Values are the beliefs and attitudes that inform and instruct the mores and norms that guide social action and order. That is, humans organize societies (the social edifice) based upon values (whether explicit or implicit). They provide the basis for people's rights or claims concerning their being and participation in the social edifice. Human rights are the articulation of such claims.

In one significant sense, nonviolence values are also rights. One may understand them as claims that apply to all humanity and all social order. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolence logic holds these values as personhood, freedom, and solidarity. He argues that all members of a social polity have those rights; that is, they hold an equal claim to human dignity, liberty, and community simply because they are human.

Thus, there is a nexus of human rights and nonviolence where the two ideas share underlying values and principles. In one sense, human rights are about the legal claims one has as a member of human society and subject to its social order. Such rights may, but do not necessarily, have a moral value underlying logic. Then there are human rights, whose values and principles are consonant with the moral logic of nonviolence, where personhood is the deciding or independent variable. All other variables depend on the value of personhood. Nonviolence defines that value in terms of equality in dignity and worth. That dignity informs one’s liberty, instructing the collective polity as a community. That is, one’s dignity implies the right to realize one’s potential, subject to our shared humanity as a community.

While human rights – as values – have legal purview. Nonviolent values do not. Thus, human rights may be, and often are, guaranteed through violent means. But nonviolent values rely on the community members' shared vision and volition for their guarantee and action to weave them in the woof and waft of the social fabric or edifice. That is, they are integral to a just and peaceful social order.