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The Inherence of Human Dignity

The Inherence of Human Dignity, 2 vols. Angus J.L. Menuge and Barry W. Bussey, eds. London: Anthem Press, 2021.

 

Justice is essential to a good and satisfying communal life. A good community is a just community. But the only language we have in modern times for thinking about justice—that of rights—has been hollowed by changes in our commonly accepted religious views and our views of what a human being is. As a consequence, “rights” are often merely asserted, claimed without stated and defensible grounds for doing so. The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an example. As this is not a political framework that can long sustain itself under the assaults of scientistic naturalism, Marxist historicism, and academic nihilism, Angus J.L. Menuge and Barry W. Bussey have edited a valuable, two-volume collection of scholarly essays, papers presented at the 2019 IVR World Congress in Lucerne, that thoroughly explores the theological, philosophical, and legal dimensions of this challenge: The Inherence of Human Dignity, Volume One The Foundations of Human Dignity and Volume Two Law and Religious Liberty (Anthem Press, 2021). This review will focus on the first volume.

Modern rights theory had its first articulation in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But there was not much in his doctrine that was humanly elevating. He and the tradition of thought he initiated rejected divine creation (though John Locke affirmed it in a truncated, sub-biblical form) and the image of God. Hobbes presented people as pre-moral, calculating beasts who, like beasts, are concerned only for self-preservation and comfort, but also, unlike beasts, for esteem and glory. Rousseau understood us as beasts which rose by an historical process into our reasoning and self-regarding humanity. Kant brought the tradition to its pinnacle with his rationalistic and universalistic categorical imperatives and continuing Rousseau’s emphasis on our self-legislating autonomy. But after more than 200 years of this rights-talk, Darwin gathered the fruit of our materialist and scientistic chickens into the basket of his morally empty evolutionary theory, reducing it to biological brass tacks. He argued that human beings are like other beasts but more complex, having no more or less value than they. At best, this took us back to Hobbes. Picking up on this, the twentieth century progressive movement rejected both Christian and Enlightenment notions of human equality, and thus of equal rights, in favor of an evolutionist distinction between the well-bred and the defectives. The Nazis picked up on this and gave us their international assertion of what they were sure was the Aryan master race and their genocidal war against Jews and Slavs. (Yes, we taught them, not the reverse.)

This discredited the Darwinist line of moral thinking, but not the materialism and evolutionism of his cosmology. The horrors of World War II, “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,” nonetheless prompted the newly formed United Nations to issue the UDHR in 1948, proclaiming “the inherent dignity and…equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Menuge notes, however, that the UDHR “neither explains nor defends that claim.” The assertive character of the declaration, unlike the American Declaration of Independence which references the Creator, was necessary in order to appeal internationally across not only religious traditions but also the religious-secular divide. If there was to be a community of nations, there would have to be an international moral reference point.

This philosophical lacuna has left us with a practical problem, however, given what has become, he writes, “an amply justified concern that the modern human rights movement is losing steam,” partly on account of “skepticism about the very idea of human dignity that allegedly grounds these rights.” The Nazi atrocities and the Nuremburg trials revived commitment to “moral absolutes” and natural law thinking, only to subside again under academic scorning. It surged briefly again after the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” and the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps will again now that attention has turned to renewed monstrosities in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But it will surely fade once more.

Closer to home, human dignity is being spread thin and lost by the drive to extend this dignity also to animals – elephants at the Bronx Zoo and orca whales at Sea World – and to inanimate objects like New Zealand’s Whanganui River or denied by popularizers of evolutionary atheist materialism like Yuval Noah Harari. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he writes:

According to the science of biology, people were not “created.” They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be “equal.” The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are “equal?” Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. … Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a “Creator” who “endows” them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. … Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. … Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.

This cycle of tides and the tendency in popular thought away from human exceptionalism indicates a deficiency in the rhetorical and moral power of the UDHR to grip and move populations and, through them, their leaders. Keith Thompson calls in his essay for “passionate arguments with convincing power that can continue to protect human rights.” Do all human beings share equal dignity, equal worth – the poor and the elite, the dull and the gifted, the helpless and the productive, the obscure and the celebrity? In Denmark, no one has Down Syndrome; no one with it is suffered to be born. Can there be any unique human dignity, any universal human rights, apart from recognizing the imago Dei from the creative hand of Yahweh? Volume One takes up this question.

Dignity, Menuge tells us, derives from the Latin dignitas, meaning worth or eminence. In classical times, attribution of this was restricted to the noble classes. It was a Judeo-Christian, i.e., Biblical, innovation to universalize this as an inherently human quality, deriving from the image of God. We read in Laura Kittel’s essay that “the moralized concept of human dignity, in which dignity signifies the fundamental moral worth of all human beings” was introduced into political discourse with the UDHR. Keith Thompson sees at least an implicit reliance of the UDHR on Biblical principles such as The Golden Rule, the image of God, and the imitation of God, though religious references were voted down in its drafting.

The book explores how we are to understand “the inherent dignity and…the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and weighs the secular grounds on which it might be rationally justified. Is it rooted in human nature or in our relationality, in human flourishing or in human autonomy? Does it require the subsisting universals of metaphysical realism as Scott Smith argues or can a nominalist metaphysics sustain the claim? Erik Wielenberg, contra Nicholas Wolterstorff, is satisfied with grounding human dignity in people’s mental capacities, whether actual as in most of us or only potential as in the mentally handicapped or the comatose. Paul Copan calls it “jolly optimism” that objective worth could emerge from “valueless, mindless, deterministic, material processes.” David Guretzki builds on Karl Barth’s theological anthropology to find grounds on which theists and non-theists alike can agree to “honour” one another. Rejecting the “absolute individual,” he instead calls everyone to observe our fundamental sociality. “To be human is to be co-human.” Asbjorn and Bjarne Melkevik rely on the Kantian view of people as ends in themselves and thus possessing dignity, not mere exchange value, and argue in support of the agency theory of dignity in contradistinction to Alan Gewirth’s well-being theory which they find often to be self-defeating in practice. Michal Rupniewski is concerned to defend human dignity “as a legally useful term.” He makes a personalist argument that the recognition of universal and equal human worth is “indispensable for the law” regardless of whether one approaches it from natural law theory, legal positivism, or critical legal studies.

Volume Two builds on the discussion in Volume One, taking the reader from the colloquium to the courtroom, applying the “metaphysical conceptualizations of the ‘ought’” to the “practical realities” of law, especially as it regards religious liberty.

These volumes, though rich in scholarship, are easily penetrable for anyone in theology, philosophy, political science, history, law, or related disciplines who wants an overview of the issues and the discussion related to human rights theory since 1948. One small improvement would have been an appendix containing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself.

 

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David C. Innes is professor of politics at The King’s College in New York City. He has published in The Washington Times, American Thinker, The Daily Caller, American Greatness, and Worldmag.com. He is author of Christ and the Kingdoms of Men: Foundations of Political Life, The Christian Citizen: Faith Engaging Political Life, and Francis Bacon.

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