Many contemporary authors fear that the proliferation of rights-claims may cause human rights to fall victim to their own popularity. If every good that is desired by one or another group of people is cloaked in the venerable garbs of a human right, and there is no way to tell ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights, this may generate scepticism towards the concept of human rights in general. However deplorable this situation may be, for moral philosophers it may be thought to involve an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of their discipline. After all, how else could we distinguish genuine from imaginary human rights than by building a theory about the subject? The aim of my paper is to show that this idea is exactly wrong — that the proliferation of human rights claims cannot be stopped even in theory. It is a mistake to think that the proliferation of rights claims results from a lack of awareness of the proper theoretical foundation of human rights. On the contrary, I will argue that the proliferation of rights mirrors a deep problem in secular theories of human rights, that these theories do not have the conceptual resources to limit ever larger rights claims. I will suggest that to understand the present situation, we need to look into the religious presuppositions of the culture in which natural rights to subsistence were first proclaimed. Specifically, I will argue that contemporary theories of human rights are secularized versions of a religious precursor.
