Over at Balkinization, Andy Koppelman has weighed in -- with this post, "The Partly Necessary God" -- to the Perry / Tamanaha / Vischer / Balkin / Araujo / etc. discussion on God and the morality of human rights. (It strikes me that Andy's post works well in conversation with Michael Scaperlanda's, here.)
For starters, Andy takes it as having been "shown" that "religion isn't necessary to human rights" and also that religion is not "sufficient" for human rights (after all, "belief in God has sometimes produced massive human rights violations"). The latter point, certainly, is beyond dispute. (It is, of course, not beyond dispute that theism has produced more or worse human rights violations than atheism.) As for the former, I'm not sure.
I've never understood Michael's claim to be that "human rights" cannot exist, in positive law, or that they cannot be enforced through litigation or protected in law, without "religion." As Andy puts it, referring to the "old gag about believing in adult baptism, all I can say is that 'I've seen it done.'" One can litigate or decide well human-rights cases, and one can "believe" in human rights, and one can struggle and sacrifice for human rights, without being a theist.
But, I've understood (maybe I have him wrong) Michael's claim to be that "the morality of human rights" is one that proceeds from and -- to the extent it describes moral realities, rather than preferences or conventions -- depends on human-dignity claims that themselves depend on "religious" claims about the person. That is, I understand Michael's point to be that, if it is not the case that, in some sense, we are created, sustained, and loved by God, then, at the end of the day, it is not the case that we have "human dignity" in the way that the "morality of human rights" assumes. This point is not refuted, it seems to me, by the observation that some people believe in God, but disrespect human rights, or by the observation that some people disbelieve in God, and vindicate human rights. The challenge, it seems to me, is to figure out whether what needs to be true in order for the morality of human rights to be founded in something other than preference or convention really is true.
Now, one could concede this and still say that theism is not necessary, that -- say -- Kant will do. (Assuming that Kantian morality does not itself depend on theism.) And then, I guess, the question is whether we think that, all things considered, the theistic account of the foundations of the morality of human rights is, on the merits, more reasonable than the Kantian account.
At the end of the day -- and this was the point made several days ago by Rob -- the question remains whether it matters whether or not we should care whether or not the morality of human rights, as practiced and endorsed by non-theists, really requires theistic foundations. Koppelman ends his post:
We should be grateful for allies, instead of complaining that my foundation is better than yours.
Maybe so. Thoughts?
UPDATE: Reader and law prof Chris Green writes:
"The challenge, it seems to me, is to figure out whether what needs to be true in order for the morality of human rights to be founded in something other than preference or convention really is true." Exactly right.
I've weighed in on Andy's last does-it-matter point a couple of times in the Balkinization threads here and here and here. Here's a paraphrase of the last one: The general proposition that "believers and non-belivers should not attack the core beliefs of the other" (Tamanaha's restatement of Koppelman's admonition) seems self-referentially incoherent, at least if "attack" includes criticism, as it seems to in context. That suggests that we shouldn't argue with each other about whether God exists. But that would only make sense if it doesn't matter much whether God exists, and lots of people have a core belief that (to put it mildly) it matters an awful lot whether God exists. So this suggestion itself seems to be attacking one of those people's core beliefs.
I also put up some thoughts on the Bainbridge blog here, defending at some length the thought that morality needs something like God that exists necessarily in order to undergird moral claims that are subject to challenge by hypothetical counterexample.
Friday, August 24, 2007
The Pontifical Council for the Evangelization of Peoples has issued a "dossier" on the The Death Penalty. (Go to this post, at Vox Nova, for a link to the dossier.) The dossier (I'm quoting the VN post) "describes the various faces of capital punishment around the world, reports which nations have abolitioned its use and which maintain it, and sketches the manner in which the Church understands that biblical and historical teachings on the death penalty require the element of practical states of affairs in evaluating the moral licitness of administering the death penalty." FYI.
The Dossier ends with this quote from the USCCB:
“When the state in our names and with our taxes ends a human life despite having non lethal alternatives it suggests that society can overcome violence with violence. The use of the death penalty ought to be abandoned not only for what it does to those who are executed but for what it does to all of society”.
