The concept of God-given unalienable rights forms the basis of American political thought and the U.S. legal tradition. It is pronounced boldly in the Declaration of Independence and reflected in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Although these were written toward the latter part of the Enlightenment period, the case for God-given rights can be traced back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas, who claims we are rational beings created in God’s image and imparted with free will. Aquinas says we exercise our will and intellect in accordance with natural law to pursue what is good, of which God is the apotheosis.
But as the belief in God declines in the United States and much of the Western world, we find ourselves in a predicament. Is it possible to justify the existence of natural, individual rights without invoking God?
But first, why is this important?
As I touched on last week, deconstructionism is more than just an intellectual exercise; it has real-world consequences that affect our daily lives. Appeals to ethical relativism and calls to reimage society should be taken seriously, especially at a time when public figures question the Constitution’s relevance, propose expanding the Supreme Court, and claim no right is absolute.
Similarly, the drive toward secularization challenges not only the proposition that our rights are endowed by God but the idea that we have natural rights at all. Indeed, some public officials insist that our rights come from the government and are not innate. This suggests rights can be legislated away at any time, as is the case in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. More alarmingly, in an age of ethical relativism, what is to stop powerholders from perpetrating the grossest tyrannies when one’s rights are considered mutable?
Secular proofs of natural rights
Enlightenment thinkers argue that natural rights can be reasoned even without appealing to divine authority. John Locke says our right to life, liberty, and property derives from rationalizing our existence in a state of nature, in which we are subject to a law of nature that impels us to survive. Reason tells us we all have an equal right to exist according to the law of nature and consequently should not violate others’ rights. We enter social contracts — i.e., form governments — to secure those rights.
Importantly, Locke recognizes that governments are illegitimate when they fail to secure our right to life, liberty, and property, whether through negligence or design. Once broken, social contracts are no longer binding. In cases of despotism, Locke says the people have a right to rebellion. This idea is supported by the Declaration of Independence, which says under such circumstances, “it is [the people’s] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
In a similar vein, the preamble of the Bill of Rights says the first 10 amendments were adopted “to prevent misconstruction or abuse of [the Constitution’s] powers” and to extend “the ground of public confidence in the Government” to “best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.” Read in its proper context, the Second Amendment is clearly a check against tyranny — an insurance policy on our natural rights.
But can the claim to natural rights withstand the scrutiny of relativism?
For the relativist, the subjectivity of human experience undermines claims to objective meaning. But this is not necessarily at odds with Enlightenment ideas of knowledge and reality. Immanuel Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism states that we cannot know things as they are empirically, only as they appear to us once processed in the mind. However, we can rationalize the universality of moral law a priori, i.e., without appealing to our senses or God.
It is through this exercise that Kant articulates his categorical imperative: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This presupposes equality before the law.
Even if we dispense with Kant’s moral law, the relativist may find that our subjectivity of experience in a world without objective meaning or value operates as a kind of equalizer, whereby nobody’s existence is more valuable than another’s. It then follows that societies best reflecting the inherent equality of experience would provide for the greatest expression of an individual’s subjectivity of experience, i.e., individual liberty, taking care only to ensure that it does not infringe upon that of others.
Cast back into the state of nature, we are left to choose the total freedom but “nasty, brutish, and short” existence of anarchy, a small government that intercedes in our affairs only to secure our freedom, or the misery of tyranny. The choice is ours to make.
