Reply to Rick

Rick's question catches me just as I am preparing to hit the road for the better part of the next two weeks.  Got to pack and take care of some odds and ends, so this will be quick.  I've read the review of Lynn Hunt's book (Hunt, Rick, not Hurt), and what the reviewer (Joshua Muravchik) says seems sound to me:

To connect human rights to social history in this way is an original and interesting approach to the subject. But it is not entirely convincing. If bodily boundaries changed after the 14th century, why did a change in the perceptions of rights not happen until the 18th? Did a revulsion toward torture bring about new ideas about rights, or did the cause-and-effect relation go the other way, with a sense of rights coming first and revulsion after? Or is it possible that some third, underlying cause affected both?

Similarly, Ms. Hunt does a nice job of explaining the era's epistolary novels and their themes of empathy, but she offers no evidence of their direct connection to the emergence of human rights. Maybe "coincidental" is indeed the right word. In any case, it is hard to believe that epistolary novels were a more potent engine of empathy than the book of Genesis, which enjoins against murder on the grounds that "in the image of God made He man."

In Ms. Hunt's interpretation, our sense of rights is infinitely elastic and vulnerable to shifting emotion. She might have stopped to address the possibility--advanced by Steven Pinker and James Q. Wilson, among others--that morality has a strong genetic component. She also plays down the power of intellect in human affairs. For Jefferson's and Locke's ideas to take hold, must we assume that the 18th-century brain required some extraneous preparation? Couldn't it be that the insights and arguments of the era's great minds were forceful in themselves, playing a much greater role than "Clarissa"?

To say that the theory at the heart of Ms. Hunt's book is unpersuasive, though, is not to deny its value. Along the way, she offers a lively and informative history of human rights, even if the source of them remains something of a mystery.

In any event, we find (what I call) the morality of human rights as least as far back as the Gospels.  I discuss the morality of human rights, and its religious ground, in my new book, Toward a Theory of Human Rights:  Religion, Law, Courts (Cambridge 2007).

Let me seize the opportunity to alert MOJ readers in the Salt Lake City area to a discussion that will take place at the University of Utah this Thursday afternoon, March 15.  Fellow MOJ blogger Steve Shiffrin, Michael McConnell, and I will be discussing establishment clause issues.