I recently read and heard some commentary that used the
phrase “God-given rights.” In each case, the commentator was referring to the
idea that the origin of our political rights stem from God rather than government.
This is not a new idea. In fact, this concept is eloquently asserted in the
second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence which states that we are
endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. However, with all due
respect to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration, is this an accurate statement
regarding the origin our rights?
If it is, I find no sanction for this idea in the Bible,
certainly not in the New Testament. I find no endorsement or explanation of
rights that civil society is required to observe or respect anywhere in the
teachings of Christ or his Apostles. In fact, 1 Peter Chapter 2, verse 13
specifically tells Christians to submit to every human authority. Slaves are to
submit to their masters, even if the masters are cruel.
This is not surprising because Jesus was clear that his Kingdom
was not of this world. Christ is concerned with the state of our soul, not
temporal political or legal concerns such as rights. Consequently, I think it
is mistaken to think of our rights in society as originating with God.
This does not mean that I believe our rights are a gift of
the government, to be removed or restricted as government officials see fit.
Rather, our rights came into existence over time through the influence of
societal variables such as history, experience, tradition, legal precedent and
any number of phenomena that shaped our cultural values. Our rights are a product
of our shared societal experience rather than something that was divinely
granted. They are a cultural inheritance to be protected.
What is the value or impact of this observation? If rights
are the product of a particular cultural experience they will differ from
society to society. Different societies will understand and express rights in
different ways. That being the case, it is futile if not illegitimate to try to
force a particular understanding of rights on another culture. This is one
reason why our attempt to force Western notions of rights on Afghanistan and
Iraq failed so miserably. Consequently, foreign interventions to enforce a
specific rights regime, or remake countries in our image is not only
wrongheaded, it’s bound to ultimately fail.
20 comments:
In fact we discussed this question at length in the early days, Joel. Under "Frith & Freedom," the top six posts are about the origin of rights. It's a debate between us two personally; it might be worth revisiting to see how our opinions have changed in the fifteen years since.
Thank you for reminding me. Those were interesting debates. My position has changed somewhat since those days. I see the origin and development of rights more as a societal phenomenon that arises over time, influenced by numerous cultural variables.
I agree. I can see clearly in history that 'the Rights of Englishmen' came to be in that way; and our American rights grew out of it. Practically, however God would like us to treat each other, we have rights because we decide to defend them as such -- for ourselves and, crucially, for each other too.
Now, that said, the Declaration's language about the Creator is important for equality. The only way that unequal beings like ourselves can be genuinely equal is if we are (as the Declaration says) equally endowed by a third party. That's the only sense of equality that really is achievable and desirable. And in that role you do need a god, and something like God's equal love. You can't put a government in that space, because then you end up in the position that 'the government gives, and the government can take away.' It has to be placed safely in the hands of the divine, which is greater than any man or collection of men, and which therefore no government can every legitimately transgress.
Nature, and Nature's God... I agree that it is a reach to call our rights God-given. They were trying to contrast it to the idea of government-given, as you note, but I think they pitched it too high. The colonists had a new independence already, in that they were increasingly ignored by a British government that had other things to worry about over the previous fifty years, and George III made himself unpopular by trying to reimpose an earlier standard of deference. American colonists ran many of their own affairs and thought they deserved it. They felt god-given, but that didn't mean that they were.
We owe a great deal to those who came before who gradually asserted the rights of other institutions and ultimately, individuals. One can believe that this long march was under the direction of a God who desired this for all people, but it is hard to make an unarguable case for it. And as you note, the Scriptures seem to regard the whole matter as rather a side issue.
"God-given"?
According to the Decalogue, nobody has the "right" to take (innocent) life, nor (earned) property, nor liberties with men/women other than one's spouse. No one has the "right" to defame or defraud others, either.
So God did have something to say about it.
I haven't read the old discussion, and I won't have time to do so for a couple of weeks, by which time this will have fallen off the front page.
So, I'm starting behind on this topic, and I think I disagree with all of you, and that means I'm probably about to learn something. But, foolhardy as I am, let me rush in.
My immediate reaction is that if rights are mere artifacts of historical contingency, they are nothing more than social norms. Your society may expect you to fight for them, but that doesn't make them rights -- they are just norms you are expected to defend with force. Your society may forbid you to fight for them as well and either way it's the same.
This ultimately seems to be a relativistic position which undercuts the idea of rights altogether. They don't really exist; they are just social attitudes and expectations. Government alone cannot change these norms, but society can. When opinion turns against your so-called rights, and when you can no longer muster the force to defend them, they are gone. Or, rather, they never existed; you could do X as long as society accepted it or you could muster the force to not be interfered with, but the whole language of rights is illusionary.
In any case, if we accept this, then there is no longer any moral case to defend one's "rights." If Jesus never said we have these rights, He most certainly never said we should use violence to defend them. Society is often wrong according to Jesus, so following our social norms (exercising these socially-derived rights) is as likely to lead us to hell as not. So now there is nothing there, no rights, no necessary relationship between morality and this notion of society-based rights, nothing to defend or fight for certainly.
