Our Rights Do Not Come From God
Or
Why We May Be Obligated To Impeach George W. Bush
I don't read blogs much these days--a strategy a recommend to you as well, friend reader. And I'm not following the news with my usual fervor these days... But I can't believe I either missed or forgot about this:
Apparently the President has claimed that he will (only???) appoint judges who believe that our rights issue from God. (Er, yes, I do realize that NewsMax is not an actual news source, but I also heard this on NPR.)
Now, as others have pointed out, this sounds like a violation of Article VI of the Constitution. If Bush insists on acting in accordance with the assertion quoted above, he must be impeached. This is clearly a religious test given that it disqualifies people on the basis of their religious beliefs. Ergo if Bush employs such a test, he is in violation of the Constitution. Consequently, if he actually employs this test he must be impeached.
But not only is Bush demanding that candidates for office hold a particular philosophical/religious belief, he is demanding that they hold an incoherent one. Almost no one who has thought about the problem with any degree of care believes that human rights depend on God. The Divine Command Theory is perhaps the least plausible theory of morality known to man. Bush demanding that judges accept this incoherent theory is akin to a leftist president demanding that judges accept cultural moral relativism.
Or
Why We May Be Obligated To Impeach George W. Bush
I don't read blogs much these days--a strategy a recommend to you as well, friend reader. And I'm not following the news with my usual fervor these days... But I can't believe I either missed or forgot about this:
Apparently the President has claimed that he will (only???) appoint judges who believe that our rights issue from God. (Er, yes, I do realize that NewsMax is not an actual news source, but I also heard this on NPR.)
Now, as others have pointed out, this sounds like a violation of Article VI of the Constitution. If Bush insists on acting in accordance with the assertion quoted above, he must be impeached. This is clearly a religious test given that it disqualifies people on the basis of their religious beliefs. Ergo if Bush employs such a test, he is in violation of the Constitution. Consequently, if he actually employs this test he must be impeached.
But not only is Bush demanding that candidates for office hold a particular philosophical/religious belief, he is demanding that they hold an incoherent one. Almost no one who has thought about the problem with any degree of care believes that human rights depend on God. The Divine Command Theory is perhaps the least plausible theory of morality known to man. Bush demanding that judges accept this incoherent theory is akin to a leftist president demanding that judges accept cultural moral relativism.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:35 AM
26 Comments:
Po-mo lib philosopher Richard Rorty admits the incoherence of "freeloading atheists": physics and reason cannot prove the inherent dignity of man. Our entire politics is built on the assumption of a Creator who endowed it.
You don't have kids, do you, tvd? The "inherent dignity of man" is a pretty challenging concept for me to swallow after six years of changing diapers and three years of various small people yelling, "You are stinky poo-poo and I hate you!"
From my vantage point, whatever dignity we have is definitely acquired.
Oddly, I can't find where Rorty says anything about the incoherence of freeloading atheists, only quotes which don't mention a source. No wait, that's not odd, as he'd never have said anything exactly like what turns up in the quotes. Presumably, they must have been heavily edited, if not completely invented. I admit I'm not an expert, but doesn't God frown on lying?
It is difficult to discuss important things with the epistemologically challenged, especially those who are first inclined to call someone a liar rather than look to their own inadequacies at Googling.
More time is spent on pettiness and sourcing than on ideas. Besides, it is rude, sir.
"It is part of the tradition of our community that the human stranger from whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity. This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by freeloading atheists like myself."
The quote appears to be from Rorty's essay, "Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism."
Rorty appears to be a chap of some good humor, and the quote is warmingly self-effacing. Moreover, it is consistent with his thought: he hangs the concept of inalienable human rights on intrapersonal sympathy and the fact they have become a cultural norm and is content to leave it at that.
"One of the shapes we have recently assumed is that of a human rights culture… We should stop trying to get behind or beneath this fact, stop trying to detect and defend its so-called 'philosophical presuppositions'… Philosophers like myself… see our task as a matter of making our own culture - the human rights culture - more self-conscious and more powerful, rather than of demonstrating its superiority to other cultures by an appeal to something trans-cultural." ---Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality
I do not share his confidence in the tenacity or efficacy of any cultural norms. Certainly America's and Western Civilization's are already under full review, if not zero-based budgeting; I also question whether such shallow niceties survive Hobbesian nasty-brutish-and-short exigencies.
