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Title: The Myth of Human Rights Author: Bob Black Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: human rights Source: Submitted by the author.
We cannot use the “natural rights of man” nor the “theory of evolution.”
We can only use Western technology – Chairman Mao[1]
There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in
politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human
rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.”[2] Everybody likes human
rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human
rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have
no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are
worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.
Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social
philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says,
“even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.”[3]
These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius,
Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund
Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme
misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince
Kropotkin, among others, are regarded. Nonetheless, Professor Feinberg’s
writings have been hailed as “far-reaching and subtle”: they “achieve an
unparalleled combination of rigor, sensitivity, and clarity.”[4] Imagine
what the rest of the philosophers must be like.
Human rights, I maintain, are mythical. This might mean many things –
one scholar compiled a list of over 50 definitions of myth.[5] In many
definitions, myths are a kind of story. That is true of the original
meaning, but I will depart from it. I would distinguish “myth” (beliefs)
from “mythology” or legends (stories). I will instead combine two other
attributes drawn from different scholarly traditions. To say that
something is mythical is, for me, to say two things.[6] The first thing
is that myths like human rights are beliefs which aren’t statements of
fact. Myths are believed in by some, or they used to be believed in, but
they were never true in the ordinary ways in which statements are true.
The second aspect of myth is that it serves political functions –
specifically, to justify some social practice or movement or
institution. This is the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s notion of
the “mythical charter” of communities.[7] In other words, “myth
manufactures a sense of social belonging, a stratagem for social
control.”[8] I would extend this idea by adding that myth as a
motivation is not confined to ideas supporting the status quo. It may
provide a charter for imagined as well as for actual communities.
Nationalist myths have justified nations before they came into
existence.[9] The cause of proletarian revolution has involved some
myths. Their purpose is to validate and to incite. Georges Sorel frankly
characterized the General Strike as an inspirational myth for
class-conscious revolutionary workers.[10] It was not inspirational for
long,[11] in part because, to make the point more generally,
“institutions into which an element of myth enters may fulfill their
functions better if these are not made too conscious, nor too many
questions asked about them.”[12]
Myth in this sense resembles the Marxist conception of ideology. Sorel’s
General Strike, an enthusiasm which he soon abandoned,[13] is perhaps an
example of what Gilbert Ryle wrote: “Myths often do a lot of theoretical
good, while they are still new.”[14] Although this particular myth, and
the syndicalism which it informed, if they ever did any good, exhausted
their possibilities a hundred years ago.
Thus the Bible contains many myths. It’s a myth that Jewish priests
“discovered” the Book of Leviticus, which fortuitously bestowed a lot of
power on Jewish priests. It’s a myth because it isn’t true, and because
it justified the power of the priesthood until the Romans destroyed the
Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
The story told by the Gospels also satisfies the criteria.[15] It’s a
myth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that He rose from the
dead. It’s false, because there is no God; and because the resurrection
of the dead is impossible; and because the idea of the Creator of the
Universe having a son is as ridiculous as the idea that He has an uncle.
What, in addition, makes it mythical, is that the story functioned to
justify the power of a new priesthood, the Roman Catholic Church, and
also regimes in many authoritarian states. In the 1940s there was a
best-selling book, and in the 1960s a movie, about Jesus, titled The
Greatest Story Ever Told.[16] I’ve described this same story as the
Greatest Story Ever Sold.[17] It is, in my usage, mythical and it is
also mythology. I hope that someday it is only mythology, like the
stories about the Olympian gods. As myths die out, mythology sets in.
Human rights are mythical in the two ways I’ve mentioned. They have no
objective reality. They aren’t true the way facts are true, empirically.
They aren’t true in the way the truths of mathematics are true,
deductively. They don’t exist, as anything except wishful thinking. But
they have a point. The whole point of announcing human rights is to
motivate or legitimate human action. That’s why I like a line from the
comedienne Elaine May. She said she liked a moral problem so much better
than a real problem.[18] Human rights are a moral problem. And yet
paradoxically, this too is true: “Rights, I have said, do not provide
reasons for acting, at least not for the persons who have them.... If,
in some situation, I ask a friend, ‘What shall I do?’ he has not given
me any advice at all, he has not prescribed any action, if he answers,
‘You have a right to do A.””[19] Here the correlation of rights with
duties fails, because duties do prescribe actions.
