James Franklin in his book, The Worth of Persons: The Foundation of Ethics (Encounter Books), discusses, among other things, the question of why people have rights. He attempts to produce a secular humanist account of ethics based upon the idea of the worth of persons. So, why are people of worth or value, while stones, say are not, to use his example? But, that is setting up the debate, and he could have made it more challenging to using an example other than stones, such as ecosystem, which Deep Ecologists see as more valuable than individuals. Thus, in the hypothetical, Franklin as a secular ethicist should have used this example, more relevant to the times. And, from this perspective it is by no means proven that the secular foundation of morality is based upon the worth of people, if non-humans have intrinsic worth. He would have to show, in a non-question-begging way, that non-human entities have only instrumental value, which is not easy, in his terms. Why for example, assume that rationality is the key, when if to use his style of thought experiments, if rationality suddenly magically disappeared, people would still presumably have value?
But, this is an argument against secular morality per se, as I see it. By contrast, Christian morality founds the worth of persons, and anything, including the planet (which when created by God, as “good” Genesis 1:4; 10; 12; 18; 21; 25). God ends the potential infinite regress of justification that s. ecular morality produces, just as the idea of God as a “first cause,” serves as one Christian explanation of th universe.
Franklin dismisses the argument that God is the foundation of morality, arguing that the hypothesis that if god did not exist, people would still be the same, so God makes no difference. But, that clearly begs the question in this debate. It makes all the difference in the world.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/04/why-do-humans-have-rights/
“The Use and Abuse of Rights
What is it about humans that means they have rights? We have a right to life because our lives are valuable, not vice versa. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “The U.N. declarations are all dignity-based documents. All of them affirm or assume that human rights accrue to human beings on account of the dignity that human beings possess, the worth, the excellence, the estimability.” He adds that that must lead to a search for what it is about humans that gives them that worth or dignity.
The Helsinki Accords themselves say that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” The rights of the Universal Declaration, such as the right to education, refer to the human beings for whom those goods are necessary. Humans have a right to education because they have the rationality to be educated, while animals don’t. That is a fact about humans, necessary and sufficient to support the right to be educated. Simply being human is sufficient and necessary to possess a right to life, because the worth of humans is what places a moral barrier in the way of any attempt to destroy human life. If there were no such thing as the worth or dignity of humans, there would be no purchase for the concept of rights; there would be nothing about humans in virtue of which they would deserve rights.