# The Inalienable Argument ## Intro Almost everyone today believes in human rights. We say every person has them, rich or poor, young or old, healthy or sick, and that no government can take them away. A dictator who tortures prisoners does not cancel their rights; he violates them. That is what "inalienable" means: the right cannot be handed over, sold, voted away or revoked. That belief raises a hard question. Who gave us these rights? If a government gave them, a government can take them back. If a majority voted for them, a majority can vote again. If they come from our abilities, then people with fewer abilities, like newborns or people with severe disabilities, would have fewer rights. None of those answers gives rights that are equal and that no one can take away. The American founders gave a different answer: people are "endowed by their Creator" with rights. The Inalienable Argument says that answer is not a pious decoration. It is the only answer on the table that delivers the kind of rights we actually believe in. If rights are real, equal and beyond the reach of any human power, the best explanation is a God who made every person in His image. ## In full The Inalienable Argument is a grounding argument from the specific shape of human rights. Its explanandum is the conjunction of four properties that the modern rights tradition, including its secular declarations, ascribes to human rights: universality (every human has them), equality (none has more than another), inherence (they are had in virtue of being human, not conferred), and inalienability (no state, majority or bearer can revoke them). A deductive spine (P1 to P5) argues that a right with those properties requires a ground that every human has equally, that admits no degrees, and that no human authority bestows; that the main secular grounds (positive law, social contract, capacity, and brute non-natural moral fact) each fail at least one condition; and that a Creator who makes each human in His image and values each equally satisfies all of them, a thesis defended in its strongest current form by Nicholas Wolterstorff. A historical strand, drawn from Brian Tierney, Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland, shows the concept was born in canon law and theology rather than recovered from classical antiquity, and the reform movements that extended rights most widely appealed to their divine ground. The honest secular rivals concede the point from the other side: Bentham and MacIntyre deny natural rights exist, and Peter Singer denies that newborns have the same right to life as persons. The conclusion is abductive and conditional: if there are inalienable human rights, theism is the best available explanation of them, and so the near-universal conviction that there are such rights is evidence for God. ## Format note This page is a braided case, the house format for new [Ris3n Arguments](/codex/ris3n-arguments/): one valid spine of premises, each premise held up by three different kinds of support (data, a comparison of rival explanations, and agreement across fields), then a check that the strands are independent, a ledger that weighs the evidence, and a defeater gate for the strongest objection. It braids four fields. **Justice** supplies the explanandum, the precise shape of the rights we claim. **Philosophy** supplies the grounding requirement and the test each rival ground fails. **History** shows where the idea of inherent rights actually came from and who appealed to it when it mattered. **Theology** supplies the one candidate ground that meets every condition: the image of God and the Creator's equal regard. ## The spine | # | Premise | |---|---| | **P1** | **The claim.** Human rights, as the modern tradition affirms them, are universal, equal, inherent and inalienable, and there is good reason to think rights of this kind are real. | | **P2** | **The grounding requirement.** A right with those four properties requires a ground that every human has, that every human has equally (it admits no degrees), and that no human authority confers, so that no human authority can withdraw it. | | **P3** | **The rivals fail.** The main non-theistic grounds (positive law, social contract, morally relevant capacities, and brute non-natural moral fact) each fail at least one condition of P2, or meet it only by stipulation. | | **P4** | **Theism meets the requirement.** A Creator who makes every human in His image and regards each with equal love supplies a ground that every human has, equally, and that no human authority confers or can revoke. | | **P5** | **The best-explanation principle.** When one candidate explanation meets all the conditions a phenomenon requires and its rivals do not, the phenomenon is evidence for that explanation over the rivals. | | **C** | **Therefore, if there are inalienable human rights, theism is their best explanation, and the strong, widely shared grounds for believing in such rights are evidence for a Creator who endows them.