“Human rights” is the modern name for what used to be called natural
rights. This idea is, historically, rather recent. It really dates from
17^(th) century England. It truly came into its own in the late 18^(th)
century, especially in Britain, France, and America. The believers try
to deduce natural rights from natural law. Natural law has no objective
reality either, but the idea goes back a lot longer, at least to the
fourth century B.C. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic,
expressed the core of the doctrine in this way: “If the power of thought
is universal among mankind, so likewise is the possession of reason,
making us rational creatures. It follows, therefore, that this reason
speaks universally to us all with its ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou shalt
not.’”[20] Here, in all its confusion, is the universality of natural
law which will later be claimed for natural rights. Even supposing the
power of thought to be universal, not all thought is rational. Even if
natural law speaks universally, we don’t hear it universally.
It’s a funny thing. Natural law philosophers didn’t notice that natural
rights followed from natural law for over 2,000 years. Aristotle didn’t
notice this. The Stoics didn’t notice this. St. Thomas Aquinas didn’t
notice this. Why not? Those guys were no fools. So where did this idea
of natural rights come from? It came from the idea of legal rights.
Where else could it come from? Nobody conceived of natural rights before
legal rights were conceived. Thus the anarchist prince, Peter Kropotkin,
wrote of “right” as “that singular word, borrowed from law.”[21]
He was a strong believer in natural morality, but not natural
rights.[22] Nietzsche held: “It was in this sphere then, the sphere of
legal obligations, that the moral conceptual world of ‘guilt,’
‘conscience,’ ‘duty,’ ‘sacredness of duty’ had its origin ....”[23]
Legal rights are also a product of history, because law is a product of
history. You don’t find any legal rights in the Bible, or in the Code of
Hammurabi, or in the early Germanic law codes. It’s a misunderstanding
to say, as one historian (who is not a lawyer) does, that these codes,
or for that matter Roman law, by protecting persons and property,
conferred personal and property rights.[24] They made provisions for
punishment or compensation (not clearly distinguished) as between
private parties, but these provisions, codifying custom, created no
rights against the state. The Germanic laws were not usually enforced by
the state, states which, indeed, barely existed. These supposed rights
also often lacked universality. The idea of legal rights developed,
especially in England, out of the idea of feudal privileges. But human
rights are, by definition, universal. Privileges are, by definition,
particular.
Ethnographically illiterate philosophers commonly make demonstrably
false assumptions about law, rights and, in general, social reality.
According to Leif Wenar, in an article about rights which is otherwise
very good, “even the most rudimentary human communities must have rules
specifying what some are entitled to tell others what they must do. Such
rules ascribe rights.”[25] This is wrong right on down the line.
In “rudimentary” – stateless – societies, generally there are no rules
specifying what some people are “entitled” to order others to do,
because nobody is entitled to order anyone to do anything.[26] This was
an endless source of frustration for colonial conquerors, because when
they said, “take me to your leader” – somebody they could do business
with — nobody understood what they were talking about. The imperialists
saw “chiefs” – because they wanted to see chiefs – where none
existed.[27] Or the imperialists invented them. Sometimes the natives
humored the colonial authorities by pretending to go along when the
government appointed locals as officials, but without obeying them. The
“chief” would be the village fool. In band societies, and tribal
societies such as the Nuer, nobody obeys anybody’s orders: “No Nuer will
let any other address an order to him.”[28]
The second mistake is a philosophical mistake, and thus even less
excusable in a philosopher. Wenar must assume that where there are
orders backed by threats, there is law. This, the legal theory of John
Austin, was definitively discredited by H.L.A. Hart.[29] It fails to
distinguish law (such as the prohibition of robbery) from crime (such as
the commission of robbery). Orders backed by threats may well have been
involved in the origins of law or, more plausibly, in the origins of the
state — but law has a generality and permanence which occasional acts of
pillage and rapine do not.
The final mistake is to suppose that where there are orders backed by
threats — or law by some better definition — there are “rights.” Where
there are rights, there are rules, because rights impose duties. But
rules may impose duties which don’t entail correlative rights. The Ten
Commandments – the quintessential, “thou shall not” rules – impose
duties on the people of Israel. They do not imply that the Israelites
have any claim-rights against Jehovah.[30] Job found that out the hard
way. Duties long preceded rights. They still outnumber rights in every
moral or legal system. “Duty is man-made,” proclaimed Charles
Fourier.[31]
Legal rights are real (although even this has been doubted[32]). They
aren’t always respected by the state. Some legal rights are rarely
respected. As an anarchist ex-lawyer, I don’t sing the praises of the
rule of law and legal rights. But, legal rights can come in handy
sometimes. Human rights never come in handy at any time.
