Bentham's utilitarianism has so long been a source of progressive social policy and the main intellectual support of the criticism of our law that we have not yet developed a theory of individual rights, comparable with utilitarian theory in clarity, in detailed articulation, and in appeal to practical men. (Herbert Hart)

Much of the twentieth century of the Christian Era (CE), especially its latter half, stands justly hailed as the Age of Human Rights. No preceding century in human history witnessed such a profusion of human rights enunciations on a global scale. Never before have the languages of human rights sought to supplant all other ethical languages. No previous century has witnessed the proliferation of endless normativity of human rights standards as a core aspect of intergovernmental desire. Never before has this discourse been so varied and diverse. The then Secretary General of the United Nations [Boutros Boutros Ghali] was, perhaps, right to observe [in 1993] … that human rights constitute ‘a common language of humanity’. Indeed in some ways, human rights sociolect emerges, in this era of the end of ideology, as the only universal ideology in the making, enabling both the legitimation of power and the praxes of emancipatory politics. […]