On December 10, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) will reach its three-quarters of a century milestone. Adopted on the same day by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the document enshrines fundamental civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. Its preamble begins with a “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” followed by thirty articles detailing these rights.

The UDHR provided what scholars Margaret Keck and Kathyrn Sikkink call a “common language” for later transnational human rights activism. In Seyla Benhabib’s words, it serves as “the closest document in our world to international public law.” Jack Donnelly similarly observed that the UDHR sets “the basic parameters of the meaning of “human rights” in contemporary international relations,” marking its foundational status.

Yet, the promise of universal human rights is threatened from all sides. As we approach the UDHR’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the Russian invasion of Ukraine—inclusive of alleged Russian war crimes, including torture, rape, and the systematic abduction of Ukrainian children—will soon mark two full years of large-scale conflict. The October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, furthermore, echoes this brutality in gut-wrenching ways, while Israel’s retaliation in Gaza has moved rapidly from a desire for revenge to an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Jabalya. For over a decade, an intensifying feeling of hopelessness and pessimism has pervaded the cause of human rights from Egypt to China and even the United States.

The intellectual environment increasingly reflects this downcast perspective. The New York Times—just weeks before the Hamas attack—reported on an uptick in public doubt among think tank analysts, economists, and diplomats that there truly is a universal set of values that underpin international human rights norms and laws. These doubts come on the backs of speculations and assertions that the “liberal” or “rules-based” international order founded in part upon these values is fraying. The tumult of world politics and the perceived shift in the global distribution of power appear to undermine the universalist idea. Readers of the National Interest will intuitively recognize that existing debates over whether the international system underwent “great transformations” in the post-World War II era have intensified.

What are we to make of these claims and characterizations? Are universal human rights a bankrupt idea? Are the values that underpin such rights a mere illusion?

An idea in cognitive science—in the modern study of the architecture of the human mind—challenges these doubts: the values undergirding human rights, it indicates, are rooted in human nature. More specifically, the character of moral psychology is such that human rights are its optimal expression—not inevitable social constructs but the result of distilling shared cognitive resources into a social and political idea.

Quiet work done in cognitive science provides reason to believe that human beings possess a cognitive system responsible for the distinctive moral qualities of human life. This system provides the building blocks of human rights, with such rights representing the clearest view of this capacity to date.

The compliance—or lack thereof—of organizations, governments, and other actors with human rights is not, in this view, the proper metric to gauge the accuracy of the idea of human rights. Instead, we should look to those conditions in which our moral cognition has been put to the most sincere, rigorous, and sustained test by a representative sampling of humanity.

The drafting of the UDHR fits these conditions. On its seventy-fifth anniversary, we should reflect on its significance to human nature and international human rights. From this, we take away a central lesson about the future of human rights: that they always have existed in a conflicted world; the point, especially if one wishes to rescue them, is to understand why.

Universal Morality?

This idea in cognitive science—“Universal Moral Grammar”—sounds like a lofty one, exactly the loftiness with which some proponents of universal human rights have become disillusioned. However, Research in this domain started with exactly zero connections to international conventions like the UDHR. It instead operates on an apolitical, scientific, and bland assumption: that the study of moral cognition should proceed in the same way as other aspects of human biology. If we are prepared to assume that capacities like vision or hearing occupy distinctive roles within the human mind, why would we forgo this assumption in the study of moral cognition? Put another way, why would our capacity to hear be “grown” biologically, but our ability to morally evaluate be “learned” through culture?

We are attuned to inflate differences between individuals or groups given the importance of morality in human social life; not only do we conflate morality per se with cultural practices, but we also perceive moral diversity in a way that we would not with other cognitive mechanisms—it is akin to viewing near- and far-sighted individuals in possession of two, radically distinct visual systems. Few would accept this. The argument here is that morality is fundamentally no different.

This assumption is “boring” because we do not get excited by visual or auditory judgments. Morality is thought of differently—its role in human life is fundamental to organizing institutions, distributing resources, and interacting with one another. It is both commonplace and, at times, visceral. As philosopher and legal scholar Matthias Mahlmann puts it, there is a “mental space that has a normative dimension…a specific mental domain of morality….” Morality, as a human cognitive characteristic, exists.

