I am not uncomfortable with the assertion of a religious cause for rights, per se. I welcome any assertion that we enjoy natural rights. I, however, do not require a creator as a source of those rights. The rights merely exist as a consequence of our existence and our locomotion. What follows from society and government (an expression of society) is more or less restriction on the exercise of our rights. I am not opposed to that either, taking from Rousseau and Mill and others the argument that in a society with rules we gain freedom that we may not have in our natural, individual state.
We exist; therefore, we have rights? How do we then perceive, recognize and understand these rights? I'm not being sarcastic here, but trying to understand how are we to determine what rights our mere existence itself creates. What basis or reasoning do we use?
I further take the "positive rights" that FLG disfavors to be not rights at all but rather elements of the social contract. Equality, for example, is part of a social contract. It is not a right and it is not a reality in nature. It is merely an agreement among members of a society (expressed in their government) that individuals will contract for equal treatment from their government and before the law. Clearly, that emerged as a hope in the Declaration of Independence. To our credit, it is a hope we have pursued straight through to this day. But the word "right" in reference to equal treatment, for example, is an error that confuses.
Okay, this I think is very useful, and perhaps people ought to use a different term when discussing things like a right to education or health care.
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How 'bout "respublicopia", the plenty of public thingies?
That's funny.
"We" is a problem. There's an assumption, in rights discussion, that all are on the same footing - clearly not true, at least for kids and geezers. And, guys like Phillip Garrido and Jesse Timmendequas, who are driven to do bad stuff. There is some protection of the vulnerable you are not talking about here, when you talk rights. dave.s.
Dave.s:
You mean Alan's assertion that "we" have rights because "we" are?
Because Locke addressed your issue with Timmendequas and Garrido pretty clearly:
"Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another."
Locke is arguing that we ought to act morally. I agree. But that is not, nor is protection for the vulnerable, a right. These things are contracted for in a society to varying degrees.
We can determine out natural rights by mental exercise. What rights do you have wandering alone in the desert? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Check although perhaps limited by resources. Free speech? Check, unrestricted in any manner. And so on.
The same process defines things people believe they have a right to that actually are part of the social contract. Can I get someone to treat my wounds? No. I am alone. I need to enter a society, experience government, and contract for that. Equality? No. Moving past the point that I am alone, I do not have the right to be as tall or as smart or as handsome as another. I do not control my genetic gifts. I can contract for equal treatment in a society that starts with a founding principle like Locke's or a statement like "all men are created equal." And so on.
Alan: Mental exercises have different starting points and different conclusions. Nor is it obvious, even granting contract - and what guarantees the morality and the validity of contract to begin with? - that all humanity will make the same contracts. It is idle to deny an element of arbitrariness in any system political theory that lacks the guarantee of God - just as it would be idle to deny an element of arbitrariness in any system of political theory that possesses the guarantee of God. You can define your moral axioms carefully, and develop your conclusions with rigorous logic, but there is no such thing as a self-evident truth. The best political theorists recognize the arbitrary elements within their systems rather than denying their existence.
I guarantee you that all humanity will NOT make the same contracts. That is why the elements of contracts are not properly considered rights. They do not exist in humans (or anything else) in a lone and natural state. Some societies contract for equality. Some do not. Equality is not a right.
I considered noting that my definition of right is perhaps indistinguishable from ability. But, I do not know that that is a limitation on the argument. Restricting a right, regardless of what one perceives the source of that right to be, is a restriction on ability or free exercise. Now I am wondering if, wandering across a desert, one has a right to go to Saturn.
Regarding God, does the Sun Goddess grant free speech to the follower of Shinto and Allah grant the same to a Muslim? Would we argue that a follower of any religion lacks the right of free speech in a natural state? Did all those deities collaborate, or is one just handing out rights to all without regard to the desires of the other deities? Or, do our rights exist because we exist? I'll take the latter along with my (rather simplistic) test of what constitutes a right.