** | **Validity.** P1 gives the phenomenon. P2 states what any adequate explanation of it must have. P3 and P4 sort the candidates: only theism meets P2. By P5, the phenomenon favours theism. The form is an inference to the best explanation set inside a conditional: anyone who grants the antecedent (real inalienable rights) is pushed, premise by premise, toward the consequent, and anyone who refuses the consequent must deny a named premise, usually P1. **Strength of the conclusion.** Abductive, not a deductive proof. The argument does not show that God exists from premises everyone accepts. It shows that the belief nearly everyone holds about human rights fits theism and fits its rivals badly, so the honest options are to accept a transcendent ground or to give up the rights as the tradition states them. ## P1, The claim: rights that are universal, equal, inherent and inalienable ### Inductive strand 1. **The founding documents say exactly this.** The Declaration of Independence (1776) calls the rights of all men "unalienable" and says they are "endowed by their Creator." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) opens its preamble with "the inherent dignity" and "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family," and Article 1 says all human beings "are born free and equal in dignity and rights." 2. **The rights are held against the state, not granted by it.** Every serious human-rights charge against a regime (torture, slavery, genocide) presupposes that the victims had the rights the regime denied. If rights were whatever the law said, a law permitting slavery would make slavery no violation. 3. **The reformers argued from inherent rights, not from law.** Martin Luther King Jr., in the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), wrote: "I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all,'" and "To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law." Frederick Douglass, in "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), refused to argue that the slave is entitled to liberty at all, because "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." 4. **Denial carries a heavy cost.** To deny P1 one must say that the victims of a lawful atrocity had no right that was violated. Few who hold the view in a seminar will say it at a graveside. ### Abductive strand | Explanation of P1's data | Explanatory power | Scope | Simplicity | Ad hoc? | |---|---|---|---|---| | Inherent rights are real and the conviction tracks them | Explains the content of the declarations, the reformers' arguments and the moral seeming | Covers every rights claim made against a law | One posit | No | | Rights are useful fictions (Bentham's line) | Explains why societies adopt rights language | Cannot explain why we judge lawful atrocities as violations | Simple | Requires that the reformers were confused about their own claims | | Rights are cultural products of the modern West | Explains the history of the vocabulary | Weak: the victims of other cultures' atrocities are judged wronged too | Simple | Makes the rights local, which is the opposite of what is claimed | ### Convergence Legal history (the declarations), moral philosophy (the realist majority among ethicists, and the persistence of the "unjust law is no law" tradition from Augustine through Aquinas to King) and ordinary moral experience reach P1 by different routes. Critics of theism mostly accept P1, which is why the argument is aimed at them; the people who deny P1 are the honest rivals named under P3. ### Objections and rebuttals 1. *"Rights are just what we agree to treat as rights."* **Rebuttal.** Then a society that agrees to treat some humans as property has violated no one's rights. That is the conclusion the abolitionists and the civil rights movement denied, and P1 records that they were right. 2. *"There are many kinds of rights; some are plainly legal."* **Rebuttal.** Agreed. The argument concerns the core human rights (life, freedom from torture and slavery, equal standing), the ones declared inherent and inalienable, not the right to a driving licence. ## P2, The grounding requirement ### Inductive strand 1. **Universality needs a ground every human has.** A right had "as human" must rest on something present in every human, including those at the edges of life. 2. **Equality needs a ground with no degrees.** If the ground came in more and less, so would the right. Intelligence, rationality, sentience, autonomy and social usefulness all come in degrees. 3. **Inalienability needs a ground no human confers.** What one human authority bestows, a human authority can withdraw. Bentham saw this clearly from the other side: "Right is the child of law" (*Anarchical Fallacies*, written 1796). 4. **The drafters knew the ground was missing.