Woman in 14-year coma gives birth in Arizona. That is how Rolling Stone reported the news after the arrest of the nurse who raped her.
Reading the story, one marvels, or shudders, at many aspects of what happened. For one, the staff were unaware of the pregnancy until the child was born. How were the signs overlooked?
About one thing, however, we are not in question: what the nurse did to the comatose woman was wrong.
What made it wrong? It isn’t that the woman suffered during the rape or will suffer from the memory of it. Perhaps she felt nothing and never will. Still the act was wrong.
Neither is it that her friends and family suffered, as if they were the primary victims of the crime.
A better answer, I think, would invoke the woman’s rights. She was the victim, after all. She was violated, as were her basic rights.
Most people in Western countries seem pretty comfortable with that answer. They take human rights for granted. They would agree with the first article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in human dignity and rights.” The point is not that those rights are always respected or even recognized. Alas, they aren’t. The point is that they should be.
If we have human rights, something must explain this. Rights don’t come from nowhere. Sure, there may be some fundamental unexplained truths, or “brute facts,” about morality. But our possession of human rights does not seem like a promising candidate. In fact, I am aware no theorist of human rights who thinks they make sense as fundamental facts, in need of no further explaining.
In that case, what explains why we have the basic rights so many of us assume we do? I am not speaking here of controversial rights, such as the right to healthcare. The need for explanation arises even for rights we can all agree on, such as the right not to be hunted for sport. That we have such basic rights enjoys nearly unanimous consent in the West. Progressives and conservatives, who cannot even agree on the weather these days, agree on the importance of human rights. To be sure, they disagree about how to balance competing rights claims—the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother, say, or the rights of the rich and the rights of the poor—but it’s rights in either direction.
I think that if we follow this line of thought, we arrive at God’s doorstep. Without appealing to God, we cannot explain human rights. By appealing to God, we can. And for those of us who take rights seriously, this is at least some evidence for theism (the view that God exists).
First, let’s consider some of the most common secular accounts of rights. Once we see the problems they face, we can ask how theism helps.
Secular Account #1: Mere Convention
Maybe human rights are the result of social convention. Our so-called basic rights are just legal rights. No mystery here, just legislative procedure.
But this has got to be wrong. If a crew shipwrecked beyond the reach of law were to torture one of the passengers for fun, they would have wronged him terribly. No law need be in place to make it so. Indeed, we generally think of our basic rights as guiding our laws. A law that punishes a certain group for their ethnicity is an unjust law, because it does not reflect the rights we all possess as human beings. That’s why abolishing slavery, and granting women the vote, gave us a more just society. Human rights, therefore, cannot be explained merely as the products of law.
Moreover, our laws, like any social conventions, do not by themselves carry much weight. Suppose I offer you a million dollars to drive on the wrong side of the street for three seconds. You look down the long country road ahead of us. No cops, no other cars in sight. If we knew it was safe, is this act permissible? It seems to me it is. But suppose I offer you a million dollars to torture an innocent person for weeks on end. This does not seem acceptable, even for a million dollars. And this illustrates that, while mere societal conventions are not in themselves especially weighty, human rights are. So if human rights result from conventions, it is puzzling why they have the weightiness they do.
Secular Account #2: Rules for a Better World
It’s too crude to say human rights are just like any old social conventions. But maybe human rights are social conventions with a special urgency. Maybe they’re rules we all agree on because they lead to a better world. To speak of rights is simply to invoke a set of rules we’ve agreed on for the sake of our mutual benefit.
Lots of theorists have accounts with this basic shape. They think codified rights are merely instrumental for bringing about a better world.
Better how? For Mill and Hume, a world of universal rights is one in which we create the most happiness. This is the utilitarian account of rights. But the problem is, the best counterexamples to utilitarianism are precisely those in which someone’s rights are violated to create the most happiness.
Just imagine a sneaky pervert who peers through his telescope to watch people undress. They never detect him, so it never upsets them. But he gets a huge hit of pleasure doing this. More pleasure, in fact, than you or I will ever experience. He is just a super-duper dirty little pleasure monster.
Now, peering through his telescope, is he doing something wrong? It seems like he is. It seems like he’s violating people’s rights. But he is, in fact, creating the most happiness. So it seems that what respects people’s rights, and what creates the most happiness, can come apart.
Martha Nussbaum takes this “rights-make-a-better-world” idea in a different direction. She thinks rights are useful for developing our valuable capacities, say, for creativity or discovery.
