The major human rights instruments were the products of the post-World War II Era, as the world struggled to come to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ tactics in their war on the Eastern Front as well as the domestic terror of Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and the brutalities inflected by the Japanese Empire on those it conquered and defeated in the war in East Asia.

The motivating idea behind the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1947), the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1958), and the other human rights instruments of this time was that there are some ways in which human beings should never be treated under any circumstances (absolute rights), ways in which human beings may only be treated in exceptional circumstances (fundamental rights), and other ways in which human beings ought only to be treated if their personal interests are clearly outweighed by those of the community as a whole (balanced rights).

So stated, the first two category of rights mark a decisive break with the philosophy of utilitarianism which, in many of its forms, says that there are no a priori limits on how an individual or a group of individuals sharing particular characteristics may be treated so long as the overall outcome is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Human rights are underpinned by the ideas of human nature, human dignity, and natural law. Many of the key proponents of human rights after World War II were Christians who, horrified by the degradation and desecration that totalitarianisms had inflicted on an industrial scale, presented human rights as a secular framework giving expression to the Christian beliefs that there is one single human race (human nature), each of whose members is made in the image of God (human dignity), and all of whom are answerable to God for the ways in which we treat one another (theocentric natural law). Human rights, so understood, provide a normative framework setting outer limits to official action, placing basic demands on governments, and thus contributing in some important but limited way to human flourishing and to making essential human goods available to all members of societies.

In this series we will be exploring the roots of human rights, Christian and otherwise, the directions in which human rights theories have developed, and Christian proposals to reject or reform human rights.