Do we have the moral duty to help the poor? Many people think that we have. And some may argue that such a moral duty is so basic that it can find its support from the moral perspectives of different religions and cultures. Some may even say that it is a universally held moral intuition that we have the moral duty to help the poor. But can we find a philosophical justification for the universality of such a moral intuition? Some philosophers attempt to provide such a philosophical justification from the perspective of human rights theory by arguing that the moral duty can be derived from some basic human rights. This paper aims to discuss some philosophical problems inherent in the aforementioned approach to the moral duty to help the poor.