** Jacques Maritain, reporting on the UNESCO inquiry that fed the 1948 Declaration, observed that delegates from opposed philosophies could agree on a list of rights only on condition that no one asked them why; the justification was where the disagreement began. ### Abductive strand | Reading of the requirement | Explanatory power | Scope | Simplicity | Ad hoc? | |---|---|---|---|---| | The four properties set real constraints on any ground | Explains why each historical attempt is judged by them | All rights theories | Clean | No | | The properties are rhetoric, not constraints | Explains the inflated language | Fails to explain why denying equality to infants strikes almost everyone as wrong | Simple | Gives up the claim it was meant to explain | ### Convergence Rights theorists who disagree about God agree that a ground must explain equality and inherence. Wolterstorff makes the requirement explicit (*Justice: Rights and Wrongs*, Princeton, 2008). Bentham and MacIntyre accept it and conclude that no ground exists. P2 is the point on which the theist and the honest sceptic agree. ### Objections and rebuttals 1. *"Equality is a political decision, not a metaphysical fact."* **Rebuttal.** Then it is alienable by another political decision, and the rights are not the rights P1 describes. The objection concedes the argument's conditional. ## P3, The rival grounds fail ### Inductive strand 1. **Positive law fails inalienability.** If rights come from law, they end where the law ends. Bentham drew the honest conclusion: natural rights are "simple nonsense," and "natural and imprescriptible rights" are "nonsense upon stilts" (*Anarchical Fallacies*). 2. **Social contract fails universality.** A right born of agreement belongs to those who can agree or bargain. Infants, the comatose, the severely impaired and future generations cannot contract, so their standing is borrowed, not inherent. 3. **Capacity grounds fail equality.** If dignity rests on rationality, sentience or self-awareness, those who have more of it have more dignity, and some humans have less than some animals. Peter Singer follows the logic openly: in *Practical Ethics* he argues that newborn infants lack the capacities that make someone a person in his sense, so that killing a newborn is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Wolterstorff argues that every capacity-based account, worked out fully, either excludes such humans or makes their worth unequal. 4. **The candid verdict from inside philosophy.** Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue* (1981, chapter 6): "the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns." He held that every attempt to give good reasons for natural rights had failed. (MacIntyre was not then arguing for God; he later moved toward a Thomist account of natural law.) ### Abductive strand | Ground | Every human? | Equally? | Not conferred by humans? | Verdict | |---|---|---|---|---| | Positive law (Bentham, legal positivism) | Only where enacted | Only where enacted | No | Fails inalienability | | Social contract | No: excludes non-contractors | Varies with bargaining power | No | Fails universality | | Capacities (rationality, sentience, autonomy) | No: varies across life | No: degrees | Yes | Fails equality | | Species membership as a bare biological fact | Yes | Yes | Yes | Meets the conditions only by stipulation; on naturalism a biological category carries no moral weight, which is Singer's charge of "speciesism" | | Brute non-natural moral facts (Wielenberg) | Asserted | Asserted | Yes | Posits the ground without explaining it; see the defeater gate | | The image of God and the Creator's equal regard | Yes | Yes | Yes | Meets all three | ### Convergence The failure of each secular ground is argued by its own users: Bentham against natural rights, MacIntyre against Enlightenment rights, Singer against species equality. These are three independent naturalist witnesses, from utilitarian, virtue-ethical and preference-utilitarian directions, who reach P3 without any theistic motive. ### Objections and rebuttals 1. *"Combine the grounds: capacity for most, contract for the rest."* **Rebuttal.** A patchwork gives different humans different grounds, so their rights rest on different things and can differ in strength. Equality needs one ground that all share. 2. *"Use the capacity of the kind, not the individual: humans are the rational kind."* **Rebuttal.** That is a good answer, and it is a teleological one. On naturalism a species is a population with fuzzy edges, not a kind with a nature; the "rational nature" reply borrows exactly the essentialism that theism supplies and naturalism disowns. ## P4, Theism meets the requirement ### Inductive strand 1. **Every human bears the image.** "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" ([Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/), ASV). The image is given to the kind and to each member, with no grades. 2. **The image is the stated ground of the prohibition on murder.** "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" ([Genesis 9:6](/codex/genesis-9-6/), ASV). The ground is not ability or usefulness but the Maker's mark. 3. **Worth bestowed, not earned.