 Maritain held that natural law theory entailed an account of human rights. Since the natural end of each person is to achieve moral and spiritual perfection, it is necessary to have the means to do so, i.e., to have rights which, since they serve to realise his or her nature, are called ‘natural’. This respects the Aristotelian-Thomistic principle of justice, that we should distribute to each ‘what is truly his or hers’. Maritain replies to the criticism that there are no such rights, since they are not universally recognised, by reminding his readers that, just as the natural law comes to be recognised gradually and over time, so also is there a gradual recognition of rights. Indeed, Maritain held that certain basic natural rights can be recognised by all, without there having to be agreement on their foundation and, as an illustration of this, he pointed to the general agreement on those rights found in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, he did insist that an adequate account of human rights required a foundation in natural law (see Man and the State, 1951: Ch. IV)—a position rejected by many authors in the Anglo-American tradition, such as Rawls (Clark 2012).