Secular Worldviews, Religious Worldviews, and the Morality of Human Rights

That's the title of a new paper--a draft--that I've posted to SSRN and thought might be of interest to some MOJ readers.  The abstract:

"The morality of human rights -- by which I mean the foundational, connected moral claims articulated in the International Bill of Human Rights -- coheres well with some religious worldviews. For example, and as philosopher Charles Taylor has explained, the 'affirmation of universal human rights [that characterizes] modern liberal political culture [represents an] authentic development[] of the gospel . . .' But does the morality of human rights also cohere, well or otherwise, with any secular worldview: any worldview that denies or is agnostic about the existence of a 'transcendent' reality, as distinct from the reality that is the object of natural-scientific inquiry? Put another way: Are secular worldviews and the morality of human rights like oil and water?

This is an essay in human rights theory--a brief essay, given its intended venue; see below. In it, I explicate the morality of human rights and then address the question articulated in the preceding paragraph. Along the way, I reference recent work in human rights theory by religious human-rights theorist Nicholas Wolterstorff ('Justice: Rights and Wrongs') and secular human-rights theorist James Griffin ('On Human Rights').

In this essay--a later version of which will be my contribution to The Routledge Companion to Theism, edited by Charles Taliaferro, Steven Goetz & Victoria S. Harrison--I build on an argument I began in The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford, 1998) and continued, in revised form, in Toward a Theory of Human Rights (Cambridge, 2007).

For a recent essay on the problématique to which my argument is a response -- an essay that discusses my argument -- see Daniel Malachuk, 'Human Rights and a Post-Secular Religion of Humanity,' Journal of Human Rights 9.2 (June 2010). Another recent, quite relevant discussion: John Dobard, 'The Inheritance of Excellence: On the Uses, Justification, and Problem of Human Dignity,' http://ssrn.com/abstract=1580548.

Comments welcome: [email protected]."

The paper is downloadable here.