“our talking about rights has taken shape as a way of affirming what it is about human beings that cannot be negotiated away or extinguished by the claims of sectional interest. The problem arises with the possible implication that what is non-negotiable or ‘essential’ in human existence is primarily a set of abstract entitlements; which in turn suggests that actual historical conditions are secondary to the imperatives of meeting a cluster of timeless conditions. It is then possible to assess and condemn any specific complex of historical relations according to their failure to embody the entitlements laid down in some kind of primordial charter for human life. What comes first, it seems, is a self to which certain things are due.

“But this sounds dangerously mythological if we are learning at all to think of selves as being formed in particular histories, particular kinds of interrelations … [What is normally considered as] an infringement of ‘rights’ [is rather] a failure to begin thinking, a failure to find things difficult in the characteristic way human language implies that they are difficult.”

Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, pp. 137-139. (Amazon US/UK)