Both of these sentences are interesting. I understand that the imposition of capital punishment could suggest, and could be taken to mean, that "society can overcome violence with violence." It could also mean, though -- and, in my view, punishment ought to mean -- not so much that the punishment "overcome[s]" the crime, but that it expresses a moral judgment about the crime, thereby vindicating both the moral order and the dignity of the victim. The question, it seems to me, is not whether the death penalty ("violence") "overcome[s]" homicide, but whether the death penalty is, or can be, the right vehicle for expressing the moral judgement that a just society should express in response to serious crime.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Thanks to Michael P. for linking to the piece from the Chronicle on Mark Lilla's Stillborn God, which was excerpted recently in the New York Times Magazine.
The Chronicle piece quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian at the University of Virginia, as being concerned about Lilla's view
that there is something called "the West" and that "within this alleged 'West' there is a 'We' that conforms to the core tenets of textbook history: 'We' were once burdened by superstitions and irrationalities until somehow 'we' became enlightened."
(Here's Prof. Vaidhyanathan's post over at "Altercations", from which the above quote was taken.)
Wholly apart from the Lilla excerpt -- more on that later -- and without disagreeing with Prof. Vaidhyanathan's point that the boundaries and content of "the West" are not always obvious, I guess I'm one who still believes firmly that it is a useful -- indeed, a necessary -- idea. There is, it seems to me, a "West," and its history is inseparable from "our" history as Catholics and Americans.
According to the Chronicle, Prof. Vaidhyanathan is also
. . . not "puzzled" by the sort of "theological radicalism" that emanates from Iran or Saudi Arabia. He claims that it echoes the theologically infused politics that one can find "in any conservative Baptist church in Texas." Even more arresting, Vaidhyanathan claims that this "hard-core millenarianism...is perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States today."
Good Lord. Again: Distinctions must be drawn -- it is important that they be drawn, and those who fail to draw them err badly -- but are too often not being drawn (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan's tired "Christianist" riff, or "American Theocracy", or "American Fascists", or . . . ): The GOP is not the Taliban; Rick Santorum is not Sayyid Qutb; our "Red v. Blue" is not the Thirty Years' War; Operation Rescue is not Al-Qaeda; regulating partial-birth-abortion is not stoning unveiled women; etc. The suggestion that the violent ideology "that emanates from Iran or Saudi Arabia" "echoes" what one can find in "any conservative Baptist church in Texas" is . . . seriously mistaken (an "echo" after all, is a fainter version of the original sound, isn't it?). And, the claim that "hard-core millenarianism" is "perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States" is . . . unhelpful and inconsistent with the facts.
Now, with respect to the Lilla piece, certainly, it's the kind of thing that I suppose we should be delighted to find in the Sunday newspaper, and discussed in the public forum. It's full of big and interesting ideas and claims. At the end of the day, though, I came away thinking that there is a way of thinking about the relationship religion and politics -- a Catholic way -- that is ignored in the essay. As I read the piece, it canvasses three ways of thinking about this relationship: (a) religious questions are and should be separate; (b) politics involves, and simply involves, the implementation of God's revealed, specific plans on earth; and (c) "liberal theology", a "third way between Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation," which failed -- Lilla thinks -- because it offered no answer to the question, "why be a Christian?" (or a Jew, etc.).
But, the "Great Separation", as Lilla frames it, is not -- it seems to me -- the only alternative (nor, indeed, has it really been our alternative) to theocracy or the hollowed-out thing that Lilla (perhaps inaccurately) calls "liberal theology." See, e.g., John Courtney Murray, "We Hold These Truths."
I have some quibbles with Lilla's "Great Separation" narrative, too, but I'll save those for another post.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
CNN (and TNT) have been plugging this upcoming series, "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour. I admit it: I'm not optimistic, and anticipate a series of badly misplaced equivalency arguments (i.e., "sure, there are the Islamists, but what about the home-schooling evangelicals?").
Jim Lindgren has a good post, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, about the demographics of "fundamentalists" and other things. And, he has links to lots of other commentary about the series.
Thinking about the series, and these posts, I find myself thinking also about the Dutch bishop's recent suggestion that Catholics call God "Allah" (a suggestion that Robert Miller firmly declines here) and also Mark Lilla's recent NYT Mag article, "The Politics of God." One thought I come away from all this with: Distinctions must be drawn -- it is important that they be drawn, and those who fail to draw them err badly -- but are too often not being drawn (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan's tired "Christianist" riff, or "American Theocracy", or "American Fascists", or . . . ): The GOP is not the Taliban; Rick Santorum is not Sayyid Qutb; our "Red v. Blue" is not the Thirty Years' War; Operation Rescue is not Al-Qaeda; regulating partial-birth-abortion is not stoning unveiled women; etc.
