Transcript Human Society - its Source of Goodness and Righteousness.

Can the concepts of
Human Rights
and Equality
provide a basis for moral
decision making?
• Respect for individual human dignity has
its roots in Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
• Cut off from these Scriptures, it is in
danger of taking on a life of its own
leading to:
– Moral confusion.
– The exploitation of the weak by the powerful
• the very reverse of what was originally
intended.
A Christian View of the source of our moral sense:
Our moral awareness that some things are ‘right’ and
other things are ‘wrong’ comes from a Real Goodness
that is above and beyond us - pressing upon us.
 It is not just our society’s subjective judgement that
‘human life is valuable’ (say).
 Its not just a good survival strategy for our genes to make us
believe that human life is valuable.
Human life is intrinsically valuable because God, our
Father, greatly values it.
 When we say: ‘cruelty is wrong’ or ‘kindness is good’ we
are not merely speaking about our own feelings or culture
(individual or collective), but about a morality real in itself
- rooted in the love and the purpose of God for our human
being.
• If we don’t believe in God or some other
transcendent source of our sense of good and
evil, we have the problem illustrated by
Bertrand Russell’s conundrum:
• In 1960, he wrote ‘I cannot see how to refute
arguments for the subjectivity of moral values,
but I find myself incapable of believing that all
that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't
like it’
• Quoted by Mary Warnock in her article: Foundations of Morality,
published by The Royal Institute of Philosophy on their Web pages
in April 2003
•God has given us commandments. However the
source of our sense of goodness is not a list of ‘Moral
Laws’, coming from beyond us. Rather:
– Beauty and grandeur are objective realities.
• When we say: ‘The valley is beautiful’ we are not
merely talking about our own feelings.
• We are claiming that beauty is something that is
actually there.
– Beauty and grandeur are connected with goodness
which is also something real.
• Evil and suffering are alien intrusions.
Even if we don’t recognise it at first, the light of the Spirit
and Word of God (the source of creation, beauty and
goodness), shines through all creation, impinging upon us all.
So we recognise righteousness and evil for what they are.
• Romans 2:14-15:
• Indeed, when heathens, who do not have
the law, (ie The 10 Commandments etc) do by
nature things required by the law, they are
a law for themselves, even though they do
not have the law, since they show that the
requirements of the law are written on
their hearts, their consciences also
bearing witness, and their thoughts now
accusing, now even defending them.
Human Society - its Source of
Goodness/Righteousness.
Goodness is the character of God shown, not
primarily in a list of rules, but in His deeply
personal dealings with us.
• The Bible is the account of God’s personal
dealings with humankind and all creation.
• Proper personal relationships cannot be
described perfectly or be measured
adequately by commandments, codes of
practice or legislation.
• The Bible message is focussed in the Person of
Jesus in whom God meets us face to face and selfsacrificially suffers for our sins.
• giving us forgiveness, lifting us up in His
resurrection and ascension,to where we belong
eternally.
• That is the meaning of `love’ and it sums up
true goodness.
• We are called to love as He loves us.
• From this comes our duties of respect for justice
and the dignity of our fellow human beings and all
creation.
In our yet imperfect world God knows we still need
laws so, by his grace, he gives them to us. (Ten
Commandments etc).
Governments and the Source of Justice Goodness & law of God
Traditional & New.
Laws of the State as far
The
Concept
of
Human
as possible are in
Rights replaces God.
harmony with that
goodness and Law of God Government legislation is
– State legislation gives always subject to European
Court of ‘Human Rights’.
certain rights in
certain contexts.
•As in a religion people are
reluctant to challenge a new ‘god’.
• E.g. the ‘right’ of
way at a
• Where there is conflict
crossroads.
between this Court and
Government legislation • But such a ‘right’ ‘Human Rights’ has the final
not a fundamental
say.
human right.
But can the concepts of
Human Rights
and Equality
provide this alternative source of a
society’s ethics and government
legislation?
Some Complications and difficulties:
• What is the difference between a human desire and a
human right?
• Do we have a right to do what we like with our bodies in
private?
– Does what I do in private affect society at large - now or in
the future? Some theories of human society say it does.
• Abortion - whose right - mother's or the unborn?
• When does the right to freedom of speech:
– breach the right of someone to be protected from what he
regards as offensive?
– propagate evil and harm society.
• Can a list of things, such as rights, describe the dignity of
a person, or does not a list of things depersonalise us?
Narrow & Broad Interpretations of Human Rights.
• Narrow: Human Rights are relevant only to such
things as `imprisonment without trial’, a ‘fair trial’,
‘torture’, ‘persecution on the grounds of beliefs’ etc.
• An example of a Broad Interpretation of ‘Rights’:
Christmas 2000. Some Perthshire parents demanded
their children’s ‘right’ to privacy and successfully
asked the Council to forbid the taking of photos during
school nativity plays. What about the other parents?
