Two very different answers are frequently offered to the question: what are human rights? One answer is that human rights are simply those rights which are enumerated in the international human rights instruments and that no further grounding is required. This is the political conception of human rights. It is vulnerable to the objection: what happens if the politics change?, what happens if the international consensus changes or disappears on questions such as the right not to be tortured or the right to life?

Another frequent answer is that human rights are those rights which any individual human being enjoys simply by virtue of their status as a human being or a human person. (We will discuss below and in a later blog post what is at stake in attaching these rights to human beings or persons). Human rights, on this account, constitute minimum standards of treatment, basic ways in which human beings ought to treat one another. A problem with this answer is that many of the things we typically regard as human rights (e.g. freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial) are both properly qualified by the interests of others and by the circumstances. The classic example relating to freedom of speech is that I am free to shout “Fire” in an empty forest but not in a crowded theatre or when someone is walking through a rifle range. In the case of the right to a fair trial what constitutes a fair trial depends on the possibilities of a community gathering evidence and finding unbiased judges and it is widely accepted that the kidnapper holding a child hostage at knifepoint has not had their rights violated if, after having been warned, they are shot dead because they refuse to release the child.

Therefore, some human rights are minimum standards of behaviour whilst others are descriptions of personal interests that ought to be given a heavy weighting when the justification for official actions and the balance of social organisation is being assessed. Ronald Dworkin influentially described the weight to be given to human rights in this way in a 1970 essay: ‘Rights as trumps’ (reprinted in his 1978 book, Taking Rights Seriously). The idea that rights are trumps has given rise to the popular idea that if an individual successfully claims a right then that automatically defeats any collective considerations. The only way to defeat a human rights claim by an individual is with a human rights claim by another individual or by showing that the right in question does not extend as far as the claimant asserts.

The answer that human rights are those rights which any individual human being enjoys simply by virtue of their status as a human being or a human person has individualism close to the heart of its DNA. The origins of this account of human rights go back to John Locke, whose theory of natural rights began with a vision of a state of nature populated by self-sufficient, individual, proprietors.

Locke’s state of nature is a fiction and not a neutral or benign one. Contrary to the picture Locke imagines, the condition of human beings into which we are born is to live in relationship with one another.  That is the situation in which everyone lives except those who make the extreme decision to live in permanent isolation. The person who achieves their ambition to become a hermit in uninhabited terrain which no other people ever visit has no need of human rights. The perceived necessity for human rights arises precisely because of our interactions with others.

Speaking of the subjects of human rights as persons has the advantage of emphasising the relationality of rights. Unfortunately, this terminology has been hijacked by those who want to argue that rights are to be understood as projections of the human will. Increasingly, attaching human rights to persons means recognising the rights only of those human persons who are in a position to choose. Thus, the pregnant woman is a human person whose right to choose whether to abort her baby is recognised (though it is often a choice made in circumstances for which the father and others bear much responsibility) but the unborn baby’s status as a human being is irrelevant because they have no voice with which to plead for their life. At the other end of life, focussing on human persons rather than human beings is one of the shifts in language used to promote euthanasia and assisted dying.

So, to return to the question: what are human rights? From a Christian perspective, human rights are shorthand descriptions of the ways in which human beings are entitled, by virtue of their status as members of the human species, to expect others to treat them.

As Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in Justice: Rights and Wrongs and Emily Ho, Matthew Ferguson, Jermy Ive and Michael Schluter contend in Relational Rights, a Christian approach to human rights places rights within the context of relationships. This means that in order to understand the scope and extent of a human right, you have to weigh it against the common good, the goods intrinsic to the relationship in the context of which the right is asserted (e.g. the limits on freedom of religion in working life may be different from those in family life or in public life), and the rights and responsibilities of the parties against whom the right is claimed. When God liberated the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, God did not give them the Declaration of the Rights of the Israelites but the Ten Commandments. One way of thinking about rights is as the flipside of responsibilities. Some thinkers such as Wesley Hohfeld and Nicholas Wolterstorff go so far as to see responsibilities and rights as being simply two sides of a coin (this is called the correlativity thesis). Even if we don’t go that far, no Christian thinker could accept that our rights are ever divorced from our responsibilities towards others. The biblical social vision (shalom) is not a state of nature of isolated individuals but a wholesome community of interdependent households providing support to one another and to those whose natural relational networks were missing or broken down (Isaiah 10:1-2; 32:16-20).

From a Christian perspective, the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘natural rights’ are interchangeable. Human rights are that subset of rights which members of the human species enjoy simply because they are members of that species. Human beings have been created in the image of God and given inherent worth and dignity. Jesus Christ says that we can see his face in ‘the least of these’ (Matthew 25:40, 45). The rights we have against others and the responsibilities we owe them are ultimately grounded in our relationship to our loving heavenly Father.

Thinking about human rights as expectations of treatment that form part of relationships: to be evaluated in the context of responsibilities, the good of the parties to the relationship, the purposes of the relationship, and the common good, does not guarantee easy answers to resolve clashes of rights. It does, however, enable us to discern the proper limits of rights in a way that promotes not just individual but also social flourishing.