The evidence is all around us. Virtually everyone in possession of the basic facts has a moral reaction to the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli response. Indeed, these moral judgments often feel as if they exist more in the gut and the heart than in the intellect—perhaps feeling more like facts than preferences. Individuals differ in their moral approval of these actions, but this does not detract from the normative dimension of their responses.

How individuals acquire this moral sense cannot be reduced merely to cultural particularities. As philosopher Susan Dwyer recognized, individuals do not learn the structure of moral dilemmas—the morally salient aspects of people, actions, and objects interacting with one another—but instead intuit it. We intuitively frame the world in normative terms.

Moreover, the various qualities individuals infer from or impose on moral dilemmas are not explicitly learned during development. Many scenarios involve interactions between people that can have multiple possible outcomes. Yet when tested, both adults and young children infer a “presumption of innocence,” or a good intention, from those performing the actions—despite not being told such intentions are present. (One can find this presumption embodied in Article 11 of the UDHR.) Humans may also possess an “acute sensitivity” to the legally defined actions constituting harmful battery “as a property of the human mind,” as legal scholar John Mikhail argues.

Relatedly, social psychologist Daniel Sznycer and legal researcher Carlton Patrick find experimental evidence indicating that criminal law originates, in part, in an innate “valuation grammar” of the mind, finding that “multiple types of lay justice intuitions vary in lockstep” across cultures and over long periods of time with respect to criminal legislation. Finally, and more broadly, International Relations scholar David Traven articulates connections between cognitive moral architecture and the laws and norms of war, arguing they “are a by-product of an evolved cognitive system in a changing contextual environment.”

Research such as this goes to show, as Sydney Levine, Alan Leslie, and Mikhail note, that how we cognize morality goes beyond “heuristics and biases.”

There is a complexity to our moral judgments that is frequently underappreciated—something the philosopher John Rawls observed in a substantive analogy to Noam Chomsky’s work on linguistics in his classic A Theory of Justice. There is an informational gulf between only the content of our moral judgments and the ability to morally evaluate that cannot be traced back to moral education or culture.

The outlines of an explanation for this remarkable ability thus posits that human beings are naturally endowed with a cognitive mechanism that is principally grown, not learned.

Recognizing even this requires a tricky distancing from ordinary life: we cannot simply pick our favorite examples of moral good or evil and move from there to understand morality. Nor can we ask individuals their opinions on social and political issues (e.g., “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States’ support for Israel?”). We cannot even begin with cliché ethical taxonomic categories, like the ethic of “community” contrasted with the ethic of “individualism.” These all unintentionally recruit far more cognitive action than is desired in the study of moral cognition.

The goal, as Mikhail puts it with a reference to Rawls, is to pinpoint those moral judgments that allow our moral capacity “to be displayed without distortion,” namely, those judgments made under conditions of sincere, rigorous, and sustained deliberation among culturally diverse individuals.

From Moral Cognition to Human Rights

All well and good, one might say, but what’s the point? Many people, after all, see the contestation of human rights and their uneven compliance as undermining the idea that they, or their moral underpinnings, could be universal.

This is a serious mistake. Although counter-intuitive, the disagreement present in drafting the UDHR by a diverse group of multinational and multicultural representatives supports the link between human nature and this standard of justice. So long, that is, that they manage to settle on a shared conception of justice.

How could this be the case?

Recall above how the optimal way to interrogate our moral capacity is not by asking questions about politics or other high-level social concepts, as these recruit more cognitive activity than we are interested in. Rather, we seek to clear up the distortions that cloud the moral capacity by pinpointing moral judgments made in suitably reflective conditions. Hot takes and emotionally charged judgments will not suffice.

However, the best way to clear up these distortions cannot be to withdraw into abstract reflection. Instead, through argument and disagreement, discourse between sufficiently diverse individuals recruits this cognitive mechanism in navigating disputes and settling as many tensions as possible. The resultant agreement will, ideally, give observers the clearest view into the moral capacity’s central properties as can reasonably be expected.

