A basic understanding of the morality of human rights, as I said in the Introduction, greatly enhances our understanding of the constitutional morality of the United States. My aim in Part I is to provide that basic understanding. I begin, in this chapter, by sketching the internationalization of human rights: the growing international recognition and protection, in the period since the end of the Second World War, of certain rights as human rights. In the next chapter, I explain what it means, in the context of the internationalization of human rights, to say that a right is a “human right.”

THE NAME OF MY STATE OF ORIGIN – Kentucky – has been said to derive from a Native American word meaning “a dark and bloody ground.” An apt name for my century of origin is a dark and bloody time – indeed, the dark and bloody time: the twentieth century “‘was the bloodiest in human existence,’…not only because of the total number of deaths attributed to wars – 109 million – but because of the fraction of the population killed by conflicts, more than 10 times more than during the 16th century.”