Human rights are just candidates for becoming legal rights. If they
become legal rights, then they matter — not because they’re human
rights, but because they’re now legal rights. Where they came from
doesn’t matter. If they don’t become legal rights, they don’t matter at
all.
Even if human rights are a wonderful idea, that doesn’t show that human
rights exist. Jeremy Bentham argued: “Reasons for wishing there were
such things as rights, are not rights; — a reason for wishing that a
certain right were established, is not that right – want is not supply –
hunger is not bread. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and
imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense on stilts.”[33]
Even the International Court of Justice acknowledges that “Rights cannot
be presumed to exist merely because it might seem desirable that they
should.”[34]
Human rights are timeless and universal. Yet for thousands of years,
everybody had human rights, but nobody knew it.
Belief in human rights is far from universal[35] (as this — my article —
not only says, but shows). Even the sincere mouthing of the phrase
“human rights” is not universal, although we are getting to that point.
There’s nothing sophisticated about my critique of rights. In fact, I’ve
been criticized for oversimplifying. But if an idea is dumb enough,
subtlety is wasted on it. I will let Alasdair MacIntyre state the
obvious for me: “The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are
no such rights is precisely the same type as the best reason for
asserting that there are no witches: every attempt to give good reasons
for believing that there are such rights has failed.”[36]
A human right might be a good idea, or a bad idea, as an idea, as a
proposal. But it’s only an idea. It’s about value, not fact. It doesn’t
describe, it prescribes. It’s an ideal. There’s a world of difference
between “is” and “ought.” The philosopher David Hume showed (or shewed)
that you can’t derive an ought from an is.[37] Nobody has ever refuted
him.
This goes for morality in general. There is no objective morality. If
there were, everybody in the world would accept it, upon giving the
matter some thought. Everybody in the world obeys the laws of gravity.
Everybody knows that 2 plus 2 equals 4[38]; at least, nobody can make it
come out 5. You can’t violate natural laws, if that means scientific
laws. But you can violate natural law if that means a natural moral
law.[39] Newton’s laws of gravitation don’t say, “Thou shalt not walk
off a cliff.”[40] They only predict what happens if you do.[41] Since
natural law has no empirical basis, “like a harlot, it is at the
disposal of everyone. The ideology does not exist that cannot be
defended by an appeal to the laws of nature.”[42] Early Greek natural
philosophers were determinist, but they referred to scientific
“principles,” not scientific “laws.”[43] In the Renaissance, in the
16^(th) and early 17^(th) centuries, with real scientists such as
Galileo and Kepler, this cautious usage continued. The earliest
reference to physical law – which confused it with natural law – was by
René Descartes in 1630. The scientific laws of Galileo, Kepler, and
Newton were descriptive, not prescriptive.[44]
Moral laws are revealed, or invented, not found.[45] Of course, they
may, in a rough-and-ready way, be of some social utility. But as
Nietzsche wrote:
It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that
many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that
many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one
should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than
hitherto.[46]
The concept of morality has more flaws than I have time to identify.
