Controversial Topic Discussion

I thought I would answer the question you have posed from my atheistic perspective as many who believe in some type of higher power seem to also believe that a higher power somehow validates otherwise unjustifiable philosophical rights. I assume what you mean by philosophical rights here is what we consider human rights and will answer accordingly. This will be a highly philosophical answer, but one that I think has solid support from empirical observation.

You ask where philosophical rights come from. I would say that rights are a human construction, as they are a human concept, but they have a solid foundation in philosophical extrapolations of the nature of existence as social animals. We might even go so far as to grant human rights status as an emergent property of the 'social organism' and thereby give them an existence to call their own even though they are wholly dependent on the entities from which they emerge, human societies.

Societies are the sum of their constituent parts. When looking at societies, to say they are formed of individuals leaves out some other, equally important, components. Where there are individuals (what some might refer to as agents) there are also actions and, if in proximity to other individuals, there are effects. Just as the human individual is formed of the constituent parts of cells and from this congregation of individual components emerge other equally existent properties that deserve consideration in our concept of what we refer to as a human being, we must consider all the parts and their emergent properties to get an accurate picture of a society. It is when we do this that we will find what I think is a solid basis for human rights.

So, we have our agents, actions and effects comprising our society. In order for the society to be able to exist the entities from which it is formed must 'get along' to within some reasonable standard. They must keep their actions and effects within the bounds of what will be tolerated by the other individuals that comprise the society. In the human body, if individual cells were not able to co-exist in a peaceful manner, then the human being could not exist. The same can be said for the society. A society of individuals who act from purely selfish motivations, or without acknowledgment and acceptance of the other individual components as equally deserving of their right to existence, is sure to fail. Being as that human beings require a social group for continued existence (dictated by the path taken in our evolutionary history), they must grant other's within their society equal rights. From this we can see that human rights are not merely some contingently accepted aspect of a society but are indeed a necessary component.

Of course, just as a human body with all its parts and emergent properties is an individual unit, a society is an individual unit as well. Through the majority of our history, human societies have been comprised of small familial and tribal groups. This is the type of groups that we seem to be evolutionarily programmed to extend these rights to. It is only within recent history, with advances in technology blurring societal boundaries, that we have begun to extend these societal rights to other societies, basically just extending our natural tendencies to get along to a wider scope as a natural result of no longer being able to clearly delineate between groups. We, of course, are still much more willing to extend all rights only locally (as can be seen by the example of wars or the differences in the level of our compassion for the plight of those close to us as opposed to those at a distance) but as societies lose their boundaries we are becoming much better at considering all humans as one societal group.

As to the actual biological mechanisms employed by evolution to form within us these concepts of equality that allow the society to exist, I think it is partially based in the stimulation of reward centers and the firings of mirror neurons, which give us an ability to place ourselves in the position of others. These two phenomenon seem to create the balance between selfishness and altruism that are at the heart of what we might consider our social nature. These are purely physical phenomenon occurring within the individual human body, but they steer actions and therefor effects and thereby provide the natural tendencies from which we derive our understanding of human rights.

Anyway, i wrote this fairly quickly so it may not be completely clear what I am saying, but I thought I should provide at least some partial picture of human rights from a naturalist's/materialist's perspective.

I would go on to propose that, in actuality, a higher power cannot validate human rights as it removes human rights from the realm of humanity. They then become god given rights which, though one could choose to believe they are applicable to actual human existence and human society, would not necessarily be so. But, that is another conversation.