Human Rights are an undeniably politically, socially, and philosophically influential concept. Foundational to the laws, practices, policies, and broad societal beliefs across the modern western world is the assumption that all people are endowed with a set of rights granted to them by virtue of their humanity(Donnelly, 2013, p.7-23). In contemporary political science, human rights are understood as a necessary, secular component of geopolitics (Freeman, 2004, p.390-391), yet historically human rights were inseparably religious (Locke, 1690, p.3). This dissonance between the religious, and naturalist assumptions of human rights and the contemporary secular understanding of these rights has been resolved in a number of important ways, including but not limited to an approach of Pragmatism, and Utilitarianism. In this article, the approach of Rule Utilitarianism as applied to the problem of Human Rights will be suggested in contrast to the traditional, universalist approach.
When considering the assumptions of human rights, the easiest approach to theoretically explain and justify is a religious one. If we presume that a God exists, and that this God is by its essence, superior and/or an authority over all humans, then it follows that the given rules presented by this God ought to be followed, especially if this authority is not just a functional, but ethical authority as well. This follows in the writings of John Locke (1690), wherein he counters the systemic problems of human authoritarianism with the declaration that the ultimate authority under which all human authority is derived grants humans a set of rights by virtue of us being the children of God (Freeman, 2004). In addition to religious assumptions, naturalist assumptions are often also paired with this Lockean approach to human rights, with Locke (1690), himself stating that humans are granted freedom-by-default, and these base freedoms are stripped away by government, society, and some religious institutions unjustly. Essentially, the view that God grants humans basic rights under which no other authority might question was a vital stepping stone towards the greater democratic and egalitarian world that we currently live in within the west (Freeman, 2004). It is in this view that we can better understand that, even in re-evaluating human rights as a secular principle, they are foundationally a religious one; one that cannot be easily separated from these religious assumptions. Despite this, there have been attempts to decouple human rights from its religious and naturalist base, often from a place of pragmatism and practicality.
Consider Locke, a European Christian who ultimately sought a conservative means of pulling power away from Monarchy, and towards concepts of freedom insofar as they are not counter to essential Christian ideals (Rogers, 2024). The view that humans have basic human rights as viewed through the eyes of Locke is one where Christianity is not only a personal belief, but a Truth that ought to be upheld as foundational law (Rogers, 2024). Now consider a religious man living in China during this period of time. This man would likely be a Buddhist, and as such would have no particular consideration of Christian laws and ideals (Adler, 2002), and as such John Locke declaring that this Chinese man has rights as given to him by the Christian God would seem outlandish. Thus, the problem of a religious approach to human rights is clear: the only means under which a Christian human rights may be universalized is for Christianity also to be universalized. This presents substantial concerns regarding the personal beliefs of the people who might be forced to convert to Christianity, which itself is a violation of what many consider to be the right to thought and belief (United Nations, 1948). Therefore, it is essential for any view of human rights to contain secularist assumptions such that, regardless of the religious and/or spiritual beliefs of any given person, the set of human rights prescribed to them will not violate their right to believe as they will. With this need established, secularist philosophy quickly required a means under which human rights might exist within a secular framework, and in this approach, the immediate solution was one of pragmatism. Human rights must be universal, regardless of the religious beliefs of any individual who has rights, therefore it stands to reason that human rights must be divorced from religion. Thus, the practical need for universal human rights removed the dependence on religion (Freeman, 2004). This presents a problem, however. Despite the practical removal of religion from the outward-facing presentation of human rights, the reality of human rights as a religious belief had not been properly decoupled. Due to this, I would argue that in the goal of a pragmatic a-religious human rights, a reworking of the foundational assumptions are necessary. In saying this, I present a Rule Utilitarian approach under-which the concept of human rights might be based secularly.
Rule Utilitarianism is somewhat the melding of Deontology, and traditional Consequentialism; the idea that there are a set of rules or principles that we must all follow, but these rules are set through the analysis of consequences, where traditional Deontology determines these principles or rules through other means, such as one's faculty for reason, or divine instruction (Moore, 2021). Thus, Rule Utilitarianism escapes the trappings of Act Utilitarianism in that it may avoid a Utility monster. These Utility monsters originate from the thought experiment created by philosophy Robert Nozick that supposes that if one's goal is to maximize total utility within a consequentialist framework, a monster could be created that derived greater utility than the entire total utility of the human population through that population's destruction. Traditionally, utilitarianism would require that all of humanity be destroyed to appeal to the monster (Nozick, 1974, p. 41). Within a Rule Utilitarian framework, the Utility Monster does not allow for the erasure of the entire human race, as mass genocide sets a precedent, or rule, under which net negative outcomes are observed. If it were morally permissible to commit genocide to appeal to a greater source of utility, an even greater utility monster for whom the entire destruction of all other utility monsters was the only means to derive greater overall utility would therefore counter the initial utility monster. This still presents the problem under-which now the total utility has still increased at an equivalent rate to the rate of dis-utility, thus maintaining positive utility. However, if it is the median utility of a given population that we seek to maximize, a Utility monster would be an obvious outlier within the dataset, and the entire destruction of the human race would reduce the initial median utility, replacing it with the single outlier. Through the combination of the abstraction to absurdity given the existence of an infinite set of utility monsters, as well as the existence of a utility monster as a whole, traditional Utilitarianism fails. However, measuring the median utility rather than total utility addresses both these concerns, thus my approach of median utility measurement survives the scrutiny that typical utilitarianism fails. With this understood, we can then apply this principle of increasing the median utility of a given population to human rights, and in doing so we avoid the need of a religious justification of said human rights. If we find that the median utility of the human population increases when a set of human rights are observed through global law, then it is therefore ethical to uphold these human rights irrespective of the individual cultural practices of any given population who might oppose the concept of human rights themselves. Even here, there is another problem, namely that there is a significant burden of proof that the universal application of human rights does indeed increase the median utility of humanity. One way that we might determine if human rights and freedoms do indeed increase total utility, or the happiness of a given population, is to compare a list of countries ranked based on the World Happiness Report and the Freedom In The World index. When doing so, there is a significant correlation (+.98) between countries that hold the highest level of freedom, and the countries with the highest level of happiness (Freedom House, 2024; Helliwell, et al., 2024). Thus, it can be said that rates of median utility are indeed correlated with rates of freedom, or the rates of the application of universal human rights. Therefore, it stands to reason that an increase in median utility does indeed occur given greater access to universal human rights, thus suggesting that universal human rights may be attained within a Rule Utilitarian framework without the need of a religious foundation.
Separating human rights from religiosity is not only useful, but essential for an effective and practical universal application of human rights. Thus, it is important to find a new foundation under which human rights might be interpreted, as maintaining the current religious foundation undermines the universality of these human rights. Previous attempts to secularize human rights failed, as they did not create a proper foundational distinction between the previous religious framework, and the new secular framework. Therefore, an approach that fully and completely divorces human rights from religion must remove all connection to the religious foundation, and one means under which this might be done is through the application of Rule Utilitarianism. So long as it can be said that median net utility increases with the application of universal human rights, it remains ethically consistent and valid to support the existence of human rights through Rule Utilitarianism, and as it has been demonstrated that there is a significant correlation between human rights and utility, this does seem to be the case. Therefore, Rule Utilitarianism is an ideal solution to the problem of secularism and human rights.
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