There are a lot of moralities out there, and they usually contradict
each other. But they have at least one thing in common. Morality tells
you to do things that you don’t want to do. And it forbids you to do
things that you do want to do. As the sociologist Emile Durkheim put it,
“the specific characteristic of obligation is to a certain extent the
violation of desire.”[47] The philosopher Kurt Baier wrote that “it is
an outstanding characteristic of morality that it demands substantial
sacrifices.”[48] Charles Fourier remarked upon “the anger of moralists
in their relentless war against pleasure.”[49]
So, the whole point of morality is to prevent you from being happy. And
it’s very good at that. What puzzles me is why morality is so
popular.[50] Maybe it isn’t so popular. That might explain why it’s so
widely ignored. According to C.S. Lewis, everyone believes in morality –
the same morality (which he calls the Law of Nature) – although “None of
us are really keeping the Law of Nature.”[51] Disobedience to morality
is, as Jean Baudrillard wrote, a mark of freedom.[52] But maybe freedom
is not as popular as I’d like it to be. According to Theodor Adorno:
“People have been refused freedom, and its value belittled, for such a
long time that now people no longer like it.”[53]
There isn’t any universal consensus on moral values. The more I learn
from history, and the more I learn from anthropology about non-Western
societies, the greater moral diversity I find. I’ll quote here from the
philosopher John Locke:
If this law of nature were universally impressed on the minds of men
immediately at birth, how does it happen that all men who are in
possession of souls furnished with this law do not immediately agree
upon this law to a man, without any hesitation, [and are] willing to
obey it? When it comes to this law, men depart from one another in so
many directions, in one place one thing, in another something else, is
declared to be a dictate of nature or right reason; and what is held to
be virtuous among some is vicious among others. Some recognize a
different law of nature, others none, [but] all recognize that it is
obscure.[54]
And yet Locke is by reputation the natural law philosopher. “The
objective existence of natural law,” as a commentator states, “is an
essential presupposition of his political theory,” but he never did
“demonstrate the existence and content of natural law.”[55] Locke “chose
not to discuss at all the question of how men can naturally know the law
of nature, the binding law of God, on which, according to the argument
of the book [Two Treatises of Government], all human rights rested and
from which the great bulk of human duties more or less directly
derived.”[56]
His contemporary Blaise Pascal, who agreed with Locke about nothing
else, agreed with him here: “Three degrees of latitude upset the whole
of jurisprudence and one meridian determines what is true.... There no
doubt exist natural laws, but once this fine reason of ours was
corrupted [by sin], it corrupted everything.”[57] The anarcho-socialist
Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) wrote that the moral judgment of mankind
varies from age to age, from race to race, and from class to class in
the same society.[58]
If this was obvious to Eurocentric white male heteronormative Christian
bourgeois philosophers in the 17^(th) century, how much more obvious it
is now! And yet, rejection of the morality dogma is widely regarded as
heresy, even by radicals who aren’t supposed to believe in heresy. In
the 19^(th) century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon scandalized European
thinkers, first, by declaring that property is theft, and second, by
becoming the first person in history to call himself an anarchist.[59]
But, he also wrote: “Who today would dare to attack morality?”[60]
Abolish the state, sure. Abolish property? Hell, why not? But — abolish
morality? How dare you! As Nietzsche wrote: “listen, for example, even
to our anarchists: how morally they speak when they want to
persuade!”[61]
This attitude persists to this day. During an interview with Noam
Chomsky, the supposed anarchist, the interviewer mentioned that “there
are at least some fairly recognizable facts about our moral nature.”
Chomsky peevishly replied, “Well, if someone doesn’t at least accept
that, then they [sic] should just have the decency to shut up and not
say anything.”[62] Chomsky has publicly supported the free speech rights
of Holocaust Revisionists.[63] This got him into some trouble. But he
doesn’t believe in free speech for heretics from morality. I consider
Chomsky to be a moralist on the level of a newspaper editor or a Baptist
minister.[64]
There isn’t any universal consensus on moral values. Whenever there
seems to be one, the values are always expressed in such vague or
abstract ways as to have no content.[65] They aren’t specific enough to
guide conduct. Pardon me if I belabor the point, but, it’s really the
only argument the moralists have. An American legal philosopher noted
“that when the natural law philosopher proposes his ideal solutions, he
again and again reverts to the positive law of his homeland.”[66]
Positive law refers to “law,” real-life state law.[67]
According to C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don and Christian apologist, there
are those who claim that “different civilisations and different ages
have had quite different moralities. But they haven’t. They have only
had slightly different moralities.”[68] Surely “the human idea of Decent
Behaviour [is] obvious to everyone.”[69] The Crusades were just some
sort of misunderstanding which proper gentlemen such as Saladin and King
Richard the Lionhearted should have sorted out over sherry and cigars,
except that Muslims don’t drink sherry (one of those slightly different
norms of Islamic morality). In our hearts, all of us, at all times and
in all places, understand, as a categorical imperative, one shining
rule: Be a Decent Chap.[70] Robert Anton Wilson commented: “In my
impression, Lewis demonstrated only that you can find an amazing amount
of similarity between camels and peanuts if you emphasize only the
contours of their backs and ignore everything else.”[71]
Let’s say that “thou shalt not kill” is an objective moral value.