Now the American Revolution looks pretty sketchy. It certainly went against a strong set of social norms from the English side. Would a Christianity that enjoins us to submit to our rulers have sanctioned it? Doubtful. Thus, it was never a matter of rights (which don't exist) nor of right and wrong, but force and force alone, and in the end we won so we look back and say we must have been right all along.
None of that is an argument that rights are God-given, but rather what I see as the consequence of saying that they are not.
What am I missing?
Well, Dad29 posted while I was writing. I wasn't disagreeing with him.
"This ultimately seems to be a relativistic position which undercuts the idea of rights altogether."
It's an empirical position. Here's another thing to read when you have time:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2010/07/liberty-by-law.html
So, philosophically, it is important to speak the truth. It might be nice if rights were grounded in a divine command; but in fact, that's not really how they came to be. We can see that your right to a jury trial descends from a chain that arises with Viking invasions, cemented by Runnymede and Magna Carta, which was later encoded into our Constitution. There's a particular chain that is empirically demonstrable, and there's no sense in not speaking the truth about that.
Dad29's point is reasonable: one might say he has a right not to be defrauded because of a universal divine command not to commit fraud. One has a right not to be murdered. On the other hand, we never usually describe those as "rights" as a general thing. We say we have a right to free speech, to keep and bear arms, to a trial by a jury of our peers -- those kinds of things aren't in the Bible.
When we're talking about the charter of liberties that free men possess, each of them came from somewhere. There was no freedom of religion before the great religious wars of the early modern era showed how steep the price was of not recognizing one. The Bible if anything warns against such a thing; the Koran strictly forbids it, except for a few 'faiths of books' that are contingently tolerated if they submit and pay a tax. Yet you do have freedom of religion because so many people died over the question that our ancestors decided not to keep fighting about it.
The Declaration of Independence was an appeal for understanding pointed toward the outside world's population & governments on the grounds of justice of the observable wrongs (as listed) being committed against a people by their own sovereign, their king, acting as the head of their government.
The king had no "right" (divine or otherwise) to abuse, mistreat, harm, or even control to the extent he did, nor did his subordinates. He obviously assumed he had that right by virtue of his status and family bloodline. I would argue he also had no right to confer wealth and favor (beyond his own personal wealth & favor - and even that is debatable given how he came by it) upon others as a form of payment, endearment, alliance or bribery if one prefers.
All that being said, he exercised "his rights" as he saw fit so, the right must have been there already. And there is no doubt a body of people can gather (and often do) to give the imprimatur of legality (these are called governments) to a king's actions but this is simple window dressing to the thing under consideration...rights...and where do they come from.
I hold just as the founding fathers did, that one is born with inalienable rights. They can be exercised (or not) they can be abused (or not) at the leisure of the individual. Of course rights can be restricted by force (and often are) but they don't disappear. How could the human right to throw off an oppressor emerge yet again after lying dormant restricted if it is not always there?
And I have always found it interesting and noteworthy that one of the first acts of any government is to enact laws against sedition and treason against government, as if, it and it alone has a "divine right" to do so ;-)
nmewn
No one is born with unalienable rights, certainly not a right to liberty. There is no creature possessed of less liberty than a new-born child. That will largely remain the case until the child becomes an adult and leaves their parent's house. Additionally, if all men were born with unalienable rights then all men would have roughly the same idea of what those rights are. But we see that people in different countries and cultures have vastly different ideas of what constitutes a right and how it's exercised.
Grim,
I agree with your point about equality. As a Christian, I believe we are all equal in the eyes of God and equally accountable to Him for our actions. Furthermore, I believe the idea of spiritual equality before God is the basis for Western notions of equality.
certainly not a right to liberty
Actually, Free Will is "liberty." All people are born with free will; they have the liberty to do what is right--or wrong.
No one is born with free will. You do not have to teach a child to lie, be greedy, or even violent. They will do that on their own without any instruction. However, if you want the child to tell the truth, share, and control its anger, to do what is right, you have to teach them and discipline them to act accordingly. Only after such instruction is an individual capable of exercising free will.
Joel, that's kind of a Kantian view of free will. I think it's a little counter-intuitive to say that the child's ability to do what he wants isn't a free will. However, Kant said that the ability to act on instinct isn't different from what animals can do, and he thought animals were acting deterministically in pursuing their natural drives. (This isn't true, but it's what he thought.) Only being instructed in reason and self-discipline allowed you to make genuinely free decisions.
So there's an argument for that position that has a heritage about as long as our own country's. Freedom comes with reason, because it is only when you learn to reason about what you "ought" to do that you can choose to do what you don't want, but should want. That plus discipline is what makes you free to choose the right thing, rather than driven like a dog from one natural desire to another.
"And I have always found it interesting and noteworthy that one of the first acts of any government is to enact laws against sedition and treason against government..."
Yes, ours too. The Alien & Sedition Acts were early in the Constitution's history, when the people who'd written the 1st Amendment were still around to have known what it meant.
