A Philosophical History of Rights

Since the seventeenth century, concern in the Western world for the welfare of the individual has been articulated philosophically most often as a concern for his rights. Characteristically, this has referred primarily to the individual’s subjective rights or liberties as an individual rather than what is objectively right by the universal demands of justice and fairness. The modern conception of individual rights was the result of an abandonment of ancient, value-laced ideas of nature and their replacement by the modern, mathematically transparent idea of nature that has room only for individuals, often in conflict. In The Philosophical History of Rights, Gary B. Herbert offers an interpretive phenomenology of the concept rights by tracing by retracing the historical evolution of the concept and the transformation of the problems through which the concept is defined.