** Wolterstorff argues that what grounds human rights is not a capacity but the worth bestowed on each human by being loved by God equally and permanently. A worth bestowed by God is beyond the reach of every human authority, because no human gave it. 4. **Partiality is condemned at the root.** "My brethren, hold not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons" ([James 2:1](/codex/james-2-1/), ASV), and to show partiality is to be "convicted by the law as transgressors" ([James 2:9](/codex/james-2-9/), ASV). ### Abductive strand | Feature of the theistic ground | What it explains | |---|---| | Given to every human | Universality, including infants and the impaired | | Given equally, with no degrees | Equality | | Given by the Creator, not by any creature | Inherence and inalienability | | Grounded in a Person who also commands justice | Why rights generate duties on others (Proverbs 31:8-9) | ### Convergence The image of God doctrine ([Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/)), Wolterstorff's analytic theory of rights, and the natural-law tradition from Aquinas to King reach P4 independently: one from exegesis, one from analytic philosophy of rights, one from jurisprudence. See [Biblical Dignity](/codex/biblical-dignity/). ### Objections and rebuttals 1. *"The Bible was used to defend slavery."* **Rebuttal.** It was, and the abolitionists answered from the same book, from the image and from Christ dying for slave and master alike. The argument concerns what grounds rights, not whether every Christian honoured them. See [Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/biblical-slavery-objection-defeater/) and [Christian Abolitionist Movement](/codex/christian-abolitionist-movement/). 2. *"A God-given right is just a right God can revoke."* **Rebuttal.** The ground is God's settled character and His creation of the kind, not a revocable grant. No human can revoke it, and God, who does not lie, does not contradict His own image. ## P5, The best-explanation principle ### Inductive strand Inference to the best explanation is how historians, scientists and juries reason: an explanation that accounts for all the features of a phenomenon is preferred to one that accounts for some. See [Abductive Reasoning](/codex/abductive-reasoning/). ### Abductive strand The rival is to deny that phenomena need explaining. That move is available, but it is the brute-fact option scored in the defeater gate. ### Convergence Philosophy of science and ordinary reasoning agree on the principle; critics of theistic arguments use it themselves. ### Objections and rebuttals 1. *"Maybe a better secular ground will be found."* **Rebuttal.** Perhaps, and the argument is open to it. But the debate is two centuries old, and the most candid secular voices (Bentham, MacIntyre, Singer) concluded that the inherent equal right does not exist, not that its ground is coming. ## The history strand This strand supports the argument without being one of its premises: it tests a prediction. If inherent rights depend on a theistic ground, they should have emerged where that ground was believed. They did. 1. **The vocabulary came from canon law.** Brian Tierney, *The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625* (1997), argues that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists developed a language of subjective natural rights, rights a person has, well before the Enlightenment. 2. **The individual was a Christian invention.** Larry Siedentop, *Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism* (2014), argues that the moral equality of individuals, the basis of liberal rights, was worked out through Christian moral theology and canon law rather than inherited from Greece and Rome. 3. **The secular West still runs on the inheritance.** Tom Holland, *Dominion* (2019), argues that the assumptions secular humanists take as self-evident, the dignity of the weak and the equal worth of every person, are Christian in origin. See [Tom Holland](/codex/tom-holland/) and [Secular Humanism](/codex/secular-humanism/). 4. **The reformers appealed to the ground.** King cited Augustine and Aquinas; Douglass treated it as beyond argument that God did not establish slavery, and said its "crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced". See [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/). ## The knot The strands are independent. The philosophical strand (P2, P3) is a conceptual analysis that would hold if no Christian had ever lived. The historical strand comes from medieval and intellectual historians (Tierney, Siedentop, Holland) working from archives, not from the grounding argument. The theological strand comes from Genesis and James. The rival witnesses (Bentham, MacIntyre, Singer, Wielenberg) come from four different secular schools. One overlap is counted once: King's and Douglass's appeals appear in P1 as data that people really hold inalienable rights