What she does address, and here she helpfully goes beyond what she wrote in her column, is my worry that the “dogmatic” or “axiomatic” appeal to humanity, which she sees as the only possible foundation for human rights, entails an impoverishment of our human rights discourse. She insists “on the richness of the secular conversation on human rights,” despite the spade being turned when we reach the “humanistic bedrock.”

I agree wholeheartedly that there should be a “richness” to the secular– or, for that matter, religious– human rights debate, I suppose I’m still uncertain as to how a thin view of human rights can support the depth and richness that we both think that debate should have. There is perhaps not much left to say at this general level; we must rather look at views that fit Biletzki’s model and see if they deliver on the promise of a rich, fruitful discussion of human rights.

Thank you, Professor Biletzki, for the chance to engage with you on these perennial questions.

Since there is one statement that seems to be attributed to me by more than one reader (also by many readers of the NYTimes), let me make one point clear(er): nowhere do I claim that religious beliefs or motivations are inferior to secular ones. My argument is simply that religious beliefs and motivations are – or should be understood as being – independent of or even in conflict with the idea of human rights. Peter Blewett says it more stridently when he separates our freedom “to conceive of ultimate Being” from our “political and ethical behavior.” I’m not sure I would go that far, since, for religious persons, faith certainly related to their ethical behavior. But political behavior, when it is based on fundamental human rights, should be free of religion.

B. Fleming’s challenge is interesting – but I do not purport here to delve deeply into theological issues or interpretative conundrums; neither do I deny that the canonical religious texts have multifarious readings. (So yes, one could say that all persons are of equal value in God’s eyes, but one could just as validly ask why some are “chosen” while others are not.) Still, the creation of man (and woman?) in God’s image is intimately connected with human rights in the following way: When searching for a universal grounding of human rights, it is generally recognized that human dignity provides that grounding. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the “recognition of the inherent dignity… of all members of the human family.” For the religious foundationalist of human rights it is precisely creation in the image of God that roots such inherent dignity. (“The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 1700.) So close is the relationship between dignity and creation in the image of God that, in the Hebrew tradition, the expression, “in the image of God” (b’tselem elohim), has acquired a non-literal meaning: it signifies dignity! Saying in ordinary Hebrew parlance that one was created in the image of God is tantamount to saying that one has dignity. (Or, as is more often the case, saying one has lost the image of God amounts to saying that one has lost all dignity.) Not surprisingly, a leading Israeli human rights organization is called B’Tselem – “In The Image Of.” (The philosopher of language can also be fascinated by the creation of meaningful names that is exhibited by this nomenclature. The word “b’tselem” in Hebrew, one word for the English foursome “in-the-image-of,” is as inappropriate a proper noun, a name, as “In-The-Image-Of” would be in English. In 1989, upon its establishment, it sounded odd, even awkward, to name an organization “In-The-Image-Of.” Today, over twenty-two years later, it functions easily as a proper name for a human rights organization, with no thought to its genesis in the story of human creation in Genesis. But that instance of meaning-as-use is another philosophical story.)

Matt Hoberg brings up problematic arguments that were not addressed in the article, though they certainly deserve debate in a much longer discussion, and attributes certain positions to someone who might have written the article (but didn’t). (Such are the topics of voluntaristic ethics, human nature, theory vs. motivation, and others.) Most significant for me, however, and contrary to Matt’s perception, is my insistence on the richness of the secular conversation on human rights. That it is a questioning, positing, or even critique of foundations for human rights does not impoverish or empty it of deep meaning. The use of “dogmatic” is, indeed, foundational, to the tune of Wittgenstein’s “my spade is turned.” And, again contrary to Matt’s perception of “mere humanity,” it is precisely the humanistic bedrock that inspires the kind of awe usually reserved for the divine. Raymond Weitzman’s sad description of the contextualized condition of humanity might, indeed, refute such awe. It is important, therefore, to distinguish between talk about the having of rights – a normative statement – and reports of their implementation or violation by states and communities – a descriptive account. Putting this all together consistently, one might then confess to the awe inspired by humanity’s normative potential.

