Naming the Source of Dignity: A Third Response

George Mason law student Mattias Caro weighs in the question: 

"I was intrigued by the Glendon quote you put up, in part because I spent a good deal of the summer working with Glendon's book on Eleanor Rosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Glendon does a masterful job in her book of laying out how individuals from so many different parts of the world could actually come together and approximate a common understanding of the values and truths that must necessarily undergird human society. Taking aside the utility of rights talk itself, which Glendon has also impressively criticized, the Universal Declaration was a moment for humanity in expressing a necessary natural law underpinning to any human, social enterprise. The problem lays here I think: in 1776 our Founding Fathers expressed their natural law theory in one simple phrase "self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights which among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In 1948, it took the world well over 40 separate points to flesh out the same truth.

Rather than indicate a deeper understanding and appreciation for the natural law, I think it expresses exactly the opposite. The natural law is most operative in the people when its principles are ingrained within custom, habit, and social structure. What's changed? Glendon is right: the competing views of human nature offered by Kant and Rouseau has left political theory profoundly confused: can man have a telos? Is he fundamentally a good creature and evil exits outside of him? Competing in this framework, the imago dei stands no chance because it both asserts that man indeed has an extrinsic, intelligible end (contra Kant) and that indeed man's free choice can be the source of evil (contra Rouseau). But in reading Glendon, I don't think she's making a fideistic argument that faith is the necessary ingredient for belief in the imago dei. I simply think the way things have shaken out in intellectual history, if a person does not have some sort of theistic background, they'll look for other grounds (i.e. enlightenment thinker rationalizations) to confirm their beliefs on human nature. But I'm not so sure a pre-Christian natural law thinker (such as say Cicero) would 100% object to the terms Glendon uses.

So the conversation certainly isn't one about believers vs. non-believers. But there is a lot of intellectual ground to catch up on to even begin to have a conversation on the imago dei."