Ah, Withywindle, Withywindle, Withywindle. You've really got to get over to the analytical philosophy department. After careful training, they will teach you to prefer obvious truths to complicated arguments. (This is the main benefit of modern philosophy. They are as near as I can tell the only people in academia so trained.)
You can define your moral axioms carefully, and develop your conclusions with rigorous logic, but there is no such thing as a self-evident truth.
Of course there are such things as self-evident truths. Really, it takes years and years of brainwashing with ridiculously convoluted arguments to convince people that there isn't. The Law of Non-Contradiction is self-evident. "A finite whole is greater than any of its parts" is self-evident. Indeed, the arguments against self-evident truths are so much nonsense, mostly amounting to "It is possible to imagine someone who cannot see that multiplication is commutative, therefore multiplication is not commutative."
The fact that some people fail to perceive a fact simply does not destroy the possibility that other people do perceive it. This is invoking what Michael Huemer calls "The Idiot's Veto" which he defines as follows:
"The thesis that any individual has the power to block a fact from the realm of objectivity or knowledge, merely by persistently refusing to agree with it, and resisting all efforts to educate him."
This principle entails that if we can find someone (a psychopath, perhaps) who denies that torturing little children just for the fun of it is wrong, then that's null and void and torturing little children just for the fun of it is not wrong after all.
Sorry, guys. Alan Howe is right. My fellow secular conservatives, FLG and Withywindle, are dead wrong on this one. Rights exist and it's fairly obvious that they exist. I see no reason why we need God here, though perhaps I do need a (small amount of) metaphysics. (To be fair, it's really pro tanto duties that exist. What we call rights flow from duties. I have a right to life and liberty because everybody else has a duty not to deprive me of my life and liberty.)
If you need careful training to perceive an obvious truth ...
You don't need careful training to perceive an obvious truth. You need careful training to unlearn academia's assumption that we should disregard obvious truths and instead yield to horrendously complicated error-riddled nonsense.
I should add that my conclusion that it is, after all, wrong to torture little children just for the fun of it is hardly a revelation to the passing tradesman.
But less obvious to an Assyrian soldier.
It is an obvious truth that God exists, that he doesn't exist, and that we can't know if he exists.
I don't offhand see a difference between your obvious truths and any other arbitrary a prioris.
But less obvious to an Assyrian soldier.
A common mistake, though I can see why you arrived at it. In fact, it was equally obvious to an Assyrian soldier. The difference between ancient morality and modern morality is mostly one of who is included in the in-group. "Of course," the Assyrian would say, "it is wrong to torture Assyrian children just for the fun of it. But non-Assyrians don't count."
Most cross-cultural arguments about morality are not debates about morality, but debates about facts. (Most claims about supposedly immoral cultures are based on slanders. The Aztecs did not sacrifice each other with some rare exceptions; they sacrificed defeated warriors of other cultures. The Eskimos did not, in fact, involuntarily leave their elderly to die on ice floes; they had a cultural ethic such that the elderly would volunteer to leave if food was particularly scarce. Etc.)
Every society agrees that it is wrong to kill and eat Grandma. The Hindus believe it is wrong to kill and eat cows because that cow might be Grandma. If we agreed with the factual argument, we would concur with their moral conclusion.
Is there a society which lionizes rapists, torturers, liars, etc? No. (Given my in-group, out-group distinction, you understand. Some cultures may well have lionized the murderers of other peoples.)
The major difference between my obvious truths and your arbitrary a prioris is my obvious truths are not arbitrary. Everybody agrees with them. Including you. For example, this whole conversation is pointless unless we both agree with the obvious moral truth - "on the subject of the truth of moral values, we ought to believe only what is true," i.e. we ought to refrain from believing falsehoods. If you don't agree with that, then what is the purpose of this argument?
By the way, I object to the analogy here:
It is an obvious truth that God exists, that he doesn't exist, and that we can't know if he exists.
Has anyone ever asserted the existence of God because "it's obvious"? Has anyone ever asserted the non-existence of God because "it's obvious"? Has anyone ever asserted "we can't know if God exists" because "it's obvious"? I believe the answer is no to all three points, but I'm prepared to listen if you know a prominent thinker who has made any of these claims, rather than justifying their beliefs through arguments or observation.