So the question remains untouched---if human rights do not originate with a creator, from where do they originate?
Rorty's, and modern philosophy's, answer is that the snake eats its own tail. The "incoherence" part of the original statement was mine. We are asked to rely on reason and physics, but they are clearly inadequate to the task.
After discarding the origins of the concept, secularism still demands we love our neighbor. Since it has no moral authority, we shall each in turn say, make me.
tvd,
1. Rorty is not a very good philosopher. He used to be pretty good--_Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_ is fine. Now he's a po-mo charlatan, mostly.
2. One person saying it doesn't make it so (not even G. Washington, who theists are apt to quote in these contexts)
3. He (Rorty) doesn't say what you say he says. He doesn't say you need God for morality. He says it's a Jewish-Christian idea. Don't know whether he's even right about that part.
4. He actually rejects what you say he accepts. He thinks that even God can't ground morality because nothing can. Rorty seems to think that morality is something like a fiction, but his view isn't clear enough to pin down.
5. Anyway, let me say again: no one as ever successfully rebutted Plato's (dispository) arguments against the Divine Command Theory in the _Euthyphro_. Moral rights aren't something that can be conferred, by God or anyone else. Either you are rational--in which case you have 'em--or you aren't--in which case you don't. Arguing about whether God grants us rights is like arguing about whether phlogiston is really a fluid. It's a waste of breath about an issue that was decided long ago.
Euthyphro does not apply. The Greek gods are imperfect: Socrates' argument is that Divine Command is arbitrary and that there is a higher moral order than that of those venal gods.
Further, inherent human rights are a question of essence (endowed by a Creator, for instance), not "command."
The question remains: Why does man have inalienable rights? Religion can be dismissed, but secularism is even less coherent; it merely asserts that he does.
Your position is the same as Rorty's---it's a settled matter, so who cares?
But it's far from settled, and without an essential character, it becomes more and more arbitrary, a function of "opinion." Your apparent equation of rationality and humanness would be the same as Peter Singer's, and he (quite logically) reasons that therefore, an Alzheimer's victim is a non-person. "Essence," the transcendent, does not exist; only materialism and utility. There is no higher moral order, and man does indeed live by bread alone.
Bush chooses not to help such a philosophy further insinuate itself into our society. In it are the seeds of the abolition of man.
This is going to show me to be abysmally ignorant, but for crying out loud, the whole thing seems pretty darn simple: If you don't play nice, sooner or later everybody's going to take their ball and go home. Human morality derives from the fact that we like to be around other people, something that's just not possible if we persistently piss others off -- much less if we make a habit of conking them over the head. Everything beyond that is the mere evolutionary process that proceeds from cooperative groups being more successful than antagonistic ones.
Rather than get worked up about whether rights comne from god, you might try to sort out whether there are such things.
"The idea of rights is nonsense and the idea of natural rights is nonsense on stilts".(J Bentham)
Precisely. No god, no rights. The crisis of modern philosophy.
"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." - GK Chesterton
And Lord knows how we hate dogma around here...
tvd,
1. Come on, man, we've been over this several times here, and it's well-known territory. Making an appeal to the moral perfection of the Abrahamic god doesn't help, b/c that view presupposes that there's such a thing as moral perfection antecedent to God's commands. On that view, God is good b/c he does what's right--so there's something that's right independently of God's decisions, so the DCT is false. Seriously, man, the discussion will never advance, if we keep ignoring this clear and apparently irrefutable point.
2. Chesterton sayin' it don't make it so. It's a catchy quote, but false.
3. On the same point, beware of your negative formulation: No god, rights, apparently equivalent to 'if there's no god, then there're no rights.' That's irrelevant. The relevant question here is, is the following conditional true:
If there's a God, then there're rights.
That's the conditional that the Theist can't prove (as Plato showed). Consequently theistic moral theory fails, and we're back to looking for a plausible moral theory.
