Natural Rights as defined by us?

"in short, 'natural rights' are the conditions of a good society. But what those conditions are is not given by nature or mystically bound up with the essence of man and his inevitable goal, but is determined by human decisions" (pg 34).

I found this passage in particular to be of great significance because it sums up a lot of what Macdonald is arguing in the article. Moreover, I personally find the concept of natural rights as being artificial to defeat the entire purpose of calling them natural rights, why not contemporary value rights? I guess my problem is how I have come over my years of defining natural rights. By natural rights I always thought in an objective manner i.e. natural rights were independent of human volition, not contingent upon them. I'm curious as to what others think about this concept. I still somewhat believe that there may very well be objective natural rights. It may vary well be the case that we may never know these rights, but that does not mean they do not exist and that we should not attempt to discover them. I know that there are strong arguments against the case of objective natural rights, one being that "standards are determined by human choice, not set by nature independently of men" (pg 31). Nevertheless, part of me still thinks about natural rights as something that is unchanging. Perhaps the name 'natural rights' should be replaced with a better phrase that more accurately represents the true nature of these rights. Or perhaps I am finding it hard to replace my, at times dogmatic, definition of what a natural right is.