The only thing that is substantially universal is that all humans have similar needs and tend to see and experience benefit or harm in similar ways. This leads to he evolution of moral systems that are broadly similar from society to society.

I would say that concepts of human rights evolve out of that constant negotiation of morality, but that they aren't universal in some mystical sense. The older I get the more I realize that life doesn't owe me anything just because I exist, including rights. However ... society might think it in its best interest to "guarantee" me certain entitlements because I'll be more likely to work to support and sustain society if I feel it provides the stability, safety and subjective sense of fair play and respect and hope that makes me more self-actualized and content and productive and cooperative.

Besides, as a practical matter, society has to grant me rights so that it has something to take from me if I don't behave.

We surround all this with a lot of soaring rhetoric about natural rights but it really just boils down to a fiction that we all agree to hold sacred (for some given value of sacred, anyway) so that we can coexist and cooperate effectively.

So technically I'm not entitled to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness but in our mutual self-interest, both I and society act AS IF I am, and that makes it real in a sense.

"It is a historical fact that it was the "West" that invented the idea of basic human rights."
This is a terrible way to phrase this, even if it were true. The word I think you're looking for is "codify", and in writing down as law. Sumerians had a code of law 4,000 years ago - long before the "West" existed.

The thing you seem to be calling "Human Rights" are not a natural phenomenon of the Universe. Human Rights are a human invention, intended to ensure everyone starts from a level playing field. We give them because we want to receive them. As for morality being subjective, I think you mean "objective". No definition of morality implies it's objective.

"For Western liberals, this is a real dilemma..."
Since you refer to "Western liberals" as they, I presume you don't count yourself among them. Consequently, you're either "Eastern", conservative, or both. In that light, do you not feel everyone should be treated with a basic amount of respect, and afforded a basic amount of dignity? If not, is it because you're "Eastern" or because you're conservative? In either case, it's an odd perspective. It also paints "them" with a broad brush, presuming all "Western liberals" "assume that human rights are universal", and that "most believe that moral norms are associated with certain cultures". I'd like to see an authoritative source for that statement.

"Anything else would be Western cultural imperialism (a real bad thing to western Liberals)."
But not a "bad thing" to "Eastern liberals", or "Western conservatives", I guess.

"What about those cultures that reject the idea of universal human rights because they view them as a specific Western set of values and norms? "
Name one. Any one. Name ONE culture "that reject[s] the idea of universal human rights because they view them as a specific Western set of values and norms?"

The whole premise of this post is just wrong, and it seems to be steeped in part by a lack of understanding about the definitions of several important words.

There are basics. Those not recognized by the assholes with the weapons are rights denied.

I absolutely do not see human rights as universal. We are just another life form among millions of others and the idea we are somehow 'special' is a form of arrogance (it's called anthropogenic). It's the same argument that religion tells people a god loves them and that is a heaven that transcends the universe is waiting for them. They also mention there is a hell if they don't do as they are told.

Human rights are, to me, a luxury that we have made for ourselves. That luxury extends only so long as resources exist to support us. Those resources are rapidly shrinking and with them go our so called rights.

I just finished reading the book "1491". In the end the author reports that in much of N. America the natives were early farmers and thus were much less authoritarian than later societies.This was especially true of the Haudenosaunee tribes. "Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and Britain - personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution." I would maintain that the pre- European natives of the American could not be considered 'Western' culture and that probably most early cultures had the same idea toward freedom and rights. One big difference between us and Asia is the huge difference in our numbers. Remember China has a population quadruple ours and also has the same land mass albeit with 11% less arable land. Resources are stretched to the limits and a true democracy could never exist there.

I also see morality and human rights as being two separate issues.

Perhaps an initial step is to consider the degrees of altruism that exist within different cultures.

I think we have certain rights only because we declare that we have those rights, and if we don’t constantly defend our rights those rights will disappear. Different cultures have different values, and hence different rights—and different ideas about morality also.

But our desire to have those rights has come down to us through a long evolutionary process, and in that sense our rights have been bequeathed to us by nature.

For example, I had a dog that expressed his wish to run freely in the yard. That wish is perfectly understandable in that his ancestors were free to roam with their packs. His nature was to be free.

If I had curtailed his right to roam freely he might still be alive. It is a sensitive subject and a case where conscious awareness has the ability to step in and overrule evolutionary instinctive behavior. Our rights are not absolute but are subject to regulation and modification.

Rights are neither discovered nor invented. They are agreed upon.

Tough one, but I will still argue that certain basic rights are fundamental to all human beings. Others are more culturally aligned, and specific to the development of a given society and its unique evolutionary pressures.

When people use the rights word, what they usually mean is that certain values are thought by them to be beyond debate, since I do not believe that anything is ever beyond debate, I find it hard to take that without at least a qualification or two.

If there is a universal discovered morality then it has to be based on the golden rule, which is fairly universal; and from that, the rights are no more than a set of derived laws, developed as pragmatic solutions to common problems of morality, they are therefore likely to vary, fail sometimes, and be in need of the occasional nuance. ( I do not think that they are purely western ideas, though they may vary much. For example, many cultures have recognized the so called right of rulers, kings etc. to rule, though we would not generally do so today. )

Given that, the question is really, whose view of rights serves best under any circumstance, and if you accept that, then they are debatable. Therefore it is open to debate if western rights are better or worse than any others, though the pragmatic view says they are fairly good. And since there are no universal rights, then there can be no right to have freedom from cultural imperialism, but to justify that you have to prove that western rights or any others you wish to enforce are best under each individual circumstance. Debate.

In the end the rights you get are those of the strongest cultures anyway, might may not be right, but it does get to decide what is right. So that the best rights are those which make winning cultures.

I think it's the product of the Judeo-Christian culture.

I would be surprised if individualistic cultures and collective cultures didn't converge on certain point of morality....such as prohibitions against killing, stealing, lying.....perhaps what you are looking for lies in the convergence of thought between these cultures...

The concept of "human rights" is a product of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, which sought to legitimize the rise of Capitalism, and the concept of 'laissez faire, that came with it.