Herb,
Well, Bentham isn't a guy who I have a lot of respect for, but put that aside. I don't necessarily mean to commit myself to the idea of rights as opposed to some other concept of the good, but I use that idiom b/c it's common and plausible.
And b/c we haven't seriously been considering the possibility of moral nihilism here.
We are never going to get anywhere, WS, if you keep arguing against Divine Command Theory when no one (esp. me) is arguing for it.
Shooting such sitting ducks is hardly sporting.
It is a question of essence (see above). A theory of the existence of a higher moral order doesn't hinge on an Abrahamic god, but on the existence of something inherent in man beyond his flesh and blood that requires respect. If it exists, a Divine Command to respect it would be superfluous.
But even if there is something in ourselves that is transcendent, that requires us to behave magnanimously toward other creatures, to pursue moral excellence, that also can be sufficient. I suppose this is close to the classical Greek view.(This would require, though, a telos, a purpose for man, which is a form of DCT anyway, or at least an embrace of a higher moral order, n'est-ce pas?.)
But a theory or working hypothesis need not be proven to be true and certainly cannot be discarded simply because of its unprovability. That it cannot be disproven is enough to proceed on philosophical merits. Agnosticism, not atheism, is the proper stance, since atheism, the belief that a negative can be proved (there isn't any god) is a violation of logic in itself. What IF it's true? How shall we proceed acknowledging that possibility? If there is a god, then man has rights. OK.
We have on one hand a coherent yet unprovable theory of human worth, dignity, and rights, and on the other we have nothing at all. Zilch, nada, nothing.
It might seem prudent to entertain the former provisionally (or at least let others do so, since it makes them more tractable) until something more provable comes along, especially when the alternative is the inevitable conclusions of nihilism, which Peter Singer bravely and unapologetically delineates.
One can wave off without discussion Aquinas (and his pagan pal Aristotle) or Singer, but not both. Poor Rorty has to lean on sentimentality, he's so flummoxed, as is the entire modern philosophical project.
But I'd love for you to dig in your heels and make an affirmative argument for nihilism. That would be fun. :)
No nihilist, I...
But I'm having a hard time seeing how God has any essential role in the kind of picture you paint. 'splain it to me?
I don't think I ever denied that there are teloi, did I? How do we get from there to transcendence? I've got no position on transcendence vs. immanence in this context, though I acknowledge that there are interesting issues there.
I thought you were on the side of showing that you can't have morality without God...but I just don't see how any of this gets us anywhere close to that conclusion...
And about atheism, "negatives", and proof: 't'ain't so. Negative existential propositions are proven all the time. You don't have a non-standard account of proof operating here, do ya?
Aristotle would say habituating oneself to negative existential proofs gets one out of the habit of the pursuit of the virtuous and good. The Dalai Lama would say it's bad karma. Me, I say it just leads nowhere.
Eventually, one asks the primary philosophical question, What Is Good?
So far, I have you down for pot and casual sex, about the same conclusion as most college students come to without the aid of a class in philosophy.
I am interested in your theory of rights. Please advise.
Love,
The Dude
"It is impossible to imagine anything at all in the world, or even beyond it, that can be called good without qualification--except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the other mental talents, whatever we may call them, or courage, decisiveness, and perseverence, are, as qualities of temperament, certainly good and desirable in many respects; but they can also be extremely bad and harmful when the will which makes use of these gifts of nature and whose specific quality we refer to as character, is not good. It is exactly the same with gifts of fortune. Power, wealth, honour, even health and that total well-being and contentment with one's condition which we call 'happiness', can make a person bold but consequently often reckless as well, unless a good will is present to correct their influence on the mind, thus adjusting the whole principle of one's action to render it conformable to universal ends."
Love,
Immanuel Kant
Yes, I thought I smelled Kant skulking about in the bushes.
It's good to be good and nice to be nice.
Wow, not even close, not even as a parody...
We'll get back to Brother Immanuel someday, I figger.
I suppose he's referring to thumos, which I also regard as morally neutral. However, his discarding of it in favor of dispassion illustrates his inertness.
I feel confident in asserting that the dispassionate reader of this blog would conclude its author is all about thumos. :-)
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