I get this argument a lot when I argue for the truth of intuitive judgements such as "it is wrong to torture children just for the fun of it." Instead of arguing that, in fact, I'm mistaken and this proposition isn't obvious, instead they claim that some false proposition of the past was justified on similar grounds. In fact, almost never were the examples given justified on any such grounds.
However, I don't believe that intuition is infallible. So I will give you, gratis, an intuition which many people seem to have which, it turns out, is in fact false. "All causes are local. There is no action from a distance." A great many people seem to have this intuition, but we now know that it's not true. Intuition gives us defeasible justification, not ironclad certainty. If you're looking for ironclad certainty, you're a member of the wrong species.
Andrew: I am less sure than you are of the universality of moral attitudes - and far less certain that explaining away the positive value given to torture by an Assyrian soldier, an Indian tribe, a British boarding school, can somehow be explained away as a definitional problem regarding in and out groups. (And this would seem to trivialize the definition of in group, itself a question of apparently non-obvious truth.) This also does make you hostage to anthropology: if not an Assyrian, some African or Latin American or Pacific Island tribe will have a positive value for torture, universally, and then - you explain it away as an outlier? And medieval Europe, which prizes trial by ordeal, which established truth by combat, which (often enough) thought of rape as sex without the father's consent - I am extremely dubious that there is an obvious truth that medieval Europeans condemned torture, lying, and rape. In the debate about facts, I am less certain that every description of an alien moral practice is a slander. As for your example of "on the subject of the truth of moral values, we ought to believe only what is true," it assumes a moral truth out there, independent of the participation of my understanding mind. I am not interested in discovering the truth; I am interested in making an argument about moral truth, whose validity will only be established to the extent I elicit the assent of those who listen to my argument. I am not sure this goal aligns perfectly with your obvious truth. It has indeed been asserted that the existence of God is an obvious truth, by virtually every monotheist before modern times. See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
This also does make you hostage to anthropology: if not an Assyrian, some African or Latin American or Pacific Island tribe will have a positive value for torture, universally, and then - you explain it away as an outlier?
Not at all. Because these intuitions are very nearly universal (psychopaths seem to lack moral intuition, in the same way that blind men lack sight, though this does not invalidate sight), I would be quite surprised if you found such a group and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet done so, but my argument does not rest on whether or not every society of all time agrees with my intuitions. My argument rests on the force of the intuitions themselves. That there are people who knowingly do evil things is undisputed and indisputable. It is not an impossible stretch that we could find a culture which has embraced evil in some form or another. What I am saying is that the moral differences between cultures are exaggerated to an almost absurd degree by the layperson. Virtually all human societies have had very similar basic values with a large diversity only in the forms these values take.
And medieval Europe, which prizes trial by ordeal, which established truth by combat, which (often enough) thought of rape as sex without the father's consent - I am extremely dubious that there is an obvious truth that medieval Europeans condemned torture, lying, and rape.
Torture was a form of punishment, certainly. The moral intuition that we have is not "torture is always wrong." Indeed, it's crystal clear that modern people don't all agree with that. It might be possible to arrive at the moral conclusion that "torture is always wrong," but that requires argument from more basic moral intuitions. And so forth. The presence of a law allowing women to be raped, provided the father consents, is not even evidence that the people who wrote the laws agreed that this was just. It could easily mean that they prized some other goal more highly. If the Bush Administration condoned torture, it is unlikely this is because they thought torture was a great thing or that they got off on it, but they prized some other goal more highly.
Important side point: I believe very, very few of our moral ideas are basic moral intuitions. Most moral conclusions ("abortion is wrong") are not basic intuitions, but arguments built upon basic moral intuitive premises ("we should not kill innocent human beings merely for our own convenience") combined with factual premises ("a fetus is an innocent human being"). Note that the usual pro-choice argument is a straightforward denial of the factual premise, and does not take issue with the basic moral premise. If one carefully investigates most controversies, one finds nearly always that this is true.