To talk about human rights, we have to contextualize them. By contextualizing, we lose the sense of its universality. Any biologist will tell you that despite the Declaration of Independence, we are not born equal. Nor are the environments in which we are born, raised, grow old, and die equal. So what does that say about human rights? Are some afforded more rights than others? You bet. Just look at our own society, not to mention any society that exists or ever has existed that we know anything about.

Human rights cannot be compared to natural physical laws. You jump off the top of the Empire State Building and you die…certain conditions holding. It’s 100% guaranteed by the laws of gravity. But who or what and by what laws guarantee that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Certainly it is not nature. Not even the Constitution. The Constitution is our social contract, a legal document. And we all know how good lawyers and judges are at rendering all kinds of interpretations to the words in a contract. Look at how the Supreme Court of the United States has turned corporate entities into persons with many of the same rights as an individual. But, of course, the rights of corporations and the rights of individuals are not the same. Individuals may vote with a ballot to change or influence their governmental representatives. But Corporations vote more influentially with their money and political power. One (individual) plus one (corporation) does not equal two in politics.

The only reason that human rights are sacred is because someone or some philosophical doctrine declares it is. Nothing we know of the universe can justify our saying so. It is only so because we say it. Animals certain don’t recognize the sacredness of our human rights. They either ignore us or look upon us as a food source or as just something that gets in their way. Bacteria and viruses certain don’t treat us as something sacred. The Bible certainly does not treat human life as sacred. If human life isn’t sacred how can human rights be? Jainism is the only religion that I know of that accords sacredness to human life and that’s because it treats all life, not just human life, as sacred.
There are no human rights in nature. Human rights, whatever form they take, are whatever privileges are afforded to the individual members of a human community by the practices of the community itself. They are usually never equal and when individuals in the community begin to feel that are not being afforded the privileges they deserve or when they find themselves being adversely treated by other members of their community that outcry for human rights will be heard. We all recognize that human societies human individuals are far from perfect. Unfortunately, there exists no natural, immutable and absolute standard by which to achieve perfection. Because perfection like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. We can only hope to find ourselves in some situation where we are comfortable with each other, where we can behave positively and not adversely toward each other. And even when we achieve this comfort zone, we shouldn’t expect it to last forever.

I thank Aristotle Papanikolaou, and then others, for explicitly raising the point that I had thought to explicitly lay to rest in what I said. Choosing to focus on, for want of a better name, the “Dartmouth School” definition of religion – and emphasizing that choice – I hoped to do something far-removed from caricaturizing religion; I hoped, rather, to insist that the account of religion that is necessary for my argument involves a transcendent being (usually considered omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent), aka God. Obviously there are other definitions of religion, but this one – beyond serving my argument – is, I believe the most common one, if not for theologians and philosophers, then definitely for the religious person. In fact, one of my favorite versions of philosophical thought on religion, very different from the common one above, is Wittgenstein’s, where religion is perceived (according to some interpreters) as a language-game or as a form of life and belief in God is emptied of its propositional content. But one of the principal critiques of Wittgenstein’s fascinating, original, non-standard understanding of religion is that he is not speaking for, or of, the “really” (more on that in a minute) religious person since religious persons, by and large, proclaim a belief in a transcendent being! And one would expect us philosophers to be attuned to what “ordinary” (religious) people say. Papanikolaou, by putting “religious” in scare quotes, seems to be somewhat scornful of these ordinary religious people. More so, as Brad notices, it is somewhat ingenuous to suppose that “real” religious people are more sophisticated thinkers than those whom Papnikolaou derides as “religious.”

