14 - Rights and persons: the religious ground of human rights

Summary

Persons have rights, and they have them because they are persons. This is perhaps the most basic statement about the connection of rights and persons. What are these rights? Who are the persons who have them? On what basis do they have them? And what is their ethical significance, particularly from a theological viewpoint? In this chapter we explore these questions in order to return afresh to some of the practical issues raised in chapters 3 and 4 about the rights of the foetus and non-human animals which were discussed in relation to concepts of personhood advocated by many contemporary ethicists.

The presuppositions for a theory of rights are to be found in a combination of early Christian thought, Stoicism and Roman law, but the first anticipations of the developed theories of the seventeenth century cannot be found before the medieval period, in the writings of theologians and philosophers such as Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham.1 Richard Tuck draws attention particularly to the creative thought of Jean Gerson in 1402, based on the idea of the reciprocal relationship of God and man, involving a covenant which generated rights on both sides.2 This view was not shared by the Reformers, since it seemed to compromise the sovereignty of God and underestimate the force of human sin. Implicit in these early theories we can see the seeds of later conflict and debate about the basis of human rights and the nature of a religious ethic.