Grim,
I was replying to Dad29's statement that "All people are born with free will; they have the liberty to do what is right--or wrong." My point is that you don't know what is right or wrong until you are taught the difference and develop the ability to understand the difference. Consequently, you can't automatically be born with a right or liberty you have no concept of and and no way to exercise.
"All people are born with free will; they have the liberty to do what is right--or wrong."
Point taken.
However, as onerous to civilised men as it sounds and is, they (children)are in fact born with free will and liberty until corrected by societal norms (sometimes masked as laws)...or...they wouldn't be doing anything to be corrected on.
The point is, they are exercising their innate liberty and free will (they were born with) for personal or selfish gain...it really has nothing to do with the >correct< usage of their own individual rights.
It's like I have instructed my son, you do indeed have the free will, liberty and right to take another man's life (the most extreme example anyone could think of) but there can or will be >a consequence< for that action. And it doesn't revolve around man's laws, it can be family retribution & vendetta or psychological guilt or the lament of putting your own family at risk for what you did...but...the liberty and the free will to do so will always remain there.
It's what separates the animals from us, as humans. A wolf looks at a rabbit as nothing more than victim and a meal. The rabbit better arm up, to protect his rights ;-)
nmewn
Umnnnhhh.....the 'still, small, voice' of conscience is inborn thus it is not ONLY 'upbringing' which forms a child. And of course, one must reach the 'age of reason' before credit/blame may be assigned.
Yes, upbringing matters, a lot. But to state that conscience only follows upbringing is a category error as Grim hints above. We are different from dogs, who are 'upbrought' and usually respond correctly to that stimulus.
Put another way, that a toddler doesn't know enough to know what is right from what is wrong doesn't mean what it does isn't right or wrong- it only means they aren't sinful acts as they're committed unknowingly. Regardless, the child is in fact free to act as it *pleases* which is different from an animal, which acts as it's instinct drives it. That may sometimes appear almost as driven by desire in higher life forms in the animal world, but what is desired by the animal is driven by instinct, so still instinctual.
The conversation of "rights" is so difficult because it's an explanation we give to un unprovable thing. There is no manifestation of "rights", excepting perhaps that we are alive, and we have freedom of action. Perhaps that is enough though.
Perhaps though the idea of "rights" is just one of those powerful stories we tell ourselves as a culture to organize the world the way we think is best. It is curious though, that we would ever come up with such a story and explanation if we were driven by instinct alone. Might makes right is so much simpler and obvious.
I had meant to come back to this thread last weekend, but things have been extremely busy here.
I will go read up on past posts & discussions, but I probably still won't have time until the next week or two.
After that, maybe I'll make a new post on this topic.
Meanwhile, for anyone who comes back, I have some thoughts.
Grim: So, philosophically, it is important to speak the truth. It might be nice if rights were grounded in a divine command; but in fact, that's not really how they came to be. We can see that your right to a jury trial descends from a chain that arises with Viking invasions, cemented by Runnymede and Magna Carta, which was later encoded into our Constitution. There's a particular chain that is empirically demonstrable, and there's no sense in not speaking the truth about that.
Some rights are demonstrable in that way, but, going along with Dad29's point, some rights are clearly found in Scripture and we can reason from them.
For example, we have the right not to be murdered, which implies a right to self-defense, with its further implication of the right to keep and bear arms, and a right to do the things necessary to maintain our lives such as work, trade in the marketplace, etc.
We could go further. The idea that someone could violate our rights implies a right to justice. How that justice is administered would have to be worked out historically, as you say, but the right to a jury trial would be one way of doing that. So, it could be argued that the right to a jury trial itself derives from a right to justice which is embedded in Scripture.
Being only a society's best reasoning out of the right of justice, a jury trial would not necessarily be the only way to achieve justice and so it would be something we could change if we came up with a better way to achieve justice. But the rights to life and justice would not be modifiable as they come from Scripture.
Dad29's point is reasonable: one might say he has a right not to be defrauded because of a universal divine command not to commit fraud. One has a right not to be murdered. On the other hand, we never usually describe those as "rights" as a general thing. We say we have a right to free speech, to keep and bear arms, to a trial by a jury of our peers -- those kinds of things aren't in the Bible.
Yes, this isn't the normal way to talk about rights, but that does not make it a wrong way to talk about them. This seems to be a natural reading of what the Declaration of Independence means by "endowed by their Creator"; it seems to be referring to a Scripturally-based concept of rights.
On the other hand, again, if historical contingency is all our rights rest on, then they can be changed by events. If progressives were successful in amending the Constitution to erase the second amendment and deny the right to keep and bear arms, then it is no longer a right. History can go any which way. In that case, these would not be rights but mere social and legal norms with no implication for what is actually right or wrong.
Joel: No one is born with unalienable rights ...
Sure we are. The right to life is certainly one we are not only born with, but conceived with.
Additionally, if all men were born with unalienable rights then all men would have roughly the same idea of what those rights are. But we see that people in different countries and cultures have vastly different ideas of what constitutes a right and how it's exercised.
I think this confuses reality with knowledge. You don't have to know something for it to be true.
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