Rights as a formal framework are a historical invention — primarily Western in origin, codified most powerfully in the aftermath of the Second World War — but the intuitions they formalize are not: the sense that persons should not be used merely as instruments, that there are claims against power that power itself cannot legitimately extinguish. The limits of rights-talk include its tendency toward abstraction, its difficulty in adjudicating conflicts between equally legitimate rights, and its historical deployment to protect some persons while excluding others. The rights framework is a tool; like all tools, its value depends on who wields it and for whom.
Juana