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I mentioned James Griffin's theory of human rights before, but I want to add something here.

I said before that Griffin attempts to derive rights from what he calls 'personhood' or 'human standing.' He believes that the core value that we are tying to protect by establishing individual rights is the value of personhood. To defend or preserve personhood, we must have autonomy, welfare, and liberty. In other words, we have rights to autonomy, welfare, and liberty because they are required to protect and preserve personhood.

I want to focus for a minute on Griffin's views on a right to welfare because he does go beyond traditional libertarian ideas on that point. Here is what Griffin tells us:

The intuitive case for a human right to welfare goes something like this. Human rights are protections of human standing. We attach a high value to our living as normative agents -- our autonomously choosing and freely pursuing our conception of a worthwhile life. Then it is not surprising that we should include among human rights, as indeed the tradition did from the start, not only a right to liberty but also a right to life. If human rights are protections of a form of life that is autonomous and free, they should protect life as well as that form of it. But if they protect life, must they not also ensure the wherewithal to keep body and soul together -- that is, some minimum material provision? And as mere subsistence -- that is, keeping body and soul together -- is too meagre to ensure normative agency, must not human rights guarantee also whatever leisure and education and access to the thought of others that are also necessary to being a normative agent? [James Griffin, On Human Rights, p. 179.]