Douthat on theism and human rights

The question whether what our friend Michael Perry calls the "morality of human rights" requires a theistic foundation -- which is, of course, an entirely different question from the one whether one needs to be a theist to embrace or act in accord with that morality (one does not) -- has often been discussed here at Mirror of Justice.  Michael Perry has written about the issue, of course, as have others, including Nicholas Wolterstorff.  In my review of the latter's relatively recent book, Justice, I wrote:

What makes it the case that a human being is the kind of thing that can be wronged in the way that justice forbids? It might be tempting to join thinkers like Richard Rorty in shrugging off the “outmoded” task of “rights foundationalism” and rely instead for the preservation of our “moral subculture of rights” on “sad and sentimental stories” that evoke “sympathy for the feelings” of others. 

For Wolterstorff, this will not do; an “account of human dignity adequate for grounding rights” is required. He proposes, however, that no secular account is possible. A theistic account, however, is available: In a nutshell, the “relational property of being loved by God”—a property that has nothing to do with human capacities (which are not, after all, shared or distributed equally)—is what gives a human being great worth. 

The conclusion and the heart of the argument will—as my colleague Paul Weithman has suggested—be familiar to all parents and children who have read The Velveteen Rabbit: “Natural human rights,” he concludes, “inhere in the worth bestowed on human beings by that love” and “are what respect for that worth requires.”

Finally, the “unsettling question”: If belief in what is required to ground human rights is destined to wane, then what? Our “moral subculture of rights” might well be pervasive, but it is also “frail.” If “secularization” is the expected course of things, then it is not clear how confident we can be in the future for justice. “This is,” Wolterstorff admits, a “melancholy conclusion, . . . if one believes the secularization thesis. . . . I do not believe the thesis.”

In this recent piece, "The Confidence of Jerry Coyne", Ross Douthat addresses the question, too.  Here is a taste:

The point that critics make against eliminative-materialism, which Coyne seems not to grasp, is that it makes a kind of hard-and-fast moral realism logically impossible — because if the only real thing is matter in motion, and the only legitimate method of discernment the scientific method, you’ll never get to an absolute “thou shalt not murder” (or “thou shalt risk your life on behalf of your Jewish neighbor”) now matter how cleverly you think and argue. This is not necessarily a theistic objection — it’s one of the issues raised in Thomas Nagel’s controversy-generating book, which explicitly keeps religious ideas at arm’s length — and for that matter there are forms of theism that need not imply moral realism, and Euthyphro-style objections to the union of the two. But I don’t think those of us who still embrace the traditional Western idea of God are crazy to suggest that our cosmology has at least a surface compatibility with moral realism that the materialist conception of the universe’s (nonexistent) purposes seems to lack.

So if you’re going to defend both materialism and modern rights-based liberalism, you have to actually address this point head-on.