In Chapter 1 I outlined a wide range of uses of the concept of rights in modern Western culture. We noted the concept's growing importance as a way of organizing our moral and legal understanding, and noted that the concept of human rights in particular is authoritative for us, providing an ultimate standard of justification in both morality and law. Noting too the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I presented human rights as if they set the overriding moral benchmark. We saw that a range of questions might be asked: how can human rights be justified as authoritative? How can our individual and social choices be “constrained” by rights, as if they were independent of us? How can we be motivated by such moral considerations? How are rights located in the rest of our morality and law? What rights do we have?

Contrasting philosophical concerns with the concerns that other disciplines might have about rights, we isolated two interrelated major issues: justification and understanding. We have taken as central to the above range of problems the problem of how to justify and understand the supposed independent and universal authority of human rights. We have characterized the foundations of the apparent authority that human rights have for us, and have shown the ways in which different philosophers use such foundations to answer the range of questions posed above.

We began with Plato's theory, which presented us with an account of the independence and universality of a fundamental moral concept such as “rights” purports to be.