While far from ideal, the drafting of the UDHR took on this character. In a reassessment of the debates that drove its drafting, Joe Hoover recalled that “one is struck by how long the drafters spent suggesting, debating, and revising individual articles.” Indeed, in her study of the drafting process, Mary Ann Glendon noted: “It is unlikely that any other political document in history has ever drawn from such diverse sources, or received the same worldwide, sustained considerations and scrutiny as the Declaration underwent over its two years of preparation.”

These debates were largely sincere. According to Micheline Ishay: “Despite philosophical and political rivalries between these great minds [Peng Chun Chang, Charles Malik, and René Cassin], each human rights commissioner understood what was at stake, and all responded to their historical call by transcending personal and philosophical differences.” These individuals, among others like Eleanor Roosevelt and remarkable participation from sprawling groups and individuals, leveraged the “brief time” of relative goodwill between the United States and the USSR following World War II to draft the document.

What emerged from these debates is a “highly specific list of fundamental human rights.” As legal scholar Michael Perry observed, the contents of the UDHR “represent values—that is, valued states of affairs—to be achieved.” The mere existence of this list of fundamental human rights is, in Mikhail’s view, “remarkable” and indicates that morality is more constrained by the human mind than is commonly believed. Given this cognitive constraint, the agreement resulting from the drafting process—embodied by the eventual UDHR taken up in 1948—has an overlooked conceptual significance.

The beauty of this research program is simple but counterintuitive: Universal Moral Grammar does not deny the existence of moral diversity but “is largely predicted on the existence of diversity and is directed to understanding and explaining it…The key concept…is constrained diversity.” From this constrained diversity, and through an intentional hammering out of moral problems, the conceptual significance emerges of the UDHR as a document capturing—more clearly than any other—our moral nature.

Universal Human Rights in a Conflicted World

The UDHR’s seventy-fifth anniversary will occur in a conflicted world. Yet, even after seven decades of marking this document’s unlikely creation, its significance to human nature has been severely underappreciated.

To be sure, scholarly studies of the UDHR focusing on the anti-colonial movements of the first half of the twentieth century and the collapse of empires, the ideational influences stretching back decades or centuries through political activism and religious traditions, the re-definition of “human” in the early twentieth century, and the distribution of power across states each have their places.

Yet, these approaches neglect a simple but urgent question: how on earth do individuals make the moral judgments that underpin the rights enshrined within the UDHR? The failure to ask this question across a broad range of disciplinary traditions—and the implicit failure to recognize that this is a question not of political science but of cognitive science—has led to the UDHR’s underappreciated status.

There is no contradiction, to be sure, between the realist idea that the world is anarchic, populated by self-interested states, and lacking—at least in prominent variants—anything that can plausibly be called a “rules-based order” and the idea that human moral cognition provides the basis for—and is best represented by—universal human rights norms as enshrined in the UDHR. The problem is that too many International Relations scholars have implicitly subsumed a psychology of moral judgment into their theories, thereby conflating a lack of compliance with international human rights law with the intellectual foundations of human rights.

The fact is that assumptions about human nature matter for how we understand human rights. Human rights activism that detaches itself from human nature, especially in liberal-democratic societies, may hamper itself. The key is to realize that none of what has been said here must be surprising if one adopts a cognitive science perspective—one simply needs to be willing to recognize that moral or cultural diversity is not the silver bullet against the idea of universal human rights that they think it is.

Echoing Matthias Mahlmann’s conclusion based on his recent major contribution to moral cognition and human rights, to think of human rights as spontaneous beliefs that must be supported everywhere, at all times, to hold weight is a mistake. Human rights result from humanity’s struggle with social organization and represent the clearest view of our innate moral capacity and its social manifestations. The implementation and maintenance of universal human rights take work. The UDHR and International human rights norms have always existed in a conflicted world—now is the time to understand why.

Vincent J. Carchidi is an analyst working in technology, defense, and international affairs. He has an interdisciplinary background in cognitive science and philosophy. His work has appeared in outlets including the Human Rights Review, AI & Society, War on the Rocks, Defense One, National Interest, The Geopolitics Magazine, and Military Strategy Magazine, among others. 

Image: FDR Library and Museum.