Homicide is universal. The prohibition against homicide is not. Capital
punishment – socially approved homicide – is a cross-cultural universal:
all cultures or societies have it.[72] So is war. Infanticide is
practiced in traditional East Asian and Pacific society as a “painful
necessity” when family food supplies are scarce.[73] I don’t know of any
society where people don’t kill each other. I also don’t know of any
society that believes that no one should ever kill anybody.[74] A few
individuals may feel that way, but not majorities or received opinion.
Maybe the Jains in India believe that, or the Quakers. But there aren’t
any Jain or Quaker societies, although the Quakers’ name for themselves
is the Society of Friends. Jains and Quakers live in societies where
other people do their killing for them, just as the Amish have other
people do their driving. You can’t derive a moral consensus from the
beliefs of a few cults, or the opinions of cloistered moralists who
don’t get out enough, such as C.S. Lewis. His Christian apologetics are
more fantastic than his Narnia children’s books, but not as entertaining
or believable.
Not only morality, but courtesy and etiquette are culturally relative.
In the 18^(th) century, defecating in the corners of the palace of
Versailles, and in 19^(th) century America, spitting on the floors of
saloons, were acceptable behavior. As anthropologist Franz Boas – a
notorious “cultural relativist” – wrote in 1928: “Courtesy, modesty,
good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal,
but what constitutes courtesy, good manners, and ethical standards is
not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the
most unexpected ways.”[75] It sure is.
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist who is best-known as one of the New
Atheists, insists that there are right and wrong answers in morality,
just as there are in physics.[76] He does not agree with C.S. Lewis and
Marc Hauser (who is next up here) that professed moral values are,
appearances to the contrary, much the same for everyone everywhere. Many
people, such as Christians and, worse still, Muslims, get morality
wrong. But he gets it right. The good is that which supports well-being.
He thinks that “the concept of ‘well-being’ captures all that we can
intelligently value.” And well-being is happiness.[77] “We can mean many
things when using words like ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being.”[78] No
kidding!
Harris cannot be unaware, although he pretends to be, that he is merely
presenting a vague version of utilitarianism. He does cop to being a
consequentialist,[79] and utilitarians are the only serious
consequentialists. Now utilitarianism is beset with difficulties.[80]
Are we to maximize the total human welfare or the average human welfare?
Harris waves away these “difficulties.”[81] He ignores another one
altogether. Is well-being or happiness a feeling, as Jeremy Bentham
thought,[82] or is it a well-lived life, as Aristotle thought?[83]
Harris explains, “I have elected not to pay any attention to Aristotle,”
or to use philosophers’ terms such as “noncognitivism” and “deontology”
because they would bore the reader.[84] His long textual footnotes
summarizing neuroscientific research, much of it not obviously relevant
or easy to understand, are also, for the general reader, less than
fascinating.
The quoted words, however unfamiliar to the lay reader, refer to some of
those “difficulties” that Harris brushes off, as he knows very well.
They are not going away. Currently, “very few philosophers agree
entirely with the view proposed by the Classical Utilitarians,
particularly with respect to the hedonistic view.”[85] Harris may not
“entirely agree” with them either, but, he would rather not reveal his
philosophical dilettantism. And, as Nietzsche wrote:
In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking, strange as it
may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any
suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the
philosophers called “a rational foundation of morality” and tried to
supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the
common faith in the prevalent morality; ... – certainly the very
opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of
this very faith.[86]
Further: “Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who
sanctions it is missing! The ‘beyond’ is absolutely necessary if faith
in morality is to be maintained.”[87] Just as there is no science of
religion, there is no science of morality.
Although he has probably never heard of Ludwig Feuerbach, Harris with
his humanism has approximated Feuerbach’s moralistic atheism.
Feuerbach’s thesis was that God is the idealization of man’s highest
attributes, and their projection onto an imaginary exterior being, God.
“God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself; hence
man can do nothing of himself, all goodness comes from God.” God is
indeed, in a sense, within us – but nowhere else. Man made God, and man
made Him out of himself.[88] This was sensational stuff in 1841.
But, argued Max Stirner, this liberation from God is itself theological.
Feuerbach’s “Man” is also an idealization, an abstraction, and a
projection.
