The Morality of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodies a particular morality: the morality of human rights. In this article, I address several questions concerning that morality, beginning with this fundamental question: What reason do we have, if any, to accept, rather than reject, the morality of human rights? I also explicate two human rights—the human right to moral equality and the human right to moral freedom—and then pursue the implications of the two rights for two human rights controversies: the controversies concerning, respectively, abortion and same-sex marriage.