Philosophy Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God must directly explain human rights; (2) human nature must also directly explain human rights; (3) this dual contribution must explain why morality forbids rights violations by grounding the deontic reasons associated with rights. I propose a holiness account of rights. On this view, God endows human nature with rights by making human nature holy, and God does so by fashioning humans with one of God's essential properties: the capacity to love. This theory satisfies all three conditions and explains the deontological character of rights.
Copyright Statement
Publisher PDF
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Repository Citation
Vallier, Kevin, "Human Rights and Divine Holiness" (2023). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 3.
https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/philosophy_pub/3
Publication Date
2023
Publication Title
Religious Studies
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/S003441252300077X
Start Page No.
1
End Page No.
13