A rationale for human rights should defend their essential features, including their character as rights, their universality and their high priority. Such justifications should also be able to provide starting points for the justification of a plausible list of specific rights (on starting points and the transition to specific rights, see Nickel 2007; see also section 3, which rights are human rights? below). Furthermore, making the case for international human rights is likely to require additional steps (Buchanan 2012). These requirements make creating a good human rights justification challenging.

Approaches to justification include grounding human rights in rationality, practical reasons, moral rights (Thomson 1990), human welfare (Sumner 1987, Talbott 2010), fundamental interests (Beitz 2015), human needs (Miller 2012), free will and autonomy. (Gewirth 1996, Griffin 2008) dignity (Gilabert 2018, Kateb 2011, Tasioulas 2015), justice (Nickel 2007), equality and positive liberty (Gould 2004, Nussbaum 2000, Sen 2004). Justifications may be based on only one of these types of reasons or they may be eclectic and appeal to several (Tasioulas. 2015).

In recent decades, the grounding of human rights in free will and autonomy has had strong proponents. For example, in Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (1982), Alan Gewirt proposed an agency-based justification of human rights. He argued that denying the value of successful will and action is not a choice for human beings; having life requires treating the indispensable conditions of will and action as necessary goods. Abstractly described, these conditions of successful action are freedom and welfare. A prudent rational agent who ought to have freedom and welfare will put forward a “prudential right” to them. By demanding that others respect her freedom and welfare, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and welfare of others. Since all other subjects are in the same position as she is in need of freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect their claims to freedom and well-being. She “logically must accept” that other people as agents have equal rights to liberty and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to create equal concrete human rights of a familiar type (Gewirth 1978, 1982, 1996). Gewirth’s ambition was to provide an argument for human rights that would apply to all human agents and be inescapable. From a few facts that are hard to deny and the principle of consistency, in his view, we can derive two general human rights, and from them a list of more specific rights. Gewirt’s views have generated a large amount of critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991, Boylan 1999). Gewirt’s ambition was to provide an argument for human rights that would apply to all human agents and be inescapable. From a few facts that are hard to deny and the principle of consistency, in his view, we can derive two general human rights, and from them a list of more specific rights. Gewirt’s views have generated a large amount of critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991, Boylan 1999). Gewirt’s ambition was to provide an argument for human rights that would apply to all human agents and be inescapable. From a few facts that are hard to deny and the principle of consistency, in his view, we can derive two general human rights, and from them a list of more specific rights. Gewirt’s views have generated a large amount of critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991, Boylan 1999).

A recent attempt to ground human rights in free will and autonomy can be found in James Griffin’s book On Human Rights (2008). Griffin does not share Gewirt’s goal of providing a logically inevitable argument for human rights, but his overall view shares key structural features with Gewirt’s. These include beginning the argument with the unique value of human will and autonomy (which Griffin calls “normative agency”), postulating some abstract rights (autonomy, freedom, and well-being), and creating a place for the right to well-being within the agency approach.

In the ongoing debate between “moral” (or “orthodox”) and “political” conceptions of human rights, Griffin strongly sides with those who consider human rights to be fundamentally moral rights. Their defining role, in Griffin’s view, is to protect the ability of individuals to form and pursue conceptions of a good life – an ability that Griffin variously refers to as “autonomy,” “normative agency,” and “personhood.” This capacity to form, revise, and implement conceptions of the good life is considered to be the primary value, the exclusive source of human dignity, and thus the foundation of human rights (Griffin 2008). Griffin believes that people value this ability “particularly highly, often higher than even their happiness”.