All right, so I'm talking to you about the founder of human rights, and of course it's a somewhat, you know, polemical and catchy title.

But I'm going to make a case that Francisco de Vittoria, who probably many of you have not heard about, or if you've heard about him, you've only heard, you know, his name, is really somebody who's at the heart of thinking about the kinds of content that we associate

with the term human rights.

He did not use the term human rights, and that should not come as a surprise.

That's a much later development that people start to use this language.

For most of Western tradition, when rights start to be named, they're called natural rights,

or specific kinds of rights, like the US communiacandi, or other kinds of rights like that.

But human rights is a later term, but the content, I hope you'll see,

traces back to a much earlier time.

Everyone wants to claim credit for the term human rights and for good reason.

Human rights canote, as the historian Samuel Moyne has written, the highest moral principles and

political ideals. They bring to mind heroic women and men standing against injustices like slavery

and genocide, against arbitrary imprisonment, and also standing for justice movements, including, for instance, movements in favor of emancipation,

the extension of the vote to all people regardless of color, sex, or economic standing,

and for conscience protections.

We all want to be for human rights, and we all want to claim our forebears, Catholic or Protestant,

Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist. We all want to claim that they were somehow instrumental

in human rights coming into being. But there's another reason for claiming credit for the term,

and that's to control the story, both backwards and forwards,

to exclude some figures and institutions in favor of other figures and institutions,

and to direct human rights towards certain things and away from other things. In this vein,

excluding the role of Catholics and other Christians

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