we often have a plainly inadequate grasp on what is at issue. We today need to remedy its indeterminateness; we need to complete the incomplete idea. That is the aim of this book." "Its argument is of concern, and is accessible, to philosophers, jurisprudents, political theorists, international lawyers, civil servants, and rights activists."--BOOK JACKET.