Clarity and Confusion in the Human Rights Debate: An Editorial Gary B. Herbert A theoretical confusion obscures the human rights debate today. The confusion is somewhat like a thin layer of fog, thin enough that most people do not even notice it, but thick enough to cause serious visibility problems. The fog is created by what may seem to be clarity. What seems clear--so clear that nobody wants to deny it--is that every living human being, and perhaps those not yet living (future generations) possess fundamental human rights. The claim that people have human rights simply because they are human, or because of their humanity, has almost universally been dismissed by philosophical skeptics as metaphysical nonsense. Statements about human rights, we are told, are not in any sense descriptions of anything. They are not statements that can be veri- fied empirically, or said to be true or false. Rather, we are told, they are prescriptive statements of how things ought to be. That is, they are more aptly comprehended when they are thought of as expressions of shared moral sentiments or aspirations. The title of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself seems to support this skeptical conclusion. It is the "declaration" that is said to be universal, not the rights themselves. The U. N. Declaration is, in this regard, far different in its claims than the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. In the latter, the declaration was said merely to be "solemn," not univer- sal. The rights themselves were said to be "natural, imprescriptible, and inalien- able." No comparable claim is made by the U. N. Declaration. Instead, the United Nations concept of human rights was proclaimed to be a truth that had been created by an international normative consensus. It was a shared norm, one that all nations, presumably, agreed to through their participation in the creation of international conventions, most especially, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. The fog thickens when we begin to reflect on the implications latent in this nor- mative understanding of human rights. The difficulty with a "normative" under- standing of the nature of "human rights" is that norms hold only for those who adopt them, and for only so long as they continue to hold them. It becomes difficult to distinguish between recognizing their universality from imposing one's own moral norms on people, cultures, or nations who have not accepted them, or, worse yet, on people, cultures, or nations who consider one's norms incompatible with their own