Against human rights

Anyone sceptical about human rights doesn't make himself popular. But for centuries, criticism of human rights has been harsh. On criticism from Hobbes, Bentham, Marx, communitarians and Confucianists

In the previous episode, I argued that we weren’t born with rights. There are no natural rights. Rights are a social construct. Natural law is a real concept, which we can connect to our moral intuitions, but we cannot derive natural rights from it.

The fact that we nevertheless have a human rights tradition is the result of a development since the Gree…