The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium.
Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without belief in God? The question has bothered me rather acutely since reading Thomas West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding, and since engaging with the book’s reviewer, Michael Anton, by email (and in these pages), a year ago.
In a conversation about this in an online forum, Bill Vallicella suggested one could assert that natural rights are philosophical abstracta:
Why not say that natural rights are just ‘there’ independently of the dictates of gods or mortals, and independently of their being respected or violated? Analogy: there are necessary truths, among them, the truths of logic and mathematics. A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds. Consider a world W in which there are no minds and no physical items either. Is the true proposition that there are even primes true in W? It is plausible to say Yes. But if the proposition is true in W, then it exists in W. (Anti-Meinong: an item x cannot have a property unless x exists.) Now if a truth can exist in the absence of mind (whether finite or divine) and matter, why can’t rights?
Think of a right as a kind of abstract object. If abstracta in general can exist apart from mind and matter, why not rights?
He continued:
From a practical-political POV, bringing God into political discussions in a pluralistic society is not advisable. It only incites leftists. For example, it is a mistake to bring God into the abortion debate since a powerful case against abortion can be made without the invocation of any religious premise. Why poke a pig with an unnecessary stick? Similarly, don’t say we get our rights from God. Stick to the negative claim that they don’t come from the state or from the Squad. Just say that rights such as the rights to life and liberty are natural, not conventional, and then go on to explain what could go wrong if rights are viewed as conferred by whomever is in power.
The problem with all of this is that it diverges dangerously from the political theory of the Founding. After all, it’s right there in the Declaration: “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”
The problem is this: we hear all the time that America is unique in history in that it is a “proposition nation”: a nation built on an idea, rather than the usual basis of ethnic kinship. But if that’s all that’s available to hold the nation together — we are told, loudly, every day, that it cannot possibly be anything else, and that to think otherwise is “deplorable” — then we need to be clear about what that ideas is. Thomas West has made an extremely compelling argument that the political theory of natural law and natural rights is the essential principle of the American Founding. But if this “proposition” is all that we have, then it needs either to be accepted as an axiom, or demonstrated as a theorem. Is this possible in America today?
What might have seemed axiomatic to most people in 1776 no longer does today. In a secular, pluralistic and deeply divided society, in which tradition means nothing and every cherished principle is to be brought into the dock and made to account for itself, it’s not enough just to say “I have discerned these natural rights to be abstractions that simply exist, as a brute fact.” After all, whoever you’re arguing with can just say in response, “Well, I don’t think they exist at all”. What then?
The Founders knew very well even that even in their own time, some sort of argument was needed in order to persuade the skeptical, and they had three. They were:
1) That the laws of nature, and therefore natural rights, were established by “the God of nature”: that because God exists and created the world, that he would also create laws by which it would be ordered. These laws are discoverable by reason, and can be trusted (and should be obeyed) because they come from God, the Creator of the world, the perfect exemplar of goodness, and the possessor of absolute wisdom about what is best for us.
2) That natural law is perceptible by our moral sense;
3) That the natural law is discoverable by reason, by considering the natural “fitness of things” — in particular the conduciveness of liberty to happiness. Under this head is the idea that while it is right and just for God, in his infinite omniperfection, to be sovereign over all men, men themselves are alike enough in their imperfections that none has an inherent right of sovereignty over another.
Three readily apparent objections are possible:
Argument 1) rests upon belief in God. This was not controversial in the late 1700s, but it is today. (Back then, someone making a political argument would try his best to adduce Divine grounding; now it’s something that one tries to avoid.)
Argument 2) doesn’t tell us why we ought to obey our moral sense, or whose moral determinations are to be believed.
