The opening lines of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) echo the American Declaration of Independence, recognizing in each person their “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights.” Yet, many of the sources underlying the UDHR boast far greater antiquity than 1776. Philosophers have long tangoed with the theory of natural law and its close relative, natural rights. In the early first century BC, the Roman Stoic and orator Cicero equated natural law with God, a concept which was later subsumed into early Christian thought, namely by Augustine and Ambrose, who, in the words of Gerard Watson, “baptized it and handed it on for preservation in the Church.”1
Yet, natural law theory is not a wholly pagan import, but one which is implicit in the Mosaic Law—“given to the Israelites because the natural law was being subverted, and was meant to reaffirm it as well as supplement it”2—as well as Pauline theology, as seen in Paul’s letter to the Romans (2:12-14). Within the context of Medieval thought, Thomas Aquinas built on this robust philosophical tradition, arguing, after the manner Plato’s Republic, that justice is “the habit according to which someone has a constant and perpetual will to render to each his right” (Summa, IIaIIae 58). By this, he drew a clear connection between justice and human rights.
Natural law and natural rights theory was further nuanced by Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft; tested in the fires of the American and French Revolutions of the 16th century; flouted in the bloody First and Second World Wars; and finally brought to the forefront of global attention through the drafting of the UDHR which followed shortly thereafter. Thus, it is apparent that the UDHR is a document which relies not only on the immediate sources of its own time, but on millennia of human ethical theory—some of which draw immediately from Scripture, but most of which are more fundamentally based on the universal conviction of natural law.
However, that natural law and natural rights theory boast antiquity does not by necessity lend credence to their positive existence. While some modern philosophers continue to defend natural and universal rights on the basis of natural law, others criticize such thinking as a “philosophically bankrupt” and fundamentally western conception3—one which has been disseminated through bloody conquest and colonialism. Moral relativism is having its heyday. Consequently, an appeal solely to Biblical authority alone, though convenient, is overly simplistic to combat skepticism towards natural, universal rights.
Perhaps a better approach would be, much like C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, to return to the question of natural law itself. As Lewis notes, “[H]uman beings, all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.”4 Materialistic philosophy alone is not only “powerless to establish the existence of rights inhering by nature in the human being,”5 but is equally as inadequate to explain why humans universally agree that such rights should exist—indeed, do exist—and ought to be under global aegis.
That such a democratically universal impulse exists is perhaps greater testament to objective human rights than any appeal to higher authority. By this reasoning, the UDHR recognizes—but does not grant—preexistent, immutable, absolute moral standards. The efficient cause of such universal rights must, in turn, be attributed to something which transcends humanity itself. Within Judaeo-Christian thought, this is God’s divine will and reason, by which natural law is made manifest and written upon the heart of humankind.
1 United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1948.
2 Gerard Watson, “The Natural Law and Stoicism” in The Problems of Stoicism, A. A. Long, ed. (London: Athlone Press, 1971), 236.
3 David Boucher, The Limits of Ethics in International Relations: Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Human Rights in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 45.
4 Ibid., 217.
5 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: Harper Collins, 1952), 18.
6 Jacques Maritain, “Human Rights and Natural Law,” The UNESCO Courier, n.d., https://en.unesco.org/courier/2018-4/human-rights-and-natural-law.