Other related thoughts: Giving up on that requirement for calling something “religion” would make many other cultural phenomena religions – and I think we would lose much by doing so. Now, this does not mean that I deny aspects of religiosity other than the insistence on a transcendent being. That a religious tradition might also be an artistic one (but so could a non-religious one) does not contradict the core demand that it hold recognition of a transcendent being. Neither does the acknowledgement of the human as being capable of love, compassion or forgiveness. But, like Brad, I admit to being stumped by the concept of “immanent transcendence”. If it is transcendent, then it is not humanly immanent or immanently human. By “transcendent” I mean beyond human reach or possibility; I believe that is the conventional use of the word.

Brad’s and Peter Blewett’s words bring up an issue which I didn’t have time or space to address, but it is supremely important. There is obviously a difference between the subjective, personal religious belief of the faithful and the religious institutions that organize these faithful and their actions. Brad talks about the behavior of religious individuals, or, amorphously, about the practices of “religion”, and Blewett calls them “systems.” The issue I did not – and would like to – discuss is that of the behavior and practices of religious institutions. I agree that these institutions have been responsible for division, conflict and wars throughout history. (Again, this is not to say that secular communities have been devoid of division, conflict and wars throughout history!) I would, however, go as far as to say that it is the very essence of a Godly religion, expressed in its sacred texts, that gives rise to and occasions such characteristic institutional behaviors. (Of course one can choose to emphasize the more “humane” expressions in sacred texts but a) these are precisely the locales in these texts that are not God-centered, and even if they are, b) the choice of specific texts as opposed to others is a matter of human interpretation.) In other words, it is the theoretical core of religion that entails the kind of religious practice which holds the potential of violating human rights.

To be continued…

The first argument is a non sequitur that conflates a claim about what grounds rights with what should motivate us to respect rights. The religious human rights theorist can say that agents need not have any religious content to their thoughts and motivations pertaining to respecting human rights.

The second misrepresents the landscape of theistic ethics, assuming that any such ethics must be completely voluntaristic. It’s also plainly inconsistent with the first argument. If, for the religious rights theorist, we have rights in virtue of being created in God’s image, it would seem to follow that our rights are not revisable by divine will. It’s not as if the property of being created in God’s image can simply be revoked by God!

A more general worry is that Biletzki portrays religious human rights as alienated from our humanity, since they are in some sense dependent on God, whereas she thinks secular human rights are more intimately connected with our humanity. But that’s actually very unclear. If human rights are rights we are owed “simply by virtue of being human,” then it’s unclear how the features of humanity that Biletzki emphasizes (our “reason,” “emotion,” and “compassion”) are any closer to human nature as such than being created in God’s image. Those properties, after all, aren’t distinctively human, whereas the religious theorist might argue that being created in God’s image is a distinctively human property. If we want rights to be closely connected to our nature, we may thus be better off on a religious conception of rights– or, at least, not necessarily worse off.

Finally, while Biletzki frames her essay as an exploration of what grounds or explains human rights, she ends up saying that there isn’t really a foundation at all– rather, an “axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic” reflection on “humanity and its fragility and its resilience” gets human rights off the ground. Not only does this sound tautologous– we have human rights, which by definition we have by being human, in virtue of being human!– the case now looks even worse for the secular human rights theorist. Whereas the religious theorist has a rich theory to offer about the grounding of human rights, it looks like the secular theorist on Biletzki’s view must resort to dogmatism. And if our human rights theory is so impoverished, it’s a deep mystery how we are to go on with our “discussion, disagreement, and questioning” about human rights. If all we can point to when explaining human rights is our mere humanity, then what sets the ground rules for the discussion? What will determine whether this or that is a human right, or no right at all? Without answers to these questions, we don’t have a theory of human rights at all.