Argument 3) immediately descends into utilitarian arguments, definitions of “happiness”, etc. (In an email to me, which I posted here, Michael Anton answered, in much the same way that Professor West does in his book, the question of just why it is that the obvious superiority — in wisdom, intelligence, character, and education — of some people over others does not give them as much of a defensible claim to sovereignty as, say, a parent has over a child. It is a good argument, but it is, however, a practical argument rather than a natural-rights argument, and the consequences of completely abandoning the idea there may be some justifiable discrimination in the popular distribution of sovereignty — some Democrats have seriously suggested extending the franchise to sixteen-year-olds — may in practice be worse than the toleration of some natural inequality. This difficulty is of course made much worse by the admission en masse of people with no natural aptitude for, or experience with, the forms and duties of republican government.)
Professor West, in chapter 4 of The Political Theory of the American Founding, takes up each of these arguments in turn, but allows that each one, running into the objections above, falls short of compelling agreement. Even 3), which he seems to think the strongest, can only be held, in Kantian terms, as a weaker sort of imperative (my italics):
In Kantian language, it leads to a hypothetical imperative (if you want to be happy, obey the laws of nature) rather than a categorical one (it is your moral duty to obey the laws of nature). The laws of nature, founded in reason’s judgment of what is useful for human life and happiness, become morally obligatory only when they take on a juridical or legal character. If moral laws are not commands, they are only suggestions…
I do not doubt that the founders believed in the sacredness of the rights of mankind. However, we must acknowledge that reason does not lead to moral absolutes, even if political life depends in some sense on the belief in moral absolutes.
And that’s my question: if the political life of a “proposition nation” depends upon belief in its propositions, and if all of those propositions rest upon a foundation of natural law and natural rights — i.e., discernable moral absolutes — then how can it survive without a compelling basis for belief in that foundation? And doesn’t belief in the American foundation, given the weakness of arguments 2) and 3) above, require belief in God?
Along with many of the other Founders, John Adams certainly thought so:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The more pluralistic the society, and especially the more secular, the less chance there is of any sort of common agreement about the content of America’s essential principles — or, more to the point, about why we should believe in them at all. I am not at all confident that this can be fixed.
- American Fundamentals
- On The Founding: Questions From The Right Of The Right, Part 1
- Questions About The Founding, Part 2: A Reply From Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 3: Jacques Replies to Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 4
- Questions About The Founding, Part 5
- Bronze Age Pervert: Response To Michael Anton
- Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?
8 Comments
You pass over the fact that all the founding documents were the products of Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. These men had a common history and culture, even though they and their fathers might have been on opposite sides of the English Civil War. Their natural rights were the rights of Englishmen. There is no warrant for thinking that these English rights were universal. “All men” equals White Anglo-Saxon Prostestant men. Period.
The Founding started to come apart with the immigration of large numbers of Germans and then Irishmen, both of whom had a very different idea of rights. Many were Catholics!! None were individualists who thought in terms of individual rights.
Nowadays, we are a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural empire. We are not a nation in any sense. As was universally recognized up to the 1960’s (when I took political science in college), a nation state is an ethnic/racial state, dominated by a single ethnicity or race. When the US was 85% White, you might argue that it approximated a nation state, although the multiplicity of White ethnicities prevented it from being a true nation. The lie was convenient in two world wars, so it was believed, or at least not disputed.
Multi-racial empires are ruled by brute force. Once the White population declines into merely another minority (albeit the largest), any politics will be racial, and any concept of natural law and natural rights will be laughingly, hideously irrelevant.
Bob, this is an important point, although I believe the proto-nation was far better able to assimilate European Christians than the waves of far more ethnically and culturally distant immigrants that have arrived more recently.
I’m well aware of this problem, though, and mentioned it above:
Thomas West used an Aristotelian model in his book: he said that the theory of government was the “form” of the new nation, and the particular people were the “matter”. If the matter is not suited to the form, the project must fail — and failing it is, now that we have done our best to swap out the “matter” since 1965.
