Human rights: the nature and basis of human rights, religious and secular foundations, the Universal Declaration, conflicts and limits of rights, and the application of ethical theories.

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain human rights: their nature and basis, the religious (the image of God) and secular foundations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the conflicts and limits of rights, and the application of ethical theories, and then evaluate questions about their grounding and inviolability. This topic of A2 7 asks what rights people have simply as human beings, where those rights come from, and how strong they are.

The nature and basis of human rights

Religious and secular foundations

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Conflicts, limits and the ethical theories

Rights are not always straightforward to apply.

• Conflicts and limits. Rights can conflict (one person's freedom against another's safety, or individual rights against the common good), and many rights can be limited (for example, liberty restricted to prevent harm), raising the question of whether any rights are truly absolute.
• Natural Moral Law supports rights through the common good and the dignity of the person made for flourishing.
• Situation Ethics asks what agape requires, which usually upholds the dignity of persons but allows flexibility.
• Utilitarianism sits in tension with rights, since maximising overall happiness can in principle justify overriding an individual's rights, which a strong doctrine of rights exists to prevent.

Evaluating the inviolability of rights

A model evaluation paragraph might run: "There is a powerful case that human rights should never be overridden: the whole purpose of a right is to protect the individual against being sacrificed for the convenience of others, so that to allow rights to be set aside whenever it seems useful is to abolish them as rights and to leave the vulnerable unprotected, exactly the danger the Universal Declaration was framed to prevent after the horrors of the Second World War. Yet in practice rights are not all absolute and can genuinely conflict: one person's right to free expression may clash with another's right to safety, and the right to liberty is rightly limited to prevent serious harm, so some balancing seems unavoidable. The judgement, therefore, is that a small core of the most basic rights, such as the right not to be tortured, deserves to be treated as effectively inviolable, while many rights, being capable of conflict, must be weighed against one another and against the common good, so 'never overridden' holds for the core but not for every right."

Try this

Q1. What does it mean to say human rights are inalienable? [2 marks]

• Cue. That they cannot be given up or taken away; they belong to people simply as human beings.

Q2. Explain the religious foundation of human rights. [6 marks]

• Cue. Rights rest on the imago Dei: every person is made in the image of God and so has inviolable, God-given worth, giving rights an objective, transcendent basis.

Q3. "Human rights are better grounded in religion than in secular reasoning." Discuss. [20 marks]

• Cue. Weigh the objective grounding the imago Dei gives against secular foundations in reason and humanity, and the grounding problems each faces. Reach a judgement.