The Road Not Taken: On MacIntyre's Human Rights Skepticism.

Alasdair MacIntyre is often interpreted as a wholesale skeptic of human rights. Although understandable, given his caustic criticism of rights discourse and theory, this misunderstanding overlooks his openness to subjective moral rights within the context of social practices. This paper traces the roots of his skepticism to the practical embodiment of rights discourse within liberal modernity. In MacIntye's view, the modes of claiming rights in practice presuppose the existence of natural rights, which commits the "individualist fallacy": the potential value of the right for the individual right-holder is presumed to ground an adequate reason to impose duties on others, without due consideration of the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter for common action. And, any proposed theory of human rights runs the risk of justifying that use and institutional embodiment of the human rights concept in practice. Despite his negativity, this paper interrogates the extent to which MacIntyre's thought remains open to justificatory foundations for some concept of "human rights" within the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]