I have some further thoughts at my blog: http://t.co/AlkUTsN

“For him [the religious person], the human status of sacredness draws from divine creation and directive, from man (and woman) having been created in God’s image…”

Why would something being made in God’s image require human rights? Does God require his rights to be protected? The very image of God in the flesh, Jesus, did not defend his right to life when he sacrificed for the sake of others. Therefore, of course this concept of being created in God’s image has nothing to do with human rights as she herself goes on to say. The religious person believes that the human is valuable not because he is God’s image, but because he is God’s creation and beloved child, and God’s love makes him valuable. He also believes that God created all men (Acts 17:26), which means that no man is more valuable than the next, since God, by creating each person, has endowed each with the same value. And God’s intent is that every person, no matter how far gone, have the chance to be reconciled to him. (Romans 6:6-8 and 1 Timothy 2:4)

Also when she writes that,

“…the authority that is conscripted to “command” us on the religious side is God, while on the secular side it is the human, with her claim to reason, her proclivity to emotion, and her capacity for compassion.”

she is also mistaken in assuming that religion is equivalent to God. The religious side is just as much human as the secular side. The underlying assumption of religion is that it is the human interaction with the divine being, and religion, by nature, is as prone to faults as it’s human components are. Moreover God is reasonable, emotional and compassionate (Psalm 145:8-9), so this distinction does not hold much sense for me.

The reason I take pains to explain these points despite agreeing with Ms. Belitzki, is that I think it important for people to distinguish between imperfect religion, and a perfect God. When speaking of religious people as people who believe in God, it is important, I think, to be precise.

And even if such a wondrous belief (would that it were so!) might be tortuously extrapolated from a major religious text or belief system, the behavior and practices of the religious both throughout history and today (see Prop 8, Islamic girls missing noses, Catholic abuse scandals from Philadelphia to Ireland, Israeli settlements, etc.) reveal the true function of religion everywhere. That function is to divide human beings one against another, to place one person above another based upon false or faulty premises, and to deny all knowledge and evidence that conflicting with a comforting worldview.

Mr. Papanikolaou’s comment above suggests that religious people such as those to whom I refer are not the REAL religious, that REAL religion is “more like artistic traditions” and that the goal of religion is to “experience immanent transcendance.”

These are the sorts of arguments apologists offer tirelessly. Yes, not only is it always those other, lesser, or “not real” religionists who do all the harm, but the “real” religionists are off in contemplation, engaging in some majestic effort requiring lofty and vague language to describe. Upon examination, however, it always seems that things like “immanent transcendance” are either mumbo jumbo inexplicable in plain english (once more allowing the religious speaker to think himself above lesser mortals), or are activities, thought patterns and emotions equally attainable by any thoughtful secular person, but without the ill-defined mystical language.

In short, I’m reminded of the “moral challenge” Christopher Hitchens offered for quite some time, in which he asked for anyone to suggest a moral action or thought that could not done or conceived by a secular person just as easily as a religious person.
Still no valid reply to that, it appears.
Unfortunately, there is also no answer to a person who believes a fundamentally circular argument, such as any with the conclusion, “God did it.”

Once, when I was teaching in an internationally-known Jewish adult education program, a Philadelphia rabbi teaching the same course sent out advice on how all Jews could enhance their understanding of “being Jewish” by studying Samuel 1. The chapter describes the reason Saul lost his kingship for disobeying God’s command, which was to “… attack Amalek …. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings ….” until they have been “exterminated.”

I asked the rabbi if, with our awareness of the Holocaust, he would take part in genocidal activity if his God commanded him to do it. His prompt response was an untroubled “of course I would,” after which I expressed my deep shame at being associated with him in the same teaching program.

The spirit of obedience, which was said rabbi’s key concern, is shared by billions of God-oriented people around the world making it easy for them to trump human rights/equality whenever they sense their God’s command to do so.

Experience continues to show us that “the strands within the history of religion,” of which Mr. Papanikolaou (and I, though secular) look upon with favor, are no protection for human equality whenever religion is on the march. Ms. Beletzki’s astute article shows us why.

(Bob Fine, Arizona State University, retired)