Hildegarde

First, before I start this, I want to point out that I added a short second post last night, to clarify a point, and that if some of this post seems a bit convoluted, that one may help.

But let’s get on, then, to John’s assertion–that either human rights are based on God because God gave them, or they’re “human inventions.”

Here’s the thing–I don’t believe in God, and I don’t think human rights (or, at least, individual rights) or justice or any of that, is merely a human invention.

Let’s start by untangling the rights thing, first.  People like the sound of “rights,” and they tend to throw the word at anything they think people should have, but the word is not properly defined that way. 

Rights in their original–and only supportable–formulation consisted of those areas of automony each and every individual must be granted by the state if society were to function properly.

What they–I’m thinking of people like Locke here, but also the Milton of Aereopagetica, and others–meant by “function properly” is what you and I would call “establish a stable society capable of making and sustaining progress in the sciences.”

Modern versions of what’s now called Natural Rights Theory are explicit about the benchmark role of the sciences–the first thing you lose when individual rights are not observed by governments is science–but Locke and company knew what they were looking at.

What Locke–and Jefferson–meant when they said that the Creator had given men “certain unalienable rights” was that these rights were based on something innate to human beings–something we were hard wired for. 

It’s not the rights that are innate, of course.  It’s a certain set of predictable human responses to certain environmental conditions. 

In other words, the utopian fantasies of Plato and Marx not only have not worked in the world, they are incapable of ever working in the world, because human beings are not infinitely malleable.  They can’t be made into anything we all.  What is traditionally called “human nature” is ard wired into all of us and cannot be changed short of genetic engineering of the most radical kind.

It is this fixedness of human nature that made the Catholic Church say it was possible to discover the moral law “by reason alone”–even if you knew nothing about God, you could observe human beings and how they behaved, and what things they held in common in their emotions and responses, and work out the moral law from that.

It doesn’t matter if human nature is fixed because it’s hardwired by genes or because God made us this way–and, yes, I do know that those things are not mutually exclusive–it only matters that ir is fixed.  

As long as human nature is fixed and immutable, neither human rights nor morality are “human inventions.”   Instead, their human formulations of an objective truth about being human–think of them as user’s manuals for how to make this machine run at optimum in at least some areas.

The only way rights, or morality, can be merely human inventions is if Plato, and Rousseau, were right–there is no such thing as human nature, and we can make human beings into anything we want them to be if we just change the environment enough.

I think that the untruth of this assertion ought to be self-evident by now, but a lot of people disagree with me.  

The confusion comes, however, with the continual misuse of the word “rights” to mean “stuff we think every human being should have.”

Rights are properly negative–they are a list of things your fellow citizens must not be allowed to do to you, a kind a fence around that first and most important piece of property, yourself.

What the  UN and certain people in Europe and the rest of the West call “human rights,” however, is a mess of positive demands–everybody has a “right” to food, for instance or a “right” to housing.

But a right is an absolute claim.  The only way some people can have a “right” to food or a “right” to housing or a “right” to education is if they are able to compel other people to work for them whether those other people want to or not. 

If you have a “right” to education, then, if nobody chooses to be a teacher, your government must be able to draft the unwilling and force them to be teachers so that you can have your “rights” fulfilled.”  The same is true of all the other laundry list of “human rights” that clutter up the UN Charter.

Human rights, as they have been internationally conceived for the last seventy or so years, pretty much destroy the concept of rights altogether–they are only possible in a world where nobody has any real, individual rights.

But individual rights do exist, and they are not simply something human beings made up.   It matters not at all if we were endowed by a Creator or the blind forces of evolution, our human nature is not infinitely malleable.  It is hard wired to respond in some ways and not in others.  It is the same across races, classes, and cultures.  Rights are those things that, if you violate them, the consequences are always predictable, and vary only in degree, not kind, throughout history.

You’re perfectly capable of building a society based on the suppression of speech and conscience, just like you’re perfectly capable of building a bridge by propping stone slates on unsecured tooth picks. 

If you do it, though, your society will be Afghanistan under the  Taliban, and your bridge will fall down as soon as anybody tries to cross it.