Since Kant the foundation of human rights has been grounded on certain features of individuals that are construed as conferring human dignity, the protection of which is the main justification for and purpose of human rights. Most often those features are subsumed under the general heading of rationality, and, according to Kant, the possession of which renders humans uniquely capable of moral autonomy and therefore worthy of dignity. In this essay I will argue that a second, competing foundation for rights is also anticipated within Liberalism by Thomas Hobbes and elaborated upon by several twentieth-century schools of political thought, including feminism, post-modernism, and liberal communitarianism. These three appear to be rather strange bedfellows (not to mention as Hobbesian inheritors), but what they share provides a different basis for human rights. It is a foundation laid in two different features of human experience: the capacity of human beings to enter relationships with others; and second, the existential condition of vulnerability that results from this capacity. Though not unrelated to the capacity to reason, the ability to have relationships that cause vulnerability, in response to which persons need and therefore deserve rights, opens the door both to new and new types of human rights. It is my argument in what follows that if the capacity for relationships that delivers rights uniquely to human beings is a dynamic feature of human personality and itself capable of evolution and growth, it is logical to assume that the kinds of relationships for which humans are capable can also grow. Thus, as human relationships evolve, both in terms of interactions with each other and with, for instance, their environment, it is entirely possible that new rights will emerge, for instance environmental human rights, and that some rights might even be the property of whole groups rather than only of individuals
