Martin Henry, Contributor
THERE HAS been an explosion of human rights. Never have more people had more rights than right now. But, pause a moment and think about it. Where do people get rights from and why should they have them?
As soon as we begin to ponder these questions we are forced to get down to brass tacks about the nature of human beings, their origin, purpose and destiny, and the oughts and ought nots of their social relationships. We have to consider the very fundamentals of philosophy. Rights demand a philosophical grounding, a metaphysical (beyond the physical) and moral and ethical base if they are to stand up. But where is this base to come from?
Human beings have human rights because they are valuable. But something can only have value if it has a valuer. But why would humans have any greater value than any other animal, if they have the same chance origins in the primordial ooze, live the same purely physical lives, and face the same destiny of individual annihilation? Isn't self-valuation, simply because we posses the mystery of consciousness, a massive case of chutzpah (audacity, impudence, effrontery, cheek)?
THEORY OF RIGHTS
Beginning with humans themselves [Humanism] we have to try to find something big enough on which to rest a theory of rights. Natural Law has been tried. "Natural law and natural rights follow from the nature of man and the world," one proponent proclaims. "We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. Well, what kind of animal are we? And where does 'property' exist in nature? And why shouldn't other animals have inviolable property? We rob them of their very lives, often just for sport".
True law derives from this right, the proponent says, "not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. Natural law has objective, external existence. It follows from the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) for the use of force that is natural for humans and similar animals."
The Natural Law people must take on board Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche (and he is not alone) saw clearly that morality without religion is impossible.
"All purely moral demands without their religious basis must needs end in nihilism." Moral systems created by humans without reference to God are in fact regressions to religious morality. The existence of any kind of laws pre-supposes a lawgiver.
"We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability," Nietzsche would have us know. "If there is no God, everything is permitted." Without morality, it becomes not merely possible, but inevitable, for humans to perpetrate unspeakable monstrosities against each other, against other beings and against nature as we have been busy doing.
Large numbers of people now believe in the benign, omni-competent state as the giver and determiner of human rights. But how can we judge the rightness of state action?
If humankind is more than natural and more than mere citizens of transient states then perhaps we need another kind of grounding for human rights. A 228-year old revolutionary declaration provides some insights for an alternative: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That to secure these rights [not to hand them out] Governments are instituted among men."
The launchers of the United States appealed to "the Supreme Judge of the world". If there is no Supreme Lawgiver and Judge as Imposer of moral absolutes we can discover or write as many rights as we wish, the strong and the powerful will impose their will on everybody else.
For, as C.S. Lewis insightfully observed in "The Abolition of Man", the power of man to make himself what he pleases means the power of some men to make other men what they please.
"Does anyone seriously believe that a multiplication of rights on paper will restrain Nietzsche's Superman?
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
