Amado T. Tumbali, Jr., S.J. (“Maritain’s ‘Rights’: A Heritage of Neo-Thomism in the Twentieth Century”) explains Maritain’s contribution to the development of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Using the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and the neo-scholastics, he staunchly defended a natural law ethics. He regarded moral norms as intrinsically bound to human nature. Unlike other philosophers who regarded human rights as the product of a sociological form of rule setting, or a reasoned agreement of people to accept norms imposed by a legitimate authority in exchange for security and economic benefit (cf. John Rawls’ Law of Peoples), Maritain traced the underlying basis of the concept of human rights to natural law, particularly to human nature. For Maritain, these rights are known primarily through what he calls connaturality or congeniality which develops in human persons as they grow in moral experience and maturity. Maritain’s way of philosophizing on human rights has thus laid a more stable foundation for the universal and immutable character of these rights. – from the Editor’s Preface