But the problem here is that not everyone can develop these capacities. For instance, a terminally ill newborn will never develop such capacities. But he still has basic rights. We can’t eat him just to see what he tastes like.
So, to my mind, the main attempts to explain rights in terms of the better world they create seem to fail.
Secular Account #3: The Golden Rule
I should treat you as I want to be treated. If I rob you or enslave you, I treat you this way while hoping no one does the same to me. Thus, there is something inconsistent about my behavior. I am arbitrarily treating you as if you were fundamentally different from me. The golden rule captures this thought, and so does Kant’s (in)famous test of universalizability. And maybe this is what our talk of human rights is really about. “Respect the rights of others” is just code for “treat them as you wish to be treated.”
The trouble is, not everyone wants to be treated very nicely. People are into some freaky stuff. Imagine someone who despises himself. Were he to treat you as he wants to be treated, he would commit a crime against you. We might say, a human rights violation.
Maybe we should say instead: “Respect the rights of others” is code for “treat them as you wish to be treated, assuming you value yourself.” But this revision is arbitrary. Why does it matter if you happen to value yourself? Surely, what matters is whether you should value yourself.
But now the question is, Why should you value yourself? Why do you matter? In fact, why do all people matter, regardless of race, gender, ability, and so on? The golden rule does not explain this worth of ours. It presupposes it.
How is our worth related to our rights? Plausibly, these are deeply connected. To say that we have rights is to say that we have a kind of worth that demands respect. So by presupposing our worth, the golden rule also presupposes our rights. It does not explain them, any more than it explains our worth.
Secular Account #4: Our Impressive Capacities
Time and time again, secular theorists have thought our rights could be explained by our fancy abilities. “What a piece of work is man!” says Hamlet. And he’s got a point. We can reason, love, be loved, create, discover, and plan our lives. Sure, some animals do these things to some degree, but not nearly to the level of complexity we find in human beings. Well, might this explain our rights? If someone asks what about us demands respect, perhaps we should point to this array of impressive capacities we bring to the table. We have value because of all that we can do.
This differs from Nussbaum’s account (see Secular Account #2). Nussbaum thinks talk of rights is justified because it helps us develop these impressive capacities of ours. But the idea here is that right now our having these impressive capacities makes us worthy of respect.
Still, this proposal, like Nussbaum’s, faces a damning problem: Not everyone has these capacities. Some never will. The child with downs, the elder sunk deep in dementia, the woman in the 14-year coma, they are not doing much reasoning or creating. Neither are newborns, and if they are terminally ill, they never shall. Not only do these people lack such complex capacities. They will never possess them.
Are we willing to say that such severely impaired persons lack basic human rights? Think again of the child with severe downs syndrome. Would you want to deny him basic rights, just because he can’t read Dostoevsky or file his taxes? Because he is less capable than us, could we hunt him for food, or sell his organs to the highest bidder? These suggestions are as monstrous as they are implausible.
Or think again of the woman in the 14-year coma. Surely, the nurse who raped her wronged her. He has no defense in the observation that she lacks, and will not regain, her ability to reason or govern her life.
It seems, then, universal human rights cannot be explained by our impressive capacities, capacities only some of us have.
Secular Account #5: Capacities PLUS Symbolic Value
If you think our rights are explained by our impressive capacities, you exclude the impaired and the undeveloped as rights-holders. And that seems like a big problem for your account.
Recently, the philosopher Erik Wielenberg has tried to address this problem. He suggests that the child with downs or the woman in the coma symbolize normal human beings. And because they are symbols, they have great worth. So, his picture is this. Normal adults have worth because they can reason and create. And the cognitively impaired have worth because they symbolize people who can reason and create.
Some symbols do seem to demand respectful treatment. You wouldn’t spit on a picture of someone you love. And you wouldn’t burn the flag of the country to which you swear allegiance. So maybe Wielenberg is onto something here.
I do not think so. Wielenberg’s account flounders on two problems.
First, symbolic value does not seem especially weighty. For a million dollars, would I douse a picture of my mother with gasoline and set it on fire? I love you, mom, but the match is already lit. For a million dollars, would I do this to a child with downs syndrome? May God smite me if I would. The rights of the impaired are weighty things. Symbolic value is not so weighty.
Wielenberg is aware of this objection. He responds that the child with downs symbolizes normal adults to a far greater degree than the picture of my mother symbolizes her. So the child with downs has far more symbolic value.
