Wolterstorff on Rights Grounded in Respect of Worth 3.1.3

To disrespect a person entails that he or she has non-instrumental worth. But what accounts for human beings having non-instrumental worth? If there is no grounding the belief in non-instrumental human worth, human beings cannot be under-respected. If human beings cannot be under-respected, they cannot be wronged. And if they cannot be wronged, there are no human rights.

Wolterstorff takes his readers on a tour of the leading secular approaches and finds them wanting. Kant and many others attempt to ground human worth or dignity in some capacity human beings have. Kant himself identified the capacity for rational agency as what makes humans worthy. The problem here, as it is for all capacity arguments, is that some humans possess a greater capacity for x (rational agency, etc.) than others and some human don’t have that capacity at all (e.g., the profoundly mentally handicapped, those in a persistent vegetative state, and those suffering late-term dementia). The approaches of Ronald Dworkin and Alan Gewirth fail for the same reason.

Perhaps, Wolterstorff suggests, someone will yet formulate a workable secular grounding for the worth of human beings but the prospects don’t look good given the firepower already deployed. We can thus give up on a grounded human rights project or go for a theistic account. Wolterstorff pursues the latter.