Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Contemporary Human Rights Theories

Description

Today, especially in the West, human rights are considered the fundamental principles in ensuring respect for human dignity, justice, and peace. However, on this point, Alasdair MacIntyre seems to maintain a different perspective. He argues that human rights theory is an invention, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is fiction and an outcome of the distorted morality of modernity and liberalism. Rights cannot be universal and natural rather they are developed within communities, with a specific, and local character, and presuppose the existence of social institutions, rules, and practices. All attempts of rights theorists including liberals and certain neo-Thomists to give sound reasons for their existence have failed because there are no such rights. According to MacIntyre human rights theories have caused the disintegration of the community and its values. Individuals became self-centered after the shared conception of the good had been privatized. Social...