Are there universal human rights? (02.12.2025

Are There Universal Human Rights?

Does everyone have the ‘right to a family life’? That’s what got the family WhatsApp discussion going the other night. My sister was cooking dinner, her phone balanced against the fruit bowl while my brother-in-law and I, out of sight of each other, argued away. He took the realistic, politico-economic position (focusing on immigration issues); I took the high-minded philosophical one (and got myself in a knot). In the end, we gave up and chatted about the dog instead.

Universal human rights is an important question. People often talk about it without really stopping to think. Is it obvious that we possess such things? Or is it more problematic than it appears?  

The question of whether human rights exist and apply universally sits at the juncture between philosophy, religion, and political theory. There are basically two positions. The first argues that human beings possess certain rights on the ground of something objective like our nature or God or reason. The second is that human rights are social constructs which we have invented for political and social convenience.

The debate is nothing new; it has been going on for centuries. 

Jeremy Bentham was one the most famous critics of the idea. He was writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and is famous for many things, not least having his body preserved in a glass case at University College, London (you can go and see it).

He dismissed the idea of natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” For him, rights are created by laws and institutions; they don’t exist prior to any government or legal system. The very idea that humans are born with inherent rights, independent of society, is both conceptually incoherent and politically dangerous. Why? Because you can’t prove they exist.  I can’t bring my ‘rights’ into a room and show them to you. I can bring in my wallet or my phone or anything else I might own, but I can’t slam a ‘right’ on a table and demand you to accept it.

Bentham argued that when I claim a human right, like the right to a family, I am appealing to something society has decided I should be allowed to have. It’s a societal choice that’s upheld by a law because, generally, being able to have a family, promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This is what we call utilitarianism, and a human right is nothing more than a tool we use to maximise over all well-being. But note, this might not always be the case, and when it no-longer serves that purpose, than we can dispense with it. There is nothing eternal or universal about my ‘right to a family’.

Disagreeing with Bentham are those that belong to the ‘natural law’ tradition. These people argue that human beings possess inherent dignity by virtue of being human (and nothing else). We can think of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke.

Locke believed we possessed natural rights to life, liberty and property. They don’t originate in some mathematical calculation that measures pain against pleasure, or in a government’s decree. Rather, they originate in our very nature as rational beings. Everyone possesses them irrespective of culture, race, religion or politics. They are universal because they express our common humanity. It is this type of thinking which influenced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Locke was a Christian (he was writing in the seventeenth century) and his faith heavily influenced his view of the world. He agreed that every person was created imago Dei, in the image of God, and therefore possessed inherent worth. This implied a form of equality and universal dignity that transcended social and cultural boundaries.

Of course, the Church doesn’t have clean hands – we all know that. It has been complicit in many atrocities and systems of oppression. We can think of the Inquisition, the forced conversion of indigenous peoples in South America and other such horrors. But, if we look at its core theological beliefs, we see that it does advocate the universality of human dignity. For Saint Augustine all souls are morally equal before God, while for Saint Thomas Aquinas our moral worth is grounded in divine reason. Today, Christian social teaching has played a key role in anti-slavery campaigns, civil-rights movements and humanitarian work.

But what happens if you don’t believe in God? In what are you going to root these universal rights? You might agree with Locke and talk about human reason; our intelligence grants us a special kind of dignity. Or you might say that in virtue of belonging to the same species, we should grant everyone the same rights – that’s only fair. But now we have moved from making an objective claim (our intelligence), to a moral claim (we should do this) and morality is a cultural phenomenon if there isn’t a God to be the author of it.

This is the challenged posed by the relativists. They argue that human rights are culturally specific rather than universal. What one society considers a right may not be recognized by another, and efforts to impose universal standards is a form of moral imperialism. Take the right to property. Communitarian societies might disagree. Or consider the right to individual autonomy, gender equality, or freedom of expression; these may conflict with the values of more traditional societies.

Criticisms such as these question whether the UN Declaration of Human Right is nothing more than an expression Western liberal values.

Perhaps you can see now why I got myself in a knot. The best answer I could have given (and didn’t because we talked about the dog instead) was the idea of human flourishing.

While cultures differ on certain human rights, core protections are indispensable because they allow all human beings, in all communities, to flourish. This is an empirical fact. No culture has ever advocated murder as a moral good; they have all permitted it as an unfortunate necessity in time of war or to uphold justice. In the same way, freedom from torture and slavery; the right to education, to a fair trial, to privacy, to asylum – I could on – ensure that all human beings irrespective or age or gender, have the chance to live fruitful lives. Cultures may vary but anything that undermines human flourishing should not be permitted simply because it is ‘traditional’.

Now it is true that, perhaps, the thirty rights identified by the United Nations have a Western Liberal bias (take the right to democracy and the right to own things, for example), but I still contend they are universal. Why? Because, as a theist, I believe that God has intended us to live useful and meaningful lives. The best way to achieve this is for each human being to endorse them.  

And this is my brother-in-law’s point. If we insist these rights are inherent and universal, then we have a duty to uphold them, both Governments and individuals. I can’t slam my ‘right’ on the table and demand you accept it unless I accept your right as well. If the two come into conflict, we negotiate. That is part of society, learning to live together. Unfortunately, a lot of people have forgotten about the duty they owe to others.