However, this response is simply mistaken. The picture of mother does not partially symbolize her. It is 100% a picture of my mother. Now, the downs child might resemble a normal adult to a greater degree than the picture resembles my mother. But resembling something is not the same as symbolizing it. Otherwise, every acorn would symbolize every other acorn, and every twin would symbolize his sibling. That’s clearly wrong.
But there’s a second problem. Ask yourself this: As a matter of fact, do the impaired symbolize normal adults? I find this claim puzzling. In virtue of what would the impaired have this symbolic status?
Again, the impaired might resemble normal adults. But resembling something does not mean you symbolize it (think of the acorns).
Typically, something becomes a symbol by a shared convention. Consider the red cross, or the Wiccan pentacle, or the blue lines on a map. Only by convention do these things have symbolic meaning. But the rights of the impaired are not the result of societal convention (see Secular Account #1). And anyway, no such convention seems to be in place. I mean, do you think of children with downs syndrome as symbolic of normal adults? I certainly don’t.
It seems, therefore, the rights of the impaired and the underdeveloped cannot be explained by appealing to symbolic value.
Secular Account #6: Our Rational Nature
Maybe the point is not that the impaired right now can reason, create, and so on. Maybe it’s rather that these capacities lie in their nature. A being can have a certain nature, even if that nature is poorly developed or prevented from manifesting itself. A hawk with mutilated wings still has flying in its nature. So maybe the woman in the coma has rights, not because of her rational abilities, but because of her rational nature.
What does it mean to have a rational nature? It means that, were you to develop normally and reach maturity, you would be able to reason, create, love, plan, and do the impressive things normal adult humans can do. Even if you can’t do those things right now, that’s still the kind of being you are. And you have rights because you are that kind of being. I should respect you because of your rational nature.
This new proposal includes has two strengths. First, it includes the impaired and the underdeveloped. The woman in the coma, like the newborn, cannot reason or create, but this is still part of her nature.
Second, this proposal also explains why, intuitively, hobbits would have basic rights like ours. Surely, we must not eat the hobbits, just as we must not eat the talking Narnian animals. Why? If they would share our rights, what do they have in common with us that explains this? The only answer, it seems, is their rational nature.
In spite of these strengths, however, this proposal suffers from two problems. To my mind, these problems are ruinous.
Problem #1) The triviality problem
It’s just not clear why merely having a rational nature is so special, if that nature can never manifest itself. If my racecar is a barnacled ruin at the bottom of the sea, it matters little that it its nature is to drive fast and handle corners like a dream. Its nature is permanently and irrevocably shattered.
The same is true of the woman in the coma. Her rational nature will never again manifest itself. Why should merely possessing such a nature give her such tremendous worth? Just think: for no amount of money would it be alright for her family to sell her as food. Not millions, not billions. Why does merely having a rational nature matter to such a great degree, if it can never be exercised in any meaningful sense?
Suppose I have an amazing widget. I want to sell it to you for a few thousand dollars. This widget can do anything—it can make pigs fly, cook your breakfast, heal your maladies, turn lead to gold, prevent additional sequels to Fast & Furious. Sky’s the limit. The catch is, the widget is broken. In fact, as of now it can’t do any of the things it’s meant to. And unfortunately it can never be fixed. Are you still interested? I doubt it. You would not buy the widget, because you know that just being a special kind of thing is trivial if the widget is broken beyond repair.
Problem #2) The mixed-nature problem
The second problem is that our “rational nature” is a real mixed bag. Murder, rape, theft, tribal warfare, and various forms of discrimination against “the other” also seem to lie in our nature. To selectively highlight our reasoning abilities, our creativity, or any other good aspect of our nature, would be arbitrary.
Well, how valuable is a being whose nature includes reasoning and creativity, when these capacities are regularly placed in the service of evil deeds? The serial killer who covers his tracks employs his reasoning. So does the tyrant who organizes a complex genocide. On the other hand, the far more normal person who wastes huge swaths of time scrolling Twitter and watching porn and generally failing to develop himself precisely does not use his reason. What a piece of work is man indeed.
Thought of in purely secular terms, human beings are evolved primates. The good and bad parts of our nature are alike sewn up within it. So while we’re appealing to our nature, we have to consider our whole nature. In light of this, how much worth does a human being have? Sure, we’re all impressed by the great achievements of human culture. But most people aren’t involved in these achievements in any serious way, and wouldn’t be much help if they had the chance to be (myself included!). Why think of these proclivities toward greatness as part of our nature, rather than as marginal outliers? And if these proclivities towards great achievements somehow are part of our nature, so are the proclivities, present in every culture of which we are aware, towards senseless violence and discrimination. A purely evolutionary take on the human being does not permit us a rosy view of what he is.