and in the history strand as evidence of the ground those people invoked; the ledger counts them only in the second role. ## The ledger Prior-agnostic: the ledger asks only how expected each datum is under each hypothesis. The ratings are reasoned judgments from the sections above, not measurements. | Datum | How expected on theism | How expected on naturalism | Favours | Why | Independent? | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Humans have universal, equal, inalienable rights (if P1 is true) | High | Low | Theism, clearly | No secular ground meets all of P2 | Yes; the central row | | A strong, near-universal conviction that such rights exist | High | Moderate | Theism, modestly | Naturalism can explain the conviction as useful, not as true | Partly overlaps the row above | | Capacity grounds yield unequal worth (Singer, Wolterstorff) | High | High | Even | Both views predict this result; it bears on P3, not on the ledger | Yes | | The concept emerged in canon law and Christian moral theology (Tierney, Siedentop) | High | Moderate | Theism, modestly | Naturalism can tell a contingent story, but theism predicts the location | Yes | | Reformers invoked the Creator and natural law (King, Douglass) | High | Moderate | Theism, slightly | Religious rhetoric was common; the weight is modest | Partly overlaps the row above | | Honest secular theorists deny inherent equal rights (Bentham, MacIntyre) | Moderate | High | Naturalism predicts it; it supports P3 | The denial is what naturalism, followed through, expects | Supports the first row | **Net.** The weight sits on the first row and is conditional: if inherent equal rights are real, theism is much better placed than naturalism to explain them. The historical rows add modest confirmation. The argument is only as strong as one's confidence in P1, and that confidence is, for most people, very high. ## The defeater gate **The robust-realist reply.** The strongest objection comes from non-theistic moral realism. Erik Wielenberg, *Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism* (Oxford, 2014), argues that basic ethical facts are necessary, objective and brute: they do not depend on God or on anything else, and they supervene on natural properties. On this view, "every human has an inalienable right not to be tortured for fun" can simply be one of those necessary truths. No legislator conferred it, so none can revoke it. The theist's demand for a ground is answered by saying that bedrock is bedrock, and theism has its own brute facts about God's nature. The reply has three parts. 1. **Brute necessity does not explain equality.** Wielenberg's facts supervene on natural properties. The argument asks which property. If the property is a capacity, the rights inherit its degrees and its absences (P3). If the property is bare membership in the human species, the realist must say why a biological category carries infinite moral weight when, on naturalism, species are populations with blurred edges. Asserting that the right attaches to every human equally is not explaining it. 2. **The theist's bedrock is a better kind of bedrock.** Every view stops somewhere. The question is whether it stops in something that could explain the phenomenon. A personal Creator who makes and loves each human is the kind of thing that confers standing; an impersonal necessary fact that just happens to track species membership is a description of the datum, not an account of it. 3. **The parity charge cuts the other way.** Theism also has a brute fact, God's nature, but it has one, and from it derive the image, the equal regard and the duties of justice. Robust realism needs a separate brute fact for each basic right and a further brute fact for why they distribute equally across a biologically variable species. What the gate concedes: robust realism is a coherent position, and it shows that atheists can believe in rights without inconsistency. The argument does not claim otherwise. It claims that theism explains the rights we believe in, and robust realism only affirms them. See [Atheist Moral Realism Defeater](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-defeater/). ## Concessions - *Grant:* atheists believe in human rights and often defend them bravely. *Now collect:* the question was never whether they believe in rights but what makes the belief true; a shared conviction is a shared clue. - *Grant:* Christians have violated human rights, sometimes in Christ's name. *Now collect:* the charge is made in the name of rights that are inherent and equal, which is the ground this argument says only the Creator supplies. - *Grant:* the historical origin of an idea does not prove it true. *Now collect:* the argument does not rest on the history; the history only confirms the prediction the grounding analysis makes. See [Genetic Fallacy](/codex/genetic-fallacy/). - *Grant:* "endowed by their Creator" was written by men who held slaves. *Now collect:* Douglass and King held the founders to that very sentence; the sentence condemned its authors because its ground was above them. ## Cheatsheet **The 30-second version (read aloud).