The good people over at Vox Nova have kindly invited me to post occasionally over there. Since the bloggers over there share many of our interests -- and also because they are joined by an engaged and engaging group of commenters -- I thought I'd impose on them the "objectivity of human rights -- does it matter?" conversation we have been having here at Mirror of Justice. Here's a bit from my post:
. . . Here's a question I'd like to pose -- that is, that I'd like to borrow from my MOJ colleague Rob Vischer and then pose -- to the VN readers and bloggers alike: "Does the objectivity of religiously grounded human rights matter?" Inspired by Michael Perry's work, and his argument that there does not appear to be a "non-religious ground for the morality of human rights," the MOJ crowd has been wondering, for several years now, what the ground for "the morality of human rights" is, and why it might matter. (Here are some background posts by Fr. Robert Araujo, Rob Vischer, Jonathan Watson, Brian Tamanaha, and Michael Scaperlanda.) This same question surfaced often -- in different forms and contexts -- in the "Law and the Catholic Social Tradition" class that I taught last Spring at the University of Chicago.
Thoughts? What has to be true in order for the content and premises of the "morality of human rights" to be more than sentiments and conventions; that is, what has to be true -- really true -- in order for the "morality of human rights" to also be, really, true? Does it have to be the case that God exists, sustains the world, loves us, and made us in his image? If it does have to be the case, what then follows?
Friday, August 17, 2007
Nick Frankovich very kindly send me a note, clarifying (for me) his First Things post about which I blogged yesterday. He writes:
. . . A common claim on the abortion-rights side is that parents who abort their child are acting in the child's interest. Amniocentesis has revealed, say, a severe abnormality, and the family is poor and dysfunctional. The child's life would be painful or degrading to him. The parents are exercising compassion and sound judgment when they decide to exercise for the unborn child his right to die. You and I might disagree, but it's not our child, they point out.
So far that argument may be more rhetorical than legal, but I think it does find support in the legal community. I say that because of the reaction to the Terri Schiavo case. Many of the details of that case are obviously different from those of an abortion case, but in its essentials the reasoning behind support for Schiavo's euthanasia is the same as the reasoning behind the abortion-rights argument I outlined in the paragraph above.
Here is someone who can't speak for herself. She has a right to die. She also has a right to live. Which right should she choose? Someone has to make the decision for her, because she is incapable of expressing her own wish. The person to decide for her is -- fill in the blank. Most people think it should be a close family member -- spouse, parent, child -- rather than the state.
Now, the above paragraph works as an argument for abortion rights to the same degree that it worked as an argument for euthanasia in the case of Terri Schiavo. The link in the argument that is weak, in my opinion, is the assertion that "she has a right to die."
I happen to think that a person should be able to forgo heroic medical treatment and to choose hospice, although I wouldn't know how to formulate that right in such a way that people couldn't abuse it to abort their children or cut short their parents' life in assisted living or nursing care. Michael Schiavo claimed that Terri had once told him that she would want to die if she were so incapacitated, but, being unsubstantiated, his claim amounted to not much more than a parent saying "I know that under these conditions my baby would rather be aborted than be born."
I'm aware that, strictly defined, the legal basis for abortion rights doesn't cover the right to die or the right to be aborted. But I don't think abortion rights can enjoy practical, political support unless they're grounded in this substrate of belief about the right to die. . . .
Again, I'm grateful for the note. A few thoughts: First, I think that the pro-choice argument outlined in the first paragraph (i.e., "I'm having this abortion for the sake of, and for the good of, the baby, who is facing an uphappy life due to his / her disability") is not, really, one that does much work -- some, yes, but not that much -- on the pro-choice side of things. It seems to me that the basic pro-choice argument is "I do not want to have a child, and it is my right to be able to act on this not-want." That is, the paradigmatic pro-choice argument is not, it seems to me, one in which the "proxy for the unborn child's right to die" idea is all that salient.
I also think -- and maybe I'm being naive -- that there is (the Schiavo case notwithstanding) more distance than Nick suggests between the argument that one has a right to refuse unwanted medical treatment and the argument that one has a right to abortion or the argument that euthanasia is morally permissible.
My sense -- which points me in the opposite direction Nick is travelling -- is that the "right to die" feeds on the "right to abort", and its "autonomy" premises, and not the other way around.
What do others think?