To this, we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but,
just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite
immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as “God,” or find
it in him and call it “the essence of man” or “man.” I am neither God
nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is
all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me outside
me.[89]
In rebuttal, Feuerbach asserted that he did not allow divine attributes
to remain, except “as absolutes of nature and humanity, as natural,
human properties,” whereby “they immediately lose their divine
character.”[90] He missed the point that Stirner rejected human essence
as a delusion.[91] To be an individual is to be more than a generic
human being.[92]
The “human being,” as a concept or an attribute, does not exhaust you,
because it has a conceptual content of its own, because it says what is
human and what a human being is, i.e., because it is capable of being
defined so that you can remain completely out of play. Of course, you as
a human being still have your part in the conceptual content of the
human being, but you don’t have it as you.[93]
The most ambitious recent pretense to the scientific grounding of moral
universals is by “neuro-psychologist” Marc D. Hauser.[94] Hauser went
off the track – the trolley track (see below) – from the get-go. His
universal moral grammar is modeled on Noam Chomsky’s universal language
grammar.[95] Indeed they are co-authors of an article arguing for a
biological basis for language.[96] Hauser was innocent of any suspicion
that Chomsky’s universal linguistics might not be universally accepted
as science. It is not.[97] Chomsky, for obscure reasons, believes that
there is a language “faculty,” indeed a language organ, in the brain,
which contains all actual and possible languages. Children don’t
actually learn a language: they “acquire” it when, by hearing a
language, the language organ is “activated” and the small child
accesses, by exposure to it, one of the thousands of languages which he
already knows.[98] Does this sound crazy? It is! Needless to say, brain
scientists have never located any area of the brain dedicated
exclusively to language. They never will.
If the language organ is ridiculous, the moral organ is much more
ridiculous. The location of this one, too, remains as elusive as El
Dorado. Hauser has done no research on human beings. All of his own
research is on other primates, and none of it supports his theory of
moral universals. Instead, he relies on a scattering of human psychology
studies which don’t support his theory either.[99] There is no reason to
suppose that a dedicated region of the brain is involved in moral
judgment.[100] In fact, Hauser, who insists that there exists a moral
organ precisely analogous to the language organ, admits that brain
imaging studies fail to pinpoint “a uniquely dedicated moral
organ”[101]: they show only “that the areas involved in emotional
processing are engaged when we deliver a moral judgment, especially
cases that are emotionally charged.”[102] Exactly. Moral judgments
express emotions. This is the “emotive” theory of ethics.[103] However,
at least one anarchist has fallen for cognitive psychology’s nutty
notion that human brains are “hard-wired” for morality.[104]
When I explain Hauser’s argument, the reader will suspect I have chosen
an easy example to refute, but, this is actually as scientifically
respectable as these attempts get. His takeoff point is the “trolley
problem” invented by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967.[105] It has
since exercised other moral philosophers.[106] The basic issue is, is it
moral to sacrifice, intentionally, an innocent life, to prevent the
unintended, but otherwise inevitable, deaths of larger numbers of other
innocents? No doubt that is something to think hard about.
Hauser, however, does not do any hard thinking. For the philosophers,
trolley problems are thought-experiments. Hauser thought they could be
real experiments. He cites the results of experiments presenting
variants on the “trolley problem” to people from various parts of the
world. A train, a trolley, is barreling down the track to where the
track diverges into two. On one fork, one person is tied to the track.
On the other track, five people are tied to the track. The experimental
subject, who just happens to be loitering by the track, learns that can
throw a switch to change the direction of the trolley. On its current
course, the trolley will kill the five people. If the switch is thrown,
the trolley will be diverted and kill only the one. Should the subject
throw the switch?
Hauser’s “intuition,” and (he assures us) the intuition of most moral
philosophers, is that the switch should be thrown.[107] But consider
this one. The observer is standing on a footbridge over the trolley
tracks. He can see that the trolley is out of control (the conductor has
fainted). Five people are tied to the track. The observer knows that if
he drops a heavy object on the track, the trolley will be stopped. The
only available heavy object is a fat man. If the observer shoves the fat
man off the bridge onto the tracks, the fat man will be killed, but the
five people will be saved. Should the observer do it? Hauser says
no.[108]
The choice is presented as a context-free, yes-or-no question. The
situation has never risen, except maybe in old animated cartoons such as
Popeye. As in almost all U.S. psychological research, the American
research subjects were undergraduate college students, who are required
to serve as experimental animals as a condition of taking the
introductory psychology course. The students mostly decided that it was
better to throw the switch to save the greater number. For them, this
was just a puzzle to be solved, an inconsequential game to be played,
not an occasion for soul-searching.[109] Even “evolutionary
psychologist” Marc D. Hauser, who relies heavily on this idiotic
research, admits: “In the same way that laboratory mice do not capture
the riches of the world’s fauna, university students do not capture the
riches of human nature.”[110]
According to the research Hauser relies upon, most American (southern
Californian) and Taiwanese college students answered as Hauser
does.[111] These populations do not capture the riches of human nature.