** You believe every person has rights that no government can take away, the newborn and the disabled as much as the genius. Fine. Where do those rights come from? If the state gave them, the state can take them. If a vote gave them, another vote can remove them. If they come from abilities, people with fewer abilities get fewer rights. Bentham called natural rights "nonsense upon stilts," and he was being consistent. The only source that gives every human the same rights, which no human power can revoke, is a Creator who made every person in His image. If the rights are real, so is the Giver. **Fast facts:** 1. Declaration of Independence (1776): rights "endowed by their Creator" and "unalienable." 2. UDHR (1948): "the inherent dignity" and "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family," with no ground named. 3. Bentham, *Anarchical Fallacies*: natural rights are "simple nonsense," imprescriptible rights "nonsense upon stilts." 4. MacIntyre, *After Virtue* (1981): belief in such rights is "one with belief in witches and in unicorns." 5. Tierney (1997) and Siedentop (2014): natural rights language and the moral individual were developed in medieval canon law and Christian moral theology. 6. King (1963): "an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law." **The closing line.** A right that a human gave, a human can take; an inalienable right needs a Giver no human can overrule. ## Cross-examination ### Round 1, Do they hold P1? - **Q:** Did the slaves in the American South have a right to liberty, even though the law said otherwise? - **If they say yes:** then rights do not come from law. Ask where they do come from. - **If they say no:** they have joined Bentham, and the argument's conditional stands untouched; they have only denied its antecedent. ### Round 2, The ground - **Q:** What is it about every human, equally, that gives them these rights? - **If they say rationality or sentience:** ask whether a newborn has as much as an adult chimpanzee, and whether that makes the chimpanzee's rights greater. - **If they say being human:** ask why, on naturalism, membership in a species is morally decisive. - **If they say it is just a basic moral fact:** ask why it distributes equally over a population whose every natural property varies. ### Round 3, Revocability - **Q:** If a future world government voted unanimously to remove a right, would the right be gone? - **If they say no:** then the right has a source above every human vote. Name it. ### Dodge table | Dodge | What it concedes | Reply | |---|---|---| | "Rights are a useful social invention." | They are alienable | "Then the regimes that abolished them violated nothing. Is that what you believe?" | | "Empathy is enough." | No equal ground | "Empathy is strongest for those like us; rights are meant to protect those we do not feel for." | | "Evolution made us value each other." | It explains the valuing, not the value | "Evolution also made us tribal. Which output is the true one, and by what standard?" | | "Religions disagree about rights too." | The disagreement is about application | "We are asking for the ground. Name a ground with all four properties." | ## Live-cite kit **Scripture (ASV):** - [Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/): And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them ([Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/), ASV) - [Genesis 9:6](/codex/genesis-9-6/): Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man ([Genesis 9:6](/codex/genesis-9-6/), ASV) - [Proverbs 31:8-9](/codex/proverbs-31-8-9/): Open thy mouth for the dumb, In the cause of all such as are left desolate. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, And minister justice to the poor and needy ([Proverbs 31:8-9](/codex/proverbs-31-8-9/), ASV) - [Amos 5:24](/codex/amos-5-24/): But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream ([Amos 5:24](/codex/amos-5-24/), ASV) - [Acts 17:26](/codex/acts-17-26/): and he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth ([Acts 17:26](/codex/acts-17-26/), ASV) **Scholarly:** - Nicholas Wolterstorff, *Justice: Rights and Wrongs* (Princeton, 2008): secular capacity accounts cannot ground equal human rights; being loved by God can. - Brian Tierney, *The Idea of Natural Rights* (1997): natural rights language began with the medieval canonists. - Larry Siedentop, *Inventing the Individual* (2014): the moral individual was formed in Christian thought. - Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue* (1981): "belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns." **Aphorism:** "What a human gave, a human can take back. An unalienable right was never a human gift." ## Connection to Scripture - [Genesis 1:27](/codex/genesis-1-27/), the image given to every human, the ground with no degrees. - [Genesis 9:6](/codex/genesis-9-6/), the first stated ground of the right to life: not ability, but the image. - [James 2:1-9](/codex/james-2-1-9/), partiality condemned as sin against the royal law. - [Proverbs 31:8-9](/codex/proverbs-31-8-9/), rights generate duties to speak for those who cannot. - [Amos 5:24](/codex/amos-5-24/), justice that flows from God, not from the court. - [Galatians 3:28](/codex/galatians-3-28/), the equal standing of every human in Christ, the root of the reformers' arguments. ## Scholarship Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record. - Tom Holland, *Dominion* (2019). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20428369W) - Alasdair C. MacIntyre, *After virtue* (1981). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL10446730W) - Larry Siedentop, *Inventing the Individual* (2014). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17574044W) - Peter Singer, *Practical ethics* (1979). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1819652W) - Brian Tierney, *The idea of natural rights* (1997). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1359863W) - Erik J. Wielenberg, *Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism* (Oxford University Press, 2014). [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714323.001.0001](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714323.001.0001) - Nicholas Wolterstorff, *Justice: Rights and Wrongs* (Princeton University Press, 2008). [doi:10.1515/9781400828715](https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400828715) ## See also - [Ris3n Arguments](/codex/ris3n-arguments/), the hub of ris3n's original arguments - [Arguments](/codex/arguments/), the master index - [Moral Argument](/codex/moral-argument/), the broader case from objective obligation; this page isolates the grounding of rights - [Argument from Justice](/codex/argument-from-justice/), the case from the demand that justice be done - [The Ought-Owe Argument](/codex/the-ought-owe-argument/), obligation as debt; this page asks what makes the creditor's claim inherent - [Argument from the Gift-Economy Convergence](/codex/argument-from-the-gift-economy-convergence/), gift and reciprocity; its "inalienable possessions" are a different idea from inalienable rights - [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/) and [Biblical Dignity](/codex/biblical-dignity/), the theological ground in P4 - [Argument from Human Exceptionalism](/codex/argument-from-human-exceptionalism/), the case from human distinctiveness - [Secular Humanism](/codex/secular-humanism/), the worldview that affirms the rights and lacks the ground - [Atheist Moral Realism Defeater](/codex/atheist-moral-realism-defeater/), the wider reply to godless moral realism - [Tom Holland](/codex/tom-holland/) and [Christian Abolitionist Movement](/codex/christian-abolitionist-movement/), the history strand - [Cumulative Case for Christian Theism](/codex/cumulative-case-for-christian-theism/), where this argument contributes ## Common questions this page answers **Q: Where do human rights come from if there is no God?** The main secular answers are law, social agreement, human capacities, or basic moral facts. Each struggles to give rights that are equal for every human and that no human authority can revoke. The Inalienable Argument says a Creator who makes every person in His image is the one source with all those properties. **Q: Can an atheist believe in human rights?** Yes, and many defend them well. The question is not whether atheists believe in rights but what makes the belief true. Philosophers such as Bentham and MacIntyre, who did not ground rights in God, concluded that natural rights do not exist. **Q: What does inalienable mean?** An inalienable right cannot be sold, surrendered, voted away or revoked by any government. A tyrant can violate it, but he cannot cancel it. That property is what makes the question of its source so pressing. **Q: Why did the Declaration of Independence say rights come from a Creator?** Because a right given by a government could be taken back by a government. Grounding rights in the Creator placed them above every human authority, which is exactly what made them usable against unjust laws, as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. later did. **Q: Did human rights come from Christianity?** Historians such as Brian Tierney and Larry Siedentop argue that the language of natural rights and the idea of the morally equal individual were developed in medieval canon law and Christian moral theology. Tom Holland argues the modern West still lives on that inheritance. **Q: Why can't human rights be based on intelligence or the ability to feel pain?** Because those abilities come in degrees and are absent at some stages of life, so rights based on them would be unequal and some humans would have none. Peter Singer accepts this and argues that killing a newborn is not equivalent to killing a person, which shows where capacity-based grounds lead.