As for your example of "on the subject of the truth of moral values, we ought to believe only what is true," it assumes a moral truth out there, independent of the participation of my understanding mind.
Yes, and here you reveal your own "obvious truth," unargued for and based purely on intuition. "There is no such thing as metaphysics." You have made no steps to argue for this conclusion; you have simply assumed it. Now this intuition too has a force, I agree. I am an atheist myself and I feel the force of this intuition most strongly. But more strongly than "on the subject of whether there are metaphysical entities, I ought to believe only what is true"? More strongly than "it is wrong to torture an innocent child for nothing more than sadistic pleasure"? More strongly than every moral statement you can possibly think of? Because if we completely reject metaphysics, that's where we're left. None of those things are true.
I am not interested in discovering the truth; I am interested in making an argument about moral truth, whose validity will only be established to the extent I elicit the assent of those who listen to my argument. I am not sure this goal aligns perfectly with your obvious truth.
No, I do believe we're at an impasse. You appear to be adhering to some form of the democratic theory of truth while I'm obviously an adherent of the correspondence theory of truth. I suppose one can sustain some form of the democratic theory of truth if one very carefully circumscribes it. (In its strongest form, the democratic theory of truth is self-refuting, since obviously a majority of people do not subscribe to it, making it false by its own theory.) I thought the democratic theory of truth went out with Protagoras since reality becomes incoherent and unintelligible under such a construct, but I'm sure there have to be some adherents left somewhere.
It has indeed been asserted that the existence of God is an obvious truth, by virtually every monotheist before modern times. See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Oh, come on, Aquinas spent page after page carefully arguing for the existence of God as did many other Scholastics and his proofs were relied on by the Church for centuries. The "man in the pew" of mainstream Christianity has always relied on the truth of the Bible, which was the evidence which proved the existence of God. Prior to that, it was the testimony of the Apostles and of Saint Paul who saw a man come back from the dead to prove the existence of God. And so forth. Pre-modern Christians did not believe God existed because they could see the truth of this proposition immediately, but because they regarded the existence of God as proven. I haven't read Taylor. Is it possible to explain in a couple of sentences how he shows that this is not true?
"I thought the democratic theory of truth went out with Protagoras since reality becomes incoherent and unintelligible under such a construct, but I'm sure there have to be some adherents left somewhere."
Heidegger ... Gadamer .. pluralists ... in some broad sense, Foucault and Derrida ...
It has indeed been asserted that the existence of God is an obvious truth, by virtually every monotheist before modern times. See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
"Pre-modern Christians did not believe God existed because they could see the truth of this proposition immediately, but because they regarded the existence of God as proven. I haven't read Taylor. Is it possible to explain in a couple of sentences how he shows that this is not true?"
They assumed God existed. They also assumed that God would provide means to prove his existence by reason. The proofs of God's existence all began with the assumption he existed, to corroborate what they already believed.
And miracles, of course, are credible precisely because one already believes in God. Disbelieve, and you disbelieve in reports of miracles.
"They assumed God existed."
This simply cannot be true. God (gods, the concept of divinity) was either revealed to and spread by a prophet, to take the religious explanation, or invented by man to satisfy curiosity about the world, to take my explanation. (And you need not take the latter.)
No one can assume, without experimenting with explanations (or revelation), that a God (or gods) is behind water running downhill or the sun crossing the sky or any number of natural phenomena. Why would the assumption of divinity be the first answer arrived at for all people, and then why not the same god(s) for all? Don't the prophets play a major role in belief (revelation and persuasion), or am I very mistaken? After that (revelation and persuasion), I can accept that they assumed what they were taught or (by my explanation) determined was correct, but to merely assume God existed?
So far as I can tell, all humanity believed in the divine long before written history began. Prophets, miracles, etc., can switch you from believing in one form of the divine to the other, but the basic belief has been there a long time back. Secularism, disbelief in the divine, is recent and fragile.