– Does the concept of human rights give any help in
settling disputes such as this?
– Does the concept of Human Rights mean ‘human
desires’?
• No, but some will say that their desires are their
rights!
• How will the courts decide?
– This is one of the problems of the concept.
Further back in history (in America):
Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of USA) asserted that his
countrymen were a:
"free people claiming their rights as derived from the
laws of nature and not as the gift of their Chief
Magistrate,”
This gave poetic eloquence to the plain prose of the 17th
century in the Declaration of Independence proclaimed
by the 13 American Colonies on July 4, 1776:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Two philosophers:
• John Locke (17th C) based his belief in
‘rights’ on ‘natural law’ - ultimately
dependent upon the existence of a good
God.
• David Hume (18th C) rejected the concept
of ‘rights’ because it could not be
empirically verified and therefore belonged
to metaphysics, which he rejected.
Criticism of the concept of Human Rights by Leslie
Newbigin especially the Right to … the pursuit of
happiness.
• What is true happiness ?
– If we can’t ask the Question:
• “What is the chief purpose of man’s existence?”
• then happiness is whatever each person defines it
as.
– Without belief in heaven or hell the pursuit of
happiness is carried out in the few short uncertain
years before death.
– Hectic search for happiness leading to great anxiety
• If everyone claims the right to life, liberty & happiness
– who is under obligation to honour this claim ?
• Middle Ages - there were reciprocal rights & duties.
– Rights & duties went hand in hand and both were
finite.
• But quest for happiness is infinite (we are always
wanting more from life)
- who has the infinite duty to honour the infinite
claims?
- The answer is perceived to be the nation state.
- Demands on the state are without limit.
- Nation state has taken the place of God as the source
to which many look for happiness.
Should I claim my ‘wants’ as ‘rights’? Or should it
be my ‘needs’ that are my `rights’?
 My wants may be (and often are) irrational;
 I can (and often do) want things that would not in
the end bring me lasting happiness.
 My real needs - what I need to reach my true end may be different from the wants I feel.
If ‘wants’ are ‘rights’, then the wants of the
strong prevail over the wants of the weak.
 The very reverse of the original intention of ‘human rights’
Whereas the political right believes we should make up
our own minds and therefore be governed by our wants
the political left desires to provide for our needs.
The argument of the political left assumes that
need creates a right that has priority over the wants
of those who wish to pursue personal happiness in
the way they choose.
Difficulties immediately appear:
•‘Needs’ can be accorded priority over ‘wants’ only if there
is some socially accepted view of the goal of human
existence.
 in other words, a socially accepted doctrine of the
nature and destiny of the human being.
 Such a doctrine is excluded by the dogma of
pluralism that controls post-modern society.
So the politically powerful decide our needs in a
moral vacuum without an objective moral constraint.
 The very reverse of the original ideal of ‘human rights’.
 We are all equal in our basic need for survival; this is
the need we share with the animals.
 But to be human means to need other things -respect,
honour, love.
 These needs, social rather than merely biological, call
precisely for differentiation rather than for equality.
 There are different kinds of honour & love we owe to
teachers, colleagues, parents, friends, spouse,
children.
 It is this kind of differentiated respect, honour, and
love that makes life human.
 An undifferentiated acknowledgement of the basic
biological needs of a human being does not.
 And these things - respect, honour, and love cannot be claimed as rights.
Is the word `rights' the right word?
• Alternative way of expressing the belief in correct
treatment of one-another
Duty. We have duties to one another:
What God values and loves I must value and love.
Whereas each person demanding ‘rights’ tends to
separate us into rival isolated individuals; each
person having a ‘duty’ to others unites us in
relationships.
The concept of human rights has been useful in
challenging cruel governments about their behaviour
but can it really be the basis of:
 Moral decision making?
 Government policy making
A Christian Alternative:
For our sake God Himself surrendered His rights and entered
our suffering and death so as to forgive us and lift us up to Him.
Christ did not count His equality with God something to hold
on to but He surrendered it for us:
Phil 2:3-11 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but
in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you
should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests
of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God
something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the
very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And
being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and
became obedient to death-- even death on a cross! Therefore God
exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is
above every name …
Rights and Equality - the Bible.
 Sometimes we are called to surrender our rights and
make sacrifices in order that we might help one another.
 The Bible’s injunction is not that I should claim equality
but I should count others as worthy of receiving greater
honour than I receive.
 The kind of honour and love we give should be different
for different people.
 A good society is one where we honour one another in
ways appropriate to our relationships of being.
 I give a different love and a different honour to
different persons depending on whether the person is
my parent, child, teacher, pupil, colleague, employer,
employee, husband, wife or friend.
 In such relationships true human happiness is found.
