The Philosophical Understanding of Human Rights

This book attempts to examine the doctrine of natural rights and its critiques as well as the worldview that has affected its formulations. Presenting a clear exposition of some contemporary philosophical theories of rights developed independently of the natural rights paradigm, it discusses at length the theories wherein the conception of rights is found to be compatible with utilitarianism.

Further arguing for discursive understanding of human rights based on the diversity of morals that is embedded in different cultural traditions of the world, it analyses the concept of human dignity from the Vedantic perspective, which is regarded as an important underlying principle of human rights.