Human Rights and Belief in God - NYTimes.com
The Stone	July 17, 2011, 6:00 pm
Ethics, Human Rights, Philosophy, religion and the law Human Rights are all the rage. They have become, currently, a very popular arena for both political activism and rampant discourse. Human rights, as we all know, are the rights humans are due simply by virtue of being human. But there is nothing simple here, since both “human” and “rights” are concepts in need of investigation.
There is, however, no philosophically robust reason to accept this claim. True, the religious answer is straightforward and clear-cut. True, philosophical theorizing on the foundations of human rights in particular, and morality in general, may be complex, or nuanced, or even convoluted. True, the word “sacred” carries religious connotations. But that could just be a manner of speaking — and dignity and inviolability certainly do not need to be tied down to the sacred. Aristotelian virtue and natural justice or the Kantian categorical imperative (arising from reason, of course) offer philosophical bases for morality at large. Theories of human needs, human interests and human agency provide analytical foundations for the idea of human rights. And then there is Hart’s one natural right — the equal right to be free; Gewirth’s turn to human action and logic; Sen and Nussbaum’s talk of basic human capabilities, and oh-so-many others, all affording humanistic starting points for the human dignity at the base of human rights that need nary a wink at religion. There is also a legitimate and, to my mind, strong critique of the individualism guiding the liberal idea of human rights that enjoins us to rethink our mantras regarding the autonomous self who is the “human.” That these are intricate and sometimes problematic, that they might be in tension with, even contradict, each other, that we must do considerable analytic and philosophical work in their explication does not cancel out their equal profundity — equal to religion, that is — in justifying human rights.
What difference does it make? Beyond the theoretical discussions on human rights,— What grounds them theoretically? What justifies them theoretically? What legal implications do they carry theoretically? — there is the “so what?” question. Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation? Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?
Ethics, Human Rights, Philosophy, religion and the law Previous Post
The Morality of MigrationBirth Control, Bishops and Religious AuthorityGood Minus GodRethinking the ‘Just War,’ Part 2Rethinking the ‘Just War,’ Part 1
Human Rights and Belief in God - NYTimes.com
The Stone	July 17, 2011, 6:00 pm
Ethics, Human Rights, Philosophy, religion and the law Human Rights are all the rage. They have become, currently, a very popular arena for both political activism and rampant discourse. Human rights, as we all know, are the rights humans are due simply by virtue of being human. But there is nothing simple here, since both “human” and “rights” are concepts in need of investigation.
There is, however, no philosophically robust reason to accept this claim. True, the religious answer is straightforward and clear-cut. True, philosophical theorizing on the foundations of human rights in particular, and morality in general, may be complex, or nuanced, or even convoluted. True, the word “sacred” carries religious connotations. But that could just be a manner of speaking — and dignity and inviolability certainly do not need to be tied down to the sacred. Aristotelian virtue and natural justice or the Kantian categorical imperative (arising from reason, of course) offer philosophical bases for morality at large. Theories of human needs, human interests and human agency provide analytical foundations for the idea of human rights. And then there is Hart’s one natural right — the equal right to be free; Gewirth’s turn to human action and logic; Sen and Nussbaum’s talk of basic human capabilities, and oh-so-many others, all affording humanistic starting points for the human dignity at the base of human rights that need nary a wink at religion. There is also a legitimate and, to my mind, strong critique of the individualism guiding the liberal idea of human rights that enjoins us to rethink our mantras regarding the autonomous self who is the “human.” That these are intricate and sometimes problematic, that they might be in tension with, even contradict, each other, that we must do considerable analyti
c and philosophical work in their explication does not cancel out their equal profundity — equal to religion, that is — in justifying human rights.
What difference does it make? Beyond the theoretical discussions on human rights,— What grounds them theoretically? What justifies them theoretically? What legal implications do they carry theoretically? — there is the “so what?” question. Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation? Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?
Ethics, Human Rights, Philosophy, religion and the law Previous Post
The Morality of MigrationBirth Control, Bishops and Religious AuthorityGood Minus GodRethinking the ‘Just War,’ Part 2Rethinking the ‘Just War,’ Part 1