Now for some quotations to consider:
John Witte
The modern cultivation of human rights ... began in earnest in the
Jnr is
1940's when both Christianity and the Enlightenment seemed
Director,
incapable of delivering on their promises. ... there was no second
Center for
coming of Christ promised by Christians, no heavenly city of
the
reason promised by enlightened libertarians, no withering
Interdiscip
away of the state promised by enlightened socialists. Instead,
linary
there was world war, gulags, and the Holocaust - a vile and evil
Study of
fascism and irrationalism to which Christianity and the
Religion at
Enlightenment seemed to have no cogent response or effective
Emory
deterrent.
University
•The
modern
human rights movement was thus born out of
(2000)
desperation in the aftermath of World War II. It was an attempt to
find a world faith to fill a spiritual void. It was an attempt to
harvest from the traditions of Christianity and the Enlightenment
the rudimentary elements of a new faith and a new law that would
unite a badly broken world order.
•John Witte, Jr*, The Spirit of the Laws, the Laws of the Spirit, in Stackhouse & Browning
(eds), God and Globalization, Vol.2
Oliver O'Donovan
is Professor of
'What
effect does this … have
Moral and Pastoral
justice?
It dissolves its unity and
Theology, Oxford
upon the conception of
coherence by replacing it
with a plurality of 'rights'. The language of subjective rights
(i.e. rights which adhere to a particular subject) has, of
course, a perfectly appropriate and necessary place within
a discourse founded on law… What is distinctive about the
modern conception of rights, however, is that subjective
rights are taken to be original, not derived. The
fundamental reality is a plurality of competing,
unreconciled rights, and the task of law is to harmonise
them… The right is a primitive endowment of power
with which the subject first engages in society, not an
enhancement which accrues to the subject from an
ordered and politically formed society.'
•Oliver O'Donovan*, The Desire of the Nations
The Judge was Jeremy
Summary of a Christian Judge’s view*:
Cooke at the Sept 2002
Oxford Conference on
• Our sense of morality should give rise to legislation
enacted by
Human Rights.
governments. E.g. our sense that it is wrong to steal will give
rise to laws forbidding various forms of stealing.
• Laws also regulate how we should behave in certain contexts
so as to preserve an ordered society. Such legislation will give
certain people rights in certain contexts.
– For example at a crossroads law gives someone the right of
way.
– However this is not a fundamental human right which gives
rise to a law. It is the result of a law for that particular
situation.
• Rights should occur in the context of the law of the land but not
be considered as the source of morality itself.
• However the British (and other European) governments have
reversed this and given the European Convention on Human
• Human dignity is the foundation for nurturing
and protecting human rights. It is rooted in the
vision of the 'fullness of life' promised in the
incarnation of Jesus Christ and his identification
with all humankind. We must be reminded that
human dignity is something persons have, not
something they must earn or be granted. Dignity
is not a quality bestowed on others by the family,
by society, or by a government. Rather, dignity is
a reality as a consequence of God's good creation
and never-ending love. This reality requires
acknowledgement and respect.
• Robert A. Evans, Human Rights in a Global Context
Contemporary moral experience …. has a paradoxical character. For each of us
is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of
us also becomes engaged by … manipulative relationships with others.
Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire
ourselves not to be manipulated by others; ... we find no way open to us to do
so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of
relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The
incoherence of our attitudes arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme
which we have inherited. Once we have understood this, it is possible to
understand also the key place that the concept of rights has in the distinctively
modern moral scheme…
…the culture of bureaucratic individualism results in ... political debates being
between individualism which makes its claims in terms of rights and forms
of bureaucratic organisation which make their claims in terms of utility.
But if the concept of rights and that of utility are a matching pair of
incommensurable fictions, it will be the case that the moral idiom employed
can at best provide a semblance of rationality for the modern political process,
but not its reality. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the
arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution.
Alister MacIntyre, After Virtue
What would it mean to come to a genuine, unforced international
consensus on human rights? I suppose it would be something like
… an 'overlapping consensus'. That is, different groups,
countries, religious communities, civilizations, while holding
incompatible fundamental views on theology, metaphysics,
human nature, etc., would come to an agreement on certain
norms that ought to govern human behaviour. Each would
have its own way of justifying this from out of its profound
background conception. We would agree on the norms, while
disagreeing on why they were the right norms. And we would
be content to live in this consensus, undisturbed by the
differences of profound underlying belief….
Is this kind of consensus possible? Perhaps because of my
optimistic nature, I believe that it is. But we have to confess at
the outset that it is not entirely clear around what the
consensus would form, and we are only beginning to discern
the obstacles we would have to overcome on the way there.
Charles Taylor, Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights
Articles from the Press
• Bishop of Rochester’s warning and Telegraph
editorial.
• Human Rights and Justice - Roger Scruton.
• `Fundamentalism and Human Rights.
• Cleaning up in court: the flood of legal action set
to engulf Britain.
• Human rights - by Cardinal Basil Hume