Continuing from a previous post, ‘The Problem With Moral Obligation,’ writings of Timothy Keller and his book ‘The Reason for God,’ . . . .Another theory claims that human rights are created by us, the people who write the laws. Many argue that it is in the interests of societies to create human rights because honoring individual dignity means that in the log run everyone in the community is better off. However, what if a majority decides it is not in their interests to grant human rights? If rights are nothing but a majority creation then there is nothing to appeal to when they are legislated out of existence. Dershowitz, quoting Ronald Dworkin, argues that this third view of human rights is inadequate: It is no answer to say that if individuals have these rights then the community is better off in the long run. . . because when we say someone has the right to speak his mind freely, we mean he is entitled to do so even if this would not be in the general interest.
If human rights are created by majorities, of what use are they? Their value lies in that they can be used to insist that majorities honor the dignity of minorities and individuals despite their conception of their “greater good.” Rights cannot be created—they must be discovered, or they are of no value. As Dworkin concludes, if we want to defend individual rights, we must try to discover something beyond utility that argues for these rights.10
What could that “something” be? Neither Dworkin nor Dershowitz can really give an answer. Dworkin ends up appealing to a form of majority rule anyway. In Life’s Dominion: An argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom 1995), he writes: The life of a single human organism commands respect and protection . . . because of our wonder at the . . . processes that produce new lives from old ones. . . The nerve of the sacred lies in the value we attach to a process or enterprise or project rather than to its results considered independently from how they are produced. . . .11
Law Professor Michael J Perry responds: The nonreligious source of normality, for Dworkin, is the great value “we” attached to every human being understood as a creative masterpiece; it is “our” wonder at the processes that produce new lives from old ones. . . .But to whom is Dworkin referring with his “we” and “our”? Did the Nazis value the Jews intrinsically? The conspicuous problem with Dworkin’s . . . secular argument [for rights] is that Dworkin assumes a consensus among human agents that does not exist and never has existed.12
Perry’s new book, Toward a Theory of Human Rights, is very significant. Perry concludes that though it is clear “there is a religious ground for the morality of human rights . . . it is far from clear there is a non-religious ground,13 a secular ground, for human rights.”14 Perry lays out Nietzsche’s well-known instance that, if God is dead, any and all morality of love and human right is baseless. If there is no God argues Nietzsche, Sartre, and others, there can be no good reason to be kind, to be loving or to work for peace. Perry quotes Philippa Foot who says the secular thinkers accepted the idea that there is no God and no given meaning to human life, but have not ‘really joined battle’ with Nietzsche about morality. By and large we have just gone on taking moral judgments for granted as if nothing had happened.”15 Why do we keep on doing this? ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y. Penguin Books,2008), 156-58
(Continued with. . . The Grand “Sez Who?”)
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
