Why do we care for human rights? Contemporary human rights theories barely offer any convincing answer to this rather obvious question. For example, the inclusion of potential terrorists to the prohibition of torture remains mysterious from a contractualist or cultural relativist point of view. On the other hand, overloading reason and communication with normativity as Kantians and proponents of discourse theory do, hardly passes critical examination. The author tries to help filling this gap by focussing on the importance of the human faculty of empathy for the understanding of human rights. He draws not only on traditional philosophical works, among others by Hume and Schopenhauer but also on recent developments in empirical science like psychology or neuroscience. The work results in establishing a non-reductive form of human rigths naturalism. It was honoured with the 2014 Annual Award of the Zurich Law Faculty.