Motus Mentis

Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here.

We read:

The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property because some body of men have decided to grant them to us. We have them inherently or intrinsically. We don’t get them from the State; we have them whether or not any state exists to secure them as a good state must, or to deprive us of them as a bad state will.

Rights are logically antecedent to contingent social and political arrangements, and thus logically antecedent to the positive law (the law enacted by a legislature). One can express by saying that rights are not conventional but natural. But then ‘natural’ just means ‘not conventional.’

Suppose our rights as individual persons come not from nature but from God. Then their non-conventionality would be secured. Now it would be good if we could proceed in political philosophy without bringing God into it. But then we face the problem of explaining how norms could be ingredient in nature.

Perhaps someone can explain to me how my right not to be enslaved could be grounded in my being an animal in the material world. How could any of my rights as an individual person be grounded in my being an animal in nature? I am open for instruction.

One could just insist that rights and norms are grounded in nature herself. But that would be metaphysical bluster and not an explanation.

To put it another way, I would like someone to explain how ‘natural right’ is not a contradictio in adiecto, provided, of course, that by a natural right we mean more than a non-conventional right, but a right that is non-conventional and somehow ingredient in or grounded in nature.

And let’s never forget the obvious: as natural beings, as part of the fauna of the space-time system, we are manifestly not equal either as individuals or as groups.

So I say that if you want to uphold intrinsic and unalienable rights, rights that do not have their origin in human decisions and conventions, and if you want to uphold rights for all humans regardless of their empirical strengths and weaknesses, and the same rights for all, then you must move beyond nature to nature’s God who is the source of the personhood of each one of us human animals, and the ground of equality of persons. No God, no equality of persons and no equality of rights.

It seems clear that something like this is what the second paragraph of the Declaration means with its talk of men being CREATED equal and being ENDOWED by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights. The rights come from above (God) and not from below (nature).

I agree completely. Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:

1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.

2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.

In answer to my Question 5 about whether there are in fact such things as natural rights, and whether they are conceivable in the absence of God, Michael Anton replied:

Also covered at length by West and me. He and I both say yes, as do the founders. If you change the terminology from “natural rights” plural (which the ancients would not have recognized) to “natural right” singular (which they surely did), then pretty much all political philosophers until late modernity did as well. Some were atheists. Some were deists. Some were believers. They all made the case for rationally knowable principles of justice which do not require, but are consistent with, recourse to God.

It’s the “do not require” part that troubles me. I can easily see that we can posit the existence of such rights simply by stipulating them, but if that is their only basis they lay no claim to objective existence, and are nothing more than conventions based on moral intuitions. How can it be otherwise?

I’ve just re-read the relevant passages of Mr. Anton’s review, and they contain an interesting move: We read:

Men in the state of nature — that is, without government, whether understood as a pre-political state or one following the dissolution of a political order — while free, are thus at grave risk of injury and depredation. Such afflictions are not merely bad for individual men, they violate a moral standard which nature provides but leaves to man to enforce. Moreover, in the state of nature, men cannot utilize to their full potential those talents God and nature have given them.

Here we see a reference to “a moral standard which nature provides”. How?

Next we see this:

…men’s rights remain the gift of God and nature, not of government…

OK, now it’s God and nature. A little further on:

Moreover, the same “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that endow men with inalienable natural rights similarly entitle the nations of the world to a “separate and equal station” with respect to other nations.

“Nature and of Nature’s God”. But which came first? Clearly if God exists, and created Nature, then the ultimate source of innate rights is not Nature, but God.

Now we begin to palm the card:

West shows that the founders, far from being hostile to or dismissive of religion, tradition, and other non-rational sources of guidance for human life, saw these things as not only broadly useful for political society but fully compatible with natural rights and absolutely indispensable to a political order based thereon. In the founders’ view, it is reasonable that the God who both revealed the Decalogue and is author of the natural world created that world with natural moral principles that accord with His law. The alternative — moral commands with no basis in, or that contradict, nature — seemed to the founders profoundly irrational and implausible.

Here we begin to see a reversal of priority. God is now not the necessary foundation of natural rights; it is merely “reasonable” to think that belief in God is “compatible” with them, and indispensable to a practical political order. The alternative is now described as moral commands that contradict not God, but nature.

