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What Universal Natural Rights?
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13318 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
4,252 Words |
| Author
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Anthony Flew
Anthony Flew is a widely known Hume scholar and a professor at
the University of Reading, England. |
"Right is the child of law; from real laws come real right, but from imaginary law, from 'laws of nature,' come imaginary rights. Natural rights is simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptible rights rhetorical nonsense, upon stilts."
Bentham's characteristically drastic dismissal constitutes a challenge. This response deals precisely and only with what that challenge rejects. Thus the direct concern is not with the rights which are created by and under various systems of positive law. It is instead with natural rights, and then only with such of these as may be universal. It is with rights, that is, inasmuch and insofar as these either do serve or could serve as bases for moral criticism both of items or sorts of individual conduct and of general principles or particular prescriptions of positive law. Such criticism must result in condemning whatever violates whatever natural and universal rights there are.
The first conceptual truth in this area is that natural rights, if such there be, must be in some way objective. This is the reason why so many modern-minded people are inclined to follow Bentham in dismissing the whole idea. The point has been well put by Ronald Dworkin, who claims--I must confess that I almost wrote "pretends"--to be himself taking rights seriously: "A great many lawyers are wary of talking of moral rights, even though they find it easy to talk about what it is right or wrong for governments to do, because they suppose that rights, if they exist at all, are spooky sorts of things that men have in such sort of way that they have non-spooky things like tonsils."
No doubt there is room for discussion about exactly how far and in what ways having a natural rights is or would be like having tonsils. But the way lawyers of whom Dworkin speaks are not wrong in thinking that an affirmation of rights is necessarily an affirmation that certain entitlements possess some kind of objectivity. Take, for instance, what are for us the key words of that most famous and most important of all such declarations: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."
At least for present purposes it is unfortunate that the Founding Fathers unfortunately spoke of these rights as an endowment from the Creator, thus suggesting that they are, if only under the Divine Law, also legal. But what does come out with total clarity is that they saw themselves as asserting truths rather than making demands, as reporting revelations of the
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