But I believe firmly the latter is part of the very same process as the former--the satisfaction of our curiosity, an endless effort to understand what makes up the world around us. I take the more recent efforts, which necessarily build upon the former--even if only to reject earlier ideas as proven false--to be more accurate, factual, truthful. This new secularism, this outgrowth of the scientific method and the Enlightenment, is fragile only as the higher floors of a building sway more in the wind. Both are bolted to a firm foundation.
Withywindle is half right. This:
They assumed God existed. They also assumed that God would provide means to prove his existence by reason. The proofs of God's existence all began with the assumption he existed, to corroborate what they already believed.
badly misreads Christian philosophers who were well aware of the existence of pagans and others who did not believe in God. Aquinas argues against atheism because atheism was a known philosophy. None of Aquinas's proofs for God begin with an assumption that God exists. That's an absurdly uncharitable reading of the Christian philosophers. However, perhaps I am making an uncharitable reading of Withywindle instead. If so, my apologies.
I have no idea what Charles Taylor thinks people thought, but I'm a little baffled. If we believe the narrative Withywindle is claiming, we have to assume that Christians were really startlingly stupid people who completely ignored all those cultures which they were well aware of, which didn't share their beliefs.
However, Withywindle is correct that belief in magic (though decidedly not the divine) does appear to be universal among mankind. This is hardly shocking. A lightning storm or a hurricane does appear to be magic, if you don't understand the cause. A quick refutation of "natural" belief in the divine - China has never had any such belief. Ancestor worship was the ancient religion of China and the more modern "religions" (if that's the correct word) include very little of the divine. Like the pagans, some Chinese had belief in folklore tradition which included powerful beings which could be called "gods," but Confucianism, which had none of that, more or less put an end to the folklore religion as well.
Heidegger ... Gadamer .. pluralists ... in some broad sense, Foucault and Derrida ...
I can't say I'm very familiar with Gadamer, but I regard the philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida to be nearly entirely incoherent. (This is not to say that Foucault and Heidegger have nothing worthwhile to say, of course.) The root of this incoherence can all be traced back to Hegel. The root of analytic philosophy is when British and American philosophers realized that the dominance of Hegelianism in philosophy was completely crazy and they decided to use logic and reason instead.
I haven't yet answered FLG's question, but unfortunately the grounding of objective atheist morality is far too long and detailed to include in these comments. The philosophers whose work I would recommend include Michael Martin (for a basic refutation of the idea that atheists cannot have objective morality, see this article, but really one should see his Atheism, Morality, and Meaning), David Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics, G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, or W.D. Ross's The Right and the Good, among many others.
Attempts to ground atheistic objective morality (and, if Martin is correct about the Euthyphro Dilemma, and I believe he is, any objective morality at all since the argument concludes that God's existence must be irrelevant to an objective morality) include naturalism, non-naturalism, moral intuitionism, egoism, Objectivism, virtue ethics, ideal observer theory, happiness utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, desire utilitarianism, and many others. A great many of these (though not all of them) can accomodate the concept of rights. Most of them can do so much more clearly than theistic ethics can since most religious texts do not discuss rights which are a relatively modern conception, though usually papered over with a religious sheen (e.g. John Locke). While Locke did much on the subject of rights, so did Mill who grounded them in his rule utilitarianism (breaking with Bentham's act utilitarianism, and reviving rights within utilitarianism), not in religion since Mill had none.
Indeed, more interesting is whether Christianity can actually accomodate the concept of rights. Rights as a concept comes about as a generalization of various moral intuitions which virtually everybody agrees with (including Withywindle and others who claim they don't). This is fine if we view morality as generalizable, but Divine Command Theory certainly can't accomodate such a view. (Who are we to generalize God's commands?)
Andrew:
Smith makes an argument for morality that rests upon compassion or sympathy:
"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it."
And I can see how a person could argue that from some sympathy, empathy or whatever s we have duties or responsibilities toward other human beings and from these responsibilities we derive rights.
