Continuing from the last post ‘The Problem of Moral Obligation II from Timothy Keller’s book ‘The Reason for God,’
The Grand “Sez Who?”
The reason is laid out in a classic essay by late Yale law professor Arthur Leff. Most people feel that human rights are not created by us but are found by us, that they are there and must be honored by majorities, whether they like them or not. But Leff says: When would it be impermissible to make the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as “the grand Sez Who”? In the absence of God . . . each . . . ethical and legal system will be differentiated by an answer it chooses to give to one key question: who among us . . . ought to be able to declare “law” that ought to be obeyed? Stated that baldly, the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it. . . . Either God exists, or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place. . . .16
If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is “moral” and another “immoral” but only “I like this.” If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say “the majority has the right to make the law,”but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? “If you say “No, that is wrong,” then you’re back to square one. “Who sez” that the majority has a moral obligation not to kill the minority? Why should your moral convictions be obligatory for those in opposition? Why should your view prevail over the will of the majority? The fact is, says Leff, if there is no God, then all moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be no external moral standard by which a person’s feelings and values are judged. Yet Leff ends this intellectual essay in a most shocking way: As things are now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked, Buying and selling each other is depraved. . . . there is such a thing as evil. All together now: Sez Who? God help us.
Nietzsche, of course, understood this. “The masses blink and say ‘We are all equal—Man is but man, before God we are all equal.’ Before God! But now this God has died.”17 Raymond Gaita, an atheist thinker, reluctantly writes: “Only someone who is religious can speak seriously of the sacred. . . .We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious, that they are ends in themselves, that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from conceptual resources [i.e. God] we need to say it. . . . Not one of [these statements about human beings] has the power of the religious way of speaking. . . that we are sacred because God loves us, his children.18
Leff is not simply concluding that there is no basis for human rights without God. He is also pointing out (as are Dershowitz and Dworkin, in their own way) that despite the fact that we can’t justify or ground human rights in a world without God, we still know they exist. Leff is not just speaking generically, but personally. Without God he can’t justify moral obligation, and yet he can’t not know it exists. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2018) 158-60
