Arkes on Dershowitz on Rights

Here is a review, by Hadley Arkes, of Alan Dershowitz's latest, "Rights From Wrongs:  A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights" (thanks to Philip Bess for the heads-up).  Arkes notes:

Professor Dershowitz has taken it, as the thesis threading through this work, that there are in fact no such moral principles that form the ground of our judgments. He claims to find the standards of practical judgment in a mix of considerations he calls "utilitarian," but he emphatically denies that there are "moral truths" that stand behind these judgments. He professes himself to be "(God forgive me) a moral relativist," and a "skeptic" in moral matters. A moral skeptic denies that there are knowable truths. The relativist denies those truths from another angle by insisting that there are no objective truths, only standards that are "relative" to persons and places. "Nevertheless," says Dershowitz, "I believe strongly in the concept of rights." A concept of "rights"—but with no supporting truths that can explain why they are rightful, and why the rest of us should respect them. . . .

Jeremy Bentham regarded natural rights as "nonsense on stilts," and Dershowitz hauls out the banner of Bentham as he, too, denies natural rights: "[H]uman beings have no singular nature…. We are creatures of accidental forces who have no preordained destiny or purpose." The founders had looked to the "laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as the source of natural rights. But Dershowitz reserves his deepest contempt for the notion that we were "endowed by our Creator with rights," for he denies insistently, stridently, the notion of a God who disclosed a scheme of moral truths. For Dershowitz these things are packed into a complete, repellent package: vast evils in the world have been carried out by those zealots who claim to know the truths disclosed by God. They claim to know absolute truths and to have a "monopoly" on the truth. They have produced religious wars and the Inquisition. Leaning on the Bible, they have defended slavery, denied the rights of homosexuals, and rejected even the right of a woman to control her body through abortion. Without a hint of doubt, without any flagging of certitude on his own part, Dershowitz flatly asserts that "there are no divine laws of morality, merely human laws claiming the authority of God." Of course, in his own writing, Dershowitz has often invoked the parables of rabbis and made much of his persona as a Jewish intellectual. But the God of Israel is the Creator who authored the laws of physics and a moral law. To deny that God the Creator is also a legislator of the moral law is essentially to deny the God of the whole, the God known to the Jews.

Dershowitz's proposal, in a nutshell is that -- because we do not (and cannot) know things that are "right" in principle -- we should (quoting Arkes) "make [our] way to moral judgments . . . by beginning with the things that are 'wrong.'"  Arkes assesses the project, but concludes:

[W]e find a massive begging of the question, and a theory that is constantly chasing its own tail: rights are derived from the awareness of "wrongs." But if we have no ground for identifying rights, we have no clearer ground for knowing "wrongs." We could appeal to standards of utility, but only after we explain just who are the persons whose interests and injuries count. And if there are no grounds for insisting that all human beings count, then utility would seem to offer merely a formula for the Right of the Strong: those with the power to have their will accepted as law will decide just who, among us, have lives that count. . . .

Arkes also notes:

Alan Dershowitz is an accomplished man of the law, but it would be hard to assemble a thicker compilation of mistakes about natural law than he has brought together in this slim book, in an ongoing diatribe against natural law. Every cliché is here, every sophomoric point of cleverness, without much awareness of the way these arguments have been addressed in the literature, or with no awareness of how thoroughly wrong, or even upside down, these arguments happen to be.

There's a lot more.  Check it out.