I agree Malcolm, it’s problematic to underlie liberalism and democracy with pragmatism. Not that it can’t be done, but rather that it opens up a can of worms as you suggest. Consider the comparison Dr. Vallicella makes between scientific and moral truth. To be sure one can extrapolate here and posit that 2×2=4 will always be valid (or perhaps better, a useful concept), whether in Houston or in Beijing. But the moral truths that the two peoples perceive regarding, say, abortion and procreation will still be rather different. The latter could with some feasibility assert that the one-child policy was necessary in order to curb the destability of overpopulation. If you object that state coercion in the very sacred realm of begetting children is wrong, Chinese – generally at least – would argue that they’re just being realistic about the common good, that national cohesion trumps the sanctity of life as well as individual autonomy. Killing or preventing the birth of young ones is good because it works, just as designing a good bridge or coming up with a technological breakthrough works. And without the binding power of natural law which has an arbiter (i.e. God), why should Western standards be superior of Confucian ones, which in their own way seem to be quite effective?
The thing is, one can endlessly multiply examples like the above, scenarios where utilitarianism can outweigh individual rights or particular notions of the common good. And to argue that democratic capitalist socialist nationalism (with a dab of Christian cream on top), perhaps a fair definition of much of Europe and America today, is the best system simply because it’s efficacious (which is probably true in many ways) is to miss the point. For gun owners do not believe in the 2nd because it is effective, but because it’s RIGHT. Believers and sympathetic secularists do not support the 1st because it’s conducive to American harmony, but because they properly understand that there are certain areas that the state should not butt its nose in. And so on.
Jason,
That’s a good argument against natural-rights-as-abstracta: they differ from, say, mathematical abstracta in that they do not seem to compel anything like universal assent.
That said, there are some human “universals” (defined by Donald Brown as as comprising “those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”), and there is some overlap there with natural law/natural rights. But the materialist can cite these as mere evolutionary adaptations – and the question of why we cannot freely choose to reject them as we see fit is left unanswered, except on purely practical terms. (Indeed, many of those on the list linked above —
for example gender roles, property rights, and inequalities of prestige — are under withering assault in the West today.)
“The problem with all of this is that it diverges dangerously from the political theory of the Founding […]”
But that’s what is becoming clear: the Founding was WRONG.
All men are not equal.
We might prefer if they were, but the experimental result of that premise is self-contradictory and terminally self-destructive chaos.
it’s not enough just to say “I have discerned these natural rights to be abstractions that simply exist, as a brute fact.” After all, whoever you’re arguing with can just say in response, “Well, I don’t think they exist at all”. What then?
You could just as well say: Someone says “I think these political policies come from Yahweh,” but whoever he argues with says, ‘Well I don’t think they come from Yawheh.’ What then?”
You know, given the fact that Xtians have hundreds of different factions that all contradict each other in politics and their interpretation of one single book.
But religious fanatics are never able to look at themselves, so it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t think of the very obvious reply there.
I saw some Xtian writing that “Blind people who can see get tears in their eyes, and deaf people who can hear for the first time cry of joy. Aha! How do you explain THAT if there is no God, huh, atheists?”
For the religious fanatic, the lack of a single piece of evidence for his claims through history, and the ongoing debunking of his claims – no, the Earth isn’t flat and hasn’t existed only a few thousand years, and it isn’t the center of the universe – means he has to come up with constantly new and increasingly ludicrious claims that there aren’t replies to yet. Then he can hug those for a while.
By the way, how about we simply say God wants the U.S., and the world, to be communist? No proof for that, you say? What’s the proof that it wanted libertarian beliefs in the U.S., then? “The Founding Fathers said so, so it must be true!” Cute.
Carpenter,
Amusing that you’d think of me as a “religious fanatic”. I’m not even a theist.
Primates have a natural moral sense, a sense of fairness. Certainly, other animals do also. I do not know, but suspect that such a sense increases in more social animals. Being more increases social survival.
Hence, if one does not require god for evolution then one need not require him for natural law. (Full disclosure though – I do believe in Him for both.)