Vantin, Serena. “The End of Human Rights? History, Critique, and Defense of a Prescriptive Concept.” APSA Preprints, 2026. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2026-g928p. This content is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.
A Brief Commentary on the Article by Diego Poole
This article reconstructs the main criticisms leveled against human rights and shows how the concept has evolved to incorporate many of them. But it seems to me that, ultimately, it abandons precisely what could provide an objective basis for its universality: human nature. By adopting a deliberately minimalist approach, Vantin turns human rights into a concept whose legitimacy depends on historical processes of justification, deliberation, and institutionalization, rather than on the truth about what it means to be a human person.
Nevertheless, the article is of considerable interest to scholars of classical natural law, even if they do not agree with the conclusions of this work, since its main value lies not in the solution it proposes, but in its historical and systematic reconstruction of the successive criticisms directed against the discourse on rights from the late eighteenth century to the present.
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Breve comentario sobre el artículo por Diego Poole
Este artículo reconstruye las principales críticas dirigidas contra los derechos humanos y muestra cómo el concepto ha evolucionado incorporando muchas de ellas. Pero me parece que, en última instancia, abandona precisamente aquello que podría proporcionar una base objetiva para su universalidad: la naturaleza humana. Al adoptar un enfoque deliberadamente minimalista, Vantin convierte los derechos humanos en un concepto cuya legitimidad depende de procesos históricos de justificación, deliberación e institucionalización, más que de la verdad sobre lo que es la persona humana.