DUDH - A letter to Santa Claus

Jeane Kirkpatrick em "Establishing a Viable Human Rights Policy":

The second distinction I want to emphasize is that between rights and goals. In our times, "rights" proliferate at the rhetorical level, with extraordinary speed. To the rights to life, liberty, and security of person have been added the rights to nationality, to privacy, to equal rights in marriage, to education, to culture, to the full development of personality, to self-determination, to self-government, to adequate standards of living.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims as a universal every political, economic, social right yet conceived.

Such declarations of human "rights" take on the character of "a letter to Santa Claus"-as Orwin and Prangle noted.

For every goal toward which human beings have worked, there is in our time a "right". Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of "entitlements," which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors. The fact that such "entitlements" may be without possibility of realization does not mean they are without consequences.