Indeed, “Industrial societies do not fully capture our species’
psychological nature.”[112] Nonetheless, from these artificial,
fragmentary data, Hauser finds confirmation of the universally true
proposition that “it is permissible to cause harm as a by-product of
achieving a great good, but it is impermissible to use harm as a means
to a greater good.”[113] Collateral damage is okay. That might be a good
rule of thumb, but it is, as a moral universal, ridiculous. So is the
Golden Rule, which, Hauser claims, appears in all cultures.[114] Hauser
is acquainted with not much ethnography and even less history. I have
read scores of ethnographies without ever seeing any approximation of
the Golden Rule.
Unembarrassed by the paucity of evidence, Hauser boldly announces that
“all of the following actions are universally forbidden: killing,
causing pain, stealing, cheating, lying, breaking promises, and
committing adultery.”[115] The Old Testament alone, which Hauser once
quotes,[116] teems with counter-examples. “The point here is simple,” he
explains: “our moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of rules,
with each culture setting up exceptions to the rules.”[117] But how many
exceptions does it take to disprove the rule? And what does it mean to
say that each culture sets up exceptions to the rules? “Cultures” are
ways of life, not moral legislatures.
According to Hauser, this nonsense is science: “we are equipped with a
moral faculty – an organ of the mind that carries a universal grammar of
action.”[118] That is to say, “all humans are endowed with a moral
faculty – a capacity that enables each individual to unconsciously and
automatically evaluate a limitless variety of actions in terms of
principles that dictate what is permissible, obligatory, or
forbidden.”[119] Moral principles are encoded in our DNA.[120] All he is
doing here is unwittingly producing a moral parody of Noam Chomsky’s
linguistics.
When anthropologist Maurice Bloch put the trolley problems to Malagasy
villagers,
their reaction is of another kind. First of all, they want to know who
the people concerned are, whether they are related to them, how old they
are. In his experiment, Hauser would just not be able to take such
factors into account. This would be so not only because of the way the
experiment was set up but because he would feel that by doing so he
would then be plunging into what he has decided to exclude in the first
place, what he would call the “cultural.”[121]
The moral cannot be separated from the cultural or, as Durkheim put it,
the social.[122] But that is exactly what Hauser does.
Here is another brilliant answer to the question: does morality have a
biological basis?[123] The incest taboo, for instance. Some
“evolutionary psychologists” sought to test the old hypothesis of
anthropologist Edward Westermarck that “there is an innate aversion to
sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from
early youth, and that, such persons are in most cases related, this
feeling displays itself chiefly as a horror of intercourse between near
kin.”[124] So the incest tabu arises between people who are “in most
cases” related but who are in all cases living together. The explanation
is at least as likely, if not more likely, that the tabu arises from a
common socialization.[125]
In quoting Westermarck (as he does) to support, by implication, his own
theory of a biologically innate, objective universal morality, Marc
Hauser grossly falsifies Westermarck’s real opinion. Westermarck was in
fact famous as an exponent of, as one of his books is titled, Ethical
Relativity.[126] For him, morality was not universal, and it was not
innate, it was cultural.
The scientists Hauser relied upon answered a question about biology by
taking an opinion poll of 186 undergraduate students at the University
of California at Santa Barbara – a very laid-back campus — the students
being recruited from introductory anthropology and psychology classes.
They were undoubtedly almost all white middle-class American high school
graduates, and, as such, a representative sample of all human beings at
all times and in all place. Sure enough, the students said they were
against incest! And the older they were, the more they were against it –
that is, their biology was fixed but their social learning may have
continued.
The students were not asked if they ever committed incest, or if they
ever felt incestuous desires. They were told to judge hypothetical
third-party situations. It is easy to express moral indignation against
others, especially others who do not exist. But that is the least of the
lunacy. Every one of the “subjects” of this experiment (an opinion poll
is an experiment?) knew very well that incest is socially condemned. The
older they were, the longer time they had to learn about this taboo, and
the longer time they had to learn to tell grown-ups what the grown-ups
want to hear.
