Being British, I have a naturally mischievous streak and one of the things I occasionally enjoy is gently poking students with the sharpened end of a question to get a reaction. This can easily be done with the aid of a whiteboard and a marker pen. Draw a large circle on the whiteboard and say to the class something like: “This circle represents the entire set of genomes of every living thing on planet Earth. Everything is here, from whales to whelks, ants to antelopes, bacteria to bats, hippopotami to humans.”

Now I ask the class a further question: “Raise your hand if you do not believe in human rights?” Rarely will a hand go up (peer pressure can be a wonderful thing). “Excellent!” say I, taking my pen and drawing a second, much smaller circle, within the bigger circle. “Now what those of you who believe in human rights are saying is that anybody who lives inside your smaller circle, whose genome is ‘human’, enjoys a special set of rights that inhabitants of the bigger circle do not. Agree?”

Again, rarely will anyone protest.

“Wonderful,” I enthuse, rubbing my hands together in anticipation of what is about to follow. “So here’s the problem. Along comes the white supremacist, armed with a marker pen of his own, and he draws a much tinier circle within your small circle and says, ‘No, only those who are white and European enjoy full rights. Any other races do not.’. See the problem? You have drawn a circle, he has drawn a circle, you have both drawn circles. So tell me: why is your circle acceptable (even laudable, as the we give awards to people who defend human rights) but the circle drawn by the racist is not?”

Usually, there is a stunned silence at this point.

“I’m glad you see the problem,” I continue brightly, “after all, even celebrity atheist Sam Harris, who has opined widely on ethics and human rights, recognises there is a major problem here. Let me quote you what he says.” And then I read this:

The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals — intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on — will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community.^[1]

Now at this point you may be fretting that I am being unfair on my poor cohort of students, that this is just some philosophical game designed to make them look foolish. Far from it. This is crucially important, because human rights are a fundamental right — upon them stands our entire framework of ethics, our legal system, and international law. If human beings have inherent dignity and inalienable rights, then that means we cannot, for instance, treat people as means rather than ends, nor subject them to mistreatment or abuse, nor discriminate against them on the basis of gender, race, ability, or religion.

If.

That simple two-letter conjunction is crucial. Throughout history, there have been many examples of occasions where attempts have been made to narrow the circle, to exclude certain groups from the community of human rights. For example, in 1857 an African-American slave named Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom. The case made it to the US Supreme Court who ruled against Scott, the Justices stating that:

The question is simply this: can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?

… We think … not, and that they [Africans] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.^[2]

One reads a passage like that 150 years on and winces with embarrassment at how our ancestors behaved. Yet the problem remains: all the Justices did in that ruling was to draw a circle — simply a slightly smaller circle than the one that most of us today, when we talk about “human rights”, would draw. But they are circles nonetheless.

How do we navigate through these exceedingly choppy waters? Well, things are simpler than they seem, in that there are only three choices. The first is to conclude that human rights simply do not exist. We live in a culture that is increasingly scientistic, where that which is “true” is determined by what we can test or prove in the laboratory. On such a view, there is no conceivable experiment of physics, chemistry of biology that could prove human rights — we may know which part of the human genome codes for hemoglobin, but which codes for inherent dignity? If you cannot quite stomach that degree of reductionism, you could take Michael Ruse’s route and conclude that things like rights, ethics, and morals are merely a useful fiction, a trick played on us by evolution. Ruse writes:

[C]onsidered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, it [ethics, rights, etc.] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’, they think they are referring above and beyond themselves … Nevertheless, to a Darwinian evolutionist it can be seen that such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and has no being beyond or without this.^[3]

A moment’s thought reveals this to be highly problematic: on this view, there is nothing actually wrong with murder, rape, or racism — rather our disquiet about them is purely a function of our desire to successfully reproduce and raise young. (There’s also the uncomfortable corollary that if rape or racism could be shown to aid survival and reproduction, presumably they become the ‘right’ thing to do).

That way madness lies. What about the second option? Well, the second route is to acknowledge that human rights exist, but they just are. We cannot explain them, one simply has to take them as a given. Perhaps the Human Rights Fairy magically appears, immediately after a baby is born, waves her sparkly wand, and poof! The new infant now has inherent dignity and inalienable rights. This may sound like a caricature, but it is effectively the position that most people in the West have adopted. They believe passionately in the idea of human rights, but have not the foggiest idea how to ground them. (So please don’t ask!)

If the first option leads to madness, the second leads to peril. You see, we keenly desire to affirm sentiments such as Thomas Jefferson’s, enshrined in the US Constitution: “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 among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” — but we have no basis for them whatsoever. We have become, as C. S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, “men without chests”, unable to connect our high ideals with our passions and instincts.^[4]

Why is this perilous? For this reason: if human rights have no foundation, then it makes it all the easier for governments (as in the Dred Scott decision), majorities, experts, or specialists to begin determining who does and who does not have rights and what those rights are. But how do they choose and what criteria do they apply? Happiness (but whose?) Preservation of the species? (But why should humanity be preserved?) Posterity? (But who knows what future generations will make of us). Lewis writes:

Every motive they act on becomes at once a petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao [the realm of absolute morals and values], they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.^[5]

I said there were three options. To dismiss human rights as a fiction (useful or not), to see them as real but unexplainable — so what is the third? The third option is to consider where those who first articulated the idea of human rights grounded them. One of the earliest thinkers to speak of rights was the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, Francisco Suarez, whose 1610 essay On the Laws argued that human beings have rights because they have been endowed with them by their Creator, as the Bible makes clear time and again. If human beings are God’s special creation, if they are not mere collections of atoms, lumbering biological robots blindly following their DNA’s instructions to reproduce, then that gives an excellent grounding for human rights. Suarez’s essay influenced John Locke, who influenced Thomas Jefferson, who built this idea right into the heart of the US Constitution.^[6]

And so, to return to my class of students, I leave them with this thought. If you wish to have human rights, if you want to be able to say that racism, or sexism, or any other injustice is wrong, you need to bring God back into the discussion. Don’t take my word for it — read atheist Friedrich Nietzsche:

If you abandon the Christian faith, at the same time you are pulling the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. This morality is very far from self-evident: this point needs highlighting time and again … Christianity is a system, a synoptic and complete view of things. If you break off one of its principal concepts, the belief in God, then you shatter the whole thing: you have nothing necessary left between your fingers.^[7]

How then do we hold onto human rights in the face of those who would deny them, governments who would restrict them, or experts who would redefine them away, abolishing humankind in the process? Only by rooting them firmly in the image of God in which each of us is made.^[8] As G. K. Chesterton once remarked, human beings are equal in the way that pennies are all alike: we may all be different (some pennies are bright, others are dull, some are old, some are new) but all are equally valuable because and only because each bears the image of the King.^[9]

[1]      Sam Harris, The End of Faith (London: The Free Press, 2006) 177-178.

[2]      Scott v. Sandford – 60 U.S. 393 (1856), available online at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/case.html.

[3]      Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications (London: Routledge, 1989) 268.

[4]      C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 2001 [1944]) 24-26.

[5]      Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 64.

[6]      See Robert J. Spitzer, Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011).

[7]      Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, Translated by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 45.

[8]      Genesis 1:26-27.

[9]      G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works Volume XV: Chesterton on Dickens (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) 44.