The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

The Enterprise of Theorising 33
liberties, powers and immunities) and their correlatives
(duties, no-claim rights, liabilities and disabilities).
Hart's intervention was a major factor in the Anglophone
renaissance of moral philosophy among linguistic,
liberal and conservative philosophers and historians of
thought. Their discussion has fed into popular debate,
the newspapers, lawyers' talk, and even that of the
general public, albeit incoherently in bits, like wreckage
from a ship. But the grand philosophic enterprise has
over the last 40 years swept away much confusion by
clarifying the concepts of values, goods, reasons,
objectivity, subjectivity, relativism, pluralism, scepticism,
ideology, altruism, personal identity, individualism,
autonomy, agency, responsibility, freedom, liberty (positive
and negative), preferences, priorities, equality,
justice and act-, rule- and preference-, utilitarianism.
Many such theorists have sought to devise coherent
accounts of the relationship between authority, liberty,
equality, justice and fairness. Other non-lawyer academics,
including economists, have attempted to construct
theories about moral rights and their place in
moral systems. The asserted logic is that moral rights are
firmly founded in the necessary conditions of human
action and life. That is in effect a utilitarian assessment
that if men are to live in a stable society, certain moral
rules are necessary. 34
Another development has been the production by
historiographers and philosophers of histories of concepts
and ideologies, including that of human rights.
Their analysis of the conceptual framework and languages
in which ideas were produced has revolutionised
discourse about traditions by providing paradigms
showing how traditions are embedded in the social
structures of the real world. The paradigms also
illuminate the limits of thinking within a tradition and
the modes of transformation of thought. 35 One major