The Preamble to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (ICCPR) states that the rights proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UDHR), some of which the ICCPR aims to give effect to, ‘derive from the inherent dignity of the human person’. It is because human persons have dignity that they have human rights. The Preamble to the UDHR further states that human rights are ‘inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, possessed equally by all members of this family, all of whom have ‘inherent dignity’.

Alan Gewirth argues that agents (those with the capacity and disposition to pursue purposes voluntarily) must, on pain of contradicting that they are agents, accept and comply with the ‘Principle of Generic Consistency’ (PGC), which requires them to respect the ‘generic rights’ of all agents (Gewirth 1978: 53–8). Consequently, the PGC is a principle with which all rational action must comply. In Gewirth's terminology, the PGC is ‘dialectically necessary’, which is to say that the requirement for an agent to assent to it follows purely logically from a premise that no agent can coherently deny, namely, the claim of the agent that he, she or it is an agent.