As you say, the exception doesn't disprove the rule. So, if a psychopath doesn't experience or comprehend these innate human feelings, then that doesn't mean they aren't a source of morality.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong or misunderstand. I haven't read the works you've recommended, but I will add them to my list.
Nevertheless, these feelings seem like shaky ground to base our rights upon. Then again, I guess no shakier than the Bible.
Two more points:
I'm not sure what to make of the rape article. That nobody has ever definitively proven that atheist morality is objective seems like a weak rebuttal.
Also, I can't agree more with "The root of analytic philosophy is when British and American philosophers realized that the dominance of Hegelianism in philosophy was completely crazy and they decided to use logic and reason instead." Hegel was insane and his influence even more so.
Martin was making a broad argument against the general point, so he didn't go into, say, the specifics of his own view, which he believes does indeed make the case for an objective atheist ethics. (I believe Martin is a subscriber to Ideal Observer Theory.)
The most important argument in that article is his use of the Euthyphro Dilemma to show that religious believers are in the exact same boat as atheists. Either there is an objective basis for morality with no God required (as I believe, as a moral intuitionist of the W.D. Ross school) or morality is arbitrary regardless of whether or not God exists.
I disagree with Smith that morality has its roots in emotion. Moral judgments provoke emotion, but, when I make moral judgments, I find myself coolly weighing the right on one side with the right on the other, not checking my emotions to see what my sympathy or compassion says. So I'm siding with the Stoics who argued that emotions, in fact, are a barrier to correct moral reasoning, not a help or a source. I'm not sure how I would convince a committed believer on the other side though, if they can't see what I'm getting at.
Smith is describing a biological imperative honed by Evolution--not a right. The species that did not act in a manner that prolonged its existence died off. What we see as empathy for others is merely that necessary biological impulse. Were we lacking that, we would need to produce thousands of offspring, so that some could survive to preserve the species. Indeed, support of offspring and other actions that support the life and reproductive chances of other individuals in a species becomes increasingly necessary as the number of offspring per individual declines. Without that, the smaller birthrates would equal the end of the species. We have empathy because otherwise we would not be here. We have empathy by the same process that gave us opposable thumbs.
I do not have a right to any particular treatment by another, including empathy or anything that springs from empathy. Rather, as any survey of cultures around the world today or throughout human history shows, the treatment I receive is entirely contingent on the social contract to which I subscribe. Again, go alone into the desert to determine your rights. Once two humans come into contact, society and government begin immediately--the social contract commences (assuming one does not merely kill the other). That contract might take the shape of cooperation, including "we agree to keep our distance" or "we agree to grow crops together." It may also take the form of authoritarianism which may include the self-government of the weaker party but will always include domination by the stronger party. The social contract may rob one or both of some or nearly all rights, and it may provide freedoms and opportunities that are absent in the desert. But it never provides rights. No person or government can provide me with the right of free speech, for example; they can only restrain or silence it.
Alan:
I said Smith argued morality came from empathy. I then said I could see how one could further argue that empathy creates duties toward one another and that from these duties toward one another we have rights. For example, I have a duty not to punch my interlocutors in the mouth when they say something I disagree with. From this comes your right to free speech. Or something like that.
However, your argument about social contract, as you even state, has nothing to do with rights. They exist before and outside of the contract.
I agree with Mr. Howe that evolutionary mechanisms like empathy cannot provide an objective morality and certainly cannot ground rights. We're dealing with the naturalistic fallacy at that stage. So Smith's "morality based on sentiments" approach gets us only to a morality with no foundation.
My argument is that there are objective moral values, in the form of axioms, which we can apprehend through intuition, in the same way that we apprehend mathematical axioms or the basic laws of logic. See this article for an explanation (though not a defense) of my view. My view, referred to in the article as "rational ethical intuitionism," has no difficulty with the objective grounding of rights in an atheist framework.
I regard the "social contract" as an obvious fiction (no man ever existed in Rousseau's "state of nature") and an unnecessary one. It is a poor solution to a non-existent problem.
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