At last, there’s this:

But the founders also agreed that religions and traditional sources of human guidance should not be authoritative for politics. In Europe, resting political legitimacy on religion led, first, to a millennium of oligarchic stagnation and, later, to bloody religious wars. Any attempt to do so in America would also crash into the many deeply held religious convictions on the new continent. Whose understanding of God would rule? Better to ground politics in a reasoned account of human nature that admits man’s inability to know the mind of God and respects each person’s equal natural right to follow his own conscience in matters of worship. Similarly, traditions not infringing on the equal natural rights of others were to be tolerated, and even celebrated. Under the new “form”, men would be freer to live as men than ever before in human history.

Now the move is complete. Did you keep your eye on the little ball? We’ve gone from God as the Creator of Nature, and of us, and of our rights, to a sort of equal partnership of “nature and nature’s God”, to a “reasoned account” of natural rights that has severed itself from any dependence upon particular ideas of God, or indeed upon any belief in God at all. And that’s how we get to a concept of “natural” rights — which, I must emphasize again, are irreducibly normative — that is supposed to work, as Mr. Anton explained above, even for atheists!

Upon this rock we have built the United States. But the truth, I think (and I am sure that Jefferson and Adams and Madison would agree) is that without religion — without a transcendent foundation for the rights so reverberantly declared in Philadelphia two hundred and forty-two years ago this week — it is actually built upon sand. (Hence the language in the Declaration, which explicitly keeps God in the picture.) What I want to know is this: given the relentless skepsis that was an essential feature of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, was the Founding — itself a product of a transitional period in that ongoing cultural, intellectual, and doxastic evolution — doomed, ultimately, to pass away in a far-off era of radical secularism?

Not necessarily, perhaps: we can simply stipulate that natural rights are real, and proceed accordingly; how many people, after all, are likely to examine their roots, especially in a time when we hear every day of new and hitherto unimagined, positive rights? Must our rights really rest upon ontological bedrock, or are our intuitions and conventions enough, so long as we don’t look too closely? Mr. Anton takes another look:

The central question of political philosophy — perhaps of philosophy itself — is: do right and wrong, good and evil, exist by nature? Put another way: does nature offer us any guidance on how to live well? To answer “no” is either to limit oneself to recourse to God — and God alone — or else to accept a blackness at the heart of human things. Tradition offers no solace, as traditions may be good or bad, and merely asking which of the two a particular tradition is presupposes God or natural right. Recourse to God is necessary, as we shall see, but one wonders what is so unacceptable about the founders’ argument for a fundamental compatibility between His law and His nature. Similarly, one might ask of the traditionalists: what could be so bad about a body of American ideas that, even if you dispute their truth, are unquestionably our own? And isn’t that, for traditionalism, the highest source of guidance? So how could those ideas be, in the final analysis, untrue for us?

Few have the courage or “probity” (in Straussian terms) to face the other alternative squarely but instead settle for what Allan Bloom stingingly termed “nihilism with a happy ending.” We may thank God for this widespread incoherence and hypocrisy, since living amid a Nietzschean hoi polloi would be at best inconvenient.

But surely a better alternative would be to understand the true grounding of our rights and duties. Is that possible?

One problem in establishing a regime based on reason is that, even among the finest “matter”, reason does not always prevail. How then to fix in the public mind a firm and accurate conviction of the ground of men’s rights and duties? In the book’s other primarily philosophic passage, West analyzes the founders’ three core arguments for the existence of natural right: God, the “moral sense” or conscience, and the “natural fitness of things.” The first two of their arguments West finds rationally unsatisfying. That is, not necessarily untrue, but not amenable to rational validation on their own terms. Reasoning according to Aristotle’s dictum that we should “seek out precision in each genus to the extent that the nature of the matter allows,’ West finds the third fully rational yet too abstract to command mass assent. In words of Machiavelli of which the Florentine’s great admirer John Adams might have approved, “a prudent individual knows many goods that do not have in themselves evident reasons with which one can persuade others.’ Recourse to God and the conscience is necessary, even if rationally unsatisfying to the philosopher. But then the philosopher is satisfied by nature alone; it’s everyone else we need to worry about. The founders in any case made all three arguments with apparent conviction.

“But then the philosopher is satisfied by nature alone.”

Is he? I know at least one who isn’t.