Page "Human rights" Paragraph 9

The modern sense of human rights can be traced to Renaissance Europe and the Protestant Reformation, alongside the disappearance of the feudal authoritarianism and religious conservativism that dominated the Middle Ages.

Human rights were defined as a result of European scholars attempting to form a " secularized version of Judeo-Christian ethics ".

Although ideas of rights and liberty have existed in some form for much of human history, they do not resemble the modern conception of human rights.

According to Jack Donnelly, in the ancient world, " traditional societies typically have had elaborate systems of duties ... conceptions of justice, political legitimacy, and human flourishing that sought to realize human dignity, flourishing, or well-being entirely independent of human rights.

These institutions and practices are alternative to, rather than different formulations of, human rights ".

The most commonly held view is that concept of human rights evolved in the West, and that while earlier cultures had important ethical concepts, they generally lacked a concept of human rights.

For example, McIntyre argues there is no word for " right " in any language before 1400.

Medieval charters of liberty such as the English Magna Carta were not charters of human rights, let alone general charters of rights: they instead constituted a form of limited political and legal agreement to address specific political circumstances, in the case of Magna Carta later being mythologized in the course of early modern debates about rights.