These students knew what their professors wanted to hear. These
evolutionary psychologists (“sociobiologists” rebranded) were eager to
find evidence that the incest taboo is innate and biological, not
learned and social.[127] Obviously their miserable methodology failed to
distinguish the effects of biology and culture, because the relationship
of siblings who grow up together is not merely a matter of some shared
genes, it is also a matter of a shared life experience in the family: a
social experience, a cultural experience. Tilt! Game over. Why even
quibble to ask about students without opposite-sex siblings, or gay
students, or students who were adopted? Many such students exist. Marc
Hauser, however, arrives at this non sequitur conclusion: “Among
American college students, feelings of repulsion toward incestuous
relationships are strongest among opposite-sex siblings that spent a
large part of their childhood in the same household than siblings that
spent relatively little time together. That familiarity breeds yuck
would seem to suggest that explicit, culturally articulated taboos are
unnecessary.“[128] Why, then, are they culturally articulated?
Consider this trolley problem (my invention). A Hindu Brahmin is – as
always, for no apparent reason – loitering near a trolley track switch
as a trolley approaches a crossing. He notices that, on one track, there
is a cow. On the other track, there are five untouchables: pariahs. Cows
are sacred. Pariahs are not. The Brahmin will save the cow. The pariahs
will die. For the Brahmin as for the Malagasy villagers, the question is
not human values, but rather the value of the humans. That is how humans
value.
Something like the original trolley problem, which antedated trolleys,
may have been first propounded by the anarchist philosopher William
Godwin in 1793. Unlike most anarchists, he was a utilitarian. Suppose
there is a fire in the “palace” of “the illustrious archbishop Fenelon.”
You can save only one person: the archbishop, or his chambermaid.
Of course that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive
to the general good. In saving the life of Fenelon, suppose at the
moment he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus, I
should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the
perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness.[129]
Why should Godwin – an atheist and former Calvinist minister – prefer to
save a Catholic archbishop? Because Fenelon (1651–1715) wrote the
Adventures of Telemachus, a once popular, but insufferably dull didactic
moral tract in the guise of a novel. It was one of the models for
Rousseau’s Emile.[130] If it influenced morals, it could only have been
by decreasing the greatest happiness of the greatest number. For Godwin
– as for my Brahmin — for whom “innocence” is irrelevant, the value of
the individuals affected determined the choice.
This is not quite the modern trolley problem as originally formulated,
because it does not present the choice between intentional action and
inaction. If the bystander goes to the rescue, he can save the life of
only one innocent. If he does not, both innocents perish.
What would a Taoist do? He would do nothing, no matter who was tied to
the tracks. Serene nonstriving is the Tao.
Human nature is not subject to experimentation. Rousseau himself wrote:
What experiments would be needed in order to come to know natural man;
and by what means can these experiments be performed in society? Far
from undertaking to solve this Problem, I believe that I have meditated
upon the Subject sufficiently to dare answer in advance that the
greatest Philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments,
nor the most powerful sovereigns to perform them; a collaboration which
it is scarcely reasonable to expect ....[131]
As Rousseau’s sometime friend David Hume put it, moral philosophy cannot
be experimental.[132]
According to Hauser, we are all hard-wired for morality. But his own
morality short-circuited.[133] In 2011, Hauser – until then a Harvard
professor – resigned after being found guilty of eight counts of
academic misconduct for fabricating or falsifying his research
results.[134] Hauser took his central argument, and even his specific
manipulations of trolley situations, from the 2000 doctoral dissertation
of John Mikhail.[135]
A moral consensus, even if one were cobbled together, doesn’t prove
anything except the universality of valuing.[136] That’s a mere matter
of is, not ought. As soon as one descends from high levels of
abstraction in characterizing killing, marrying, sharing, etc., in terms
of moral prescripts, there is the greatest diversity in the content of
norms.[137] A critic of Hauser wrote: “Now it may be that Yanamamo
warriors, queer-stoning Islamists and gay Dutch vegans are all living
out various dialects of morality, but if so, then it turns out that
morality is a pretty useless category.”[138] As Marshall Sahlins writes,
“the general