How Theism Helps
By now, I hope you have a feel for the kinds of problems faced by secular accounts. But how does theism help? The simplest answer is this. Theism allows us to appeal to our rational nature. For it solves both the triviality problem and the mixed-nature problem.
How theism solves the triviality problem
Theism solves the triviality problem by invoking the afterlife. To be sure, not all theisms believe in the afterlife. But some mainstream theisms do, especially Christianity. And I think Christianity is especially well-placed to solve the triviality problem.
Remember, the problem is that just having a rational nature seems trivial, if that nature is permanently and dramatically impaired. For secularists, many people will fit that description. That will be both permanently and dramatically impaired. For Christians, while some people are dramatically impaired, no one is permanently so.
Christians believe in the general resurrection. One day, God will raise everyone from the dead. So the question is, Will He raise them with their impairments or not? When God raises my grandpa Ollie, will he come back with severe dementia? When He raises the woman in the coma, will she still be out? The suggestion is absurd.
One way to see this is think about what happens after the general resurrection. For Christians, what happens is judgment. God brings you forward, examines your life, and pronounces judgment. This moment would make no sense if some people were still severely impaired. Just imagine God pronouncing judgment to the woman while she lays in her hospital bed, without a clue what’s going on.
And then what happens to her after judgment? For most Christians, she either goes to heaven or hell. So is she still in her coma? Suppose she is. Then if she goes to hell, Satan is trying to torment her, but she can’t feel a thing. Or if she goes to heaven, all the saints are praising God and enjoying the new creation, but there she is, laying there, missing it all. In that case, does she end up in purgatory? Purgatory is for moral development. I’m afraid she won’t be doing much of that comatose.
More likely, at the general resurrection, all people are restored to normal functioning. The coma patients come to. And grandpa Ollie finds his marbles.
(By the way, since we’re talking about hell, you might be tempted to write this whole thing off. You might think hell is far too implausible a doctrine. But if you think that, you’re probably thinking of a specific idea of hell: Everlasting agony from which there is no escape. But it’s worth mentioning here, that’s just one interpretation of hell. Some of the greatest theologians in history, such as Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, did not hold this view. They thought that in the end, God would rescue every person from hell by freeing them from the evil that held them there.)
The thing to see is this. If I’m right, and at the general resurrection, all persons are restored to normal functioning, then there is no such thing as a permanent impairment. Every impairment is a temporary setback. The woman in the coma is no more permanently impaired than my wife taking a nap. That means every rational nature, no matter how damaged, will one day manifest itself again. No rational nature is trivialized by a brokenness beyond repair.
Christianity gets us this result, not by cooking up some ad hoc vision of the afterlife. Instead, this result just falls out of what Christians have always thought about the human destiny.
How theism solves the mixed-nature problem
Recall the mixed nature problem. Human beings are a mix of good and bad. And a pretty dramatic mix at that. And seen in purely evolutionary terms, the good and the bad have to be viewed as equally fundamental.
Here again, I think Christianity is especially well-placed to solve this problem (but probably the same is true of Judaism and Islam). Why is that? Because Christians think that everything God has made is fundamentally good. Everything is good in its nature. Evil is a corruption of the good established by God. So when a Christian looks at human nature, she does not see the good on equal footing with the bad. She sees good as coming first, and bad as an afterthought. For Christians, the purpose of a human being is to enjoy God, to be like Him, and to engage meaningfully with the rest of God’s creation. These purposes are what define our nature. Human evil is but a corruption of this.
Simply put, Christianity solves the mixed-nature problem by allowing us to see the good in human nature as more fundamental than the bad. The secularist has no way of doing this. All she has is a pile of evolved traits, some good, some bad, but each typical of the human species.
Summing Up
In explaining our basic rights, we should appeal to our rational nature. This is an especially promising view, because it includes the severely impaired, and explains why hobbits and talking Narnian animals would share our basic rights. But for the secularist, this view is hard to maintain. It faces the triviality problem and the mixed-nature problem. The Christian, in contrast, can solve these problems by appealing only to familiar features of her theology.
If you believe in human rights, but you don’t believe in God, the question is, What explains why we have the basic rights we do? And the challenge is to craft an answer that’s at least as plausible as the Christian account I’ve suggested here. If this cannot be done, those who believe in human rights have reason to believe in God as well.
Comments