Nicholas Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Notre Dame, Princeton and others. His many books Until Justice and Peace Embrace, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Thomas Reid and the story of Epistemology and Justice in Love.
A human right is a right attached to the status of being a human being. Not all kinds of rights are human rights. The right not to be tortured is a human right. UN Declaration on Human Right-- example, that everyone has a right to periodic vacations with pay is not a human right.
It seems unlikely that secular grounding of human right would succeed, given that even after many attempts it has not succeeded. Kant adopted 'capacities approach' to ground human right. “Capacities approach” may roughly be defined as as that 'capacity to set ends through reason as contrasted with acting on the basis of impulse, addiction and the like. The problem with adopting 'capacities approach' is that people born with mental impairment and who would not be able to reason would have to be left out. For somewhat similar reason the secular grounding of Ronal Dworkin and Alan Gewirth too failed.
The Bible tells that humans are created in God's image. And thisis the most common grounding for theistic account. God loves each and every human being equally and permanently, and that worth bestowed by the love of God serves as the basis for human right.
Richard Rorty considers that grounding of human right in human dignity is 'outmoded'. To get more people to embrace human right culture, the far more effective mean is to tell 'sad and sentimental stories” to evoke sympathy, not find a philosophical grounding. Wolterstorff disagrees. The Serbian soldiers raped and killed Bosnian women in the latter's faces and voices; and the Nazis guards in the faces and voices of their Jewish victims. Yet sympathy was not evoked. As a long as a man believes that the other person does is unworthy of better treatment, seeing her face or hearing her voice will not ordinarily evoke sympathy. Conviction, therefore, must be engaged too. Conviction that this human person too has great worth.
A right is a legitimate claim to some good in life of the right-bearer. “So a right against someone is a legitimate claim against that person to their doing or refraining from doing something with respect to oneself.” To dishonour that right is to wrong someone. Rights are normative social relationship; and honouring these social relationships are foundational to human community.
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