ABSTRACT
The most extreme communitarian criticism of human rights has come from Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that human rights are as real as unicorns. ( Jeremy Bentham called human rights “nonsense on stilts.”) According to MacIntyre (1979 , p. 16), one can only understand ethical and moral precepts within the context of the tradition in which these concepts were developed. Without a shared vision of the good life in a given community, no consensus on ethics or morals can be reached. As such, “contemporary moral debates … are unsettlable and interminable” as each “argument characteristically gives way to the mere and increasingly shrill battle of assertion with counterassertion” ( MacIntyre 1979 , p. 17). These community-based and historically bound conceptions of the good conflict with the core assumption of human rights that they are universal and a given rather than time-bound, that they are to be viewed as selfevident truths. (Note that although MacIntyre is often cited as a communitarian, he has stated that he does not consider himself one.) Other communitarian positions regarding rights tend to be more nuanced.
