- What makes a right a 'human right'?
- Nickel, James, Human Rights, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter, 2014).
- Raz, Joseph, Human Rights without Foundations, in Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, ch. 15.
- Griffin, James, Human Rights and the Autonomy of International Law, in Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, ch. 16.
- Skorupski, John, Human Rights, in Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, ch. 17.
- Beitz, Charles, The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Buchanan, Allen, The Heart of Human Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Donnelly, Jack, Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
- Gewirth, Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- Griffin, James, On Human Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Nino, Carlos, The Ethics of Human Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- O’Neill, Onora, The Dark Side of Human Rights, International Affairs, vol.81 no.2 (March, 2005), pp. 427-439.
- Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Shue, Henry, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.
- Valentini, Laura, In What Sense are Human Rights Political? A PreliminaryExploration, Political Studies, vol. 60, no. 1 (2012), pp. 180-194.
- Are human rights natural?
- Is it worth talking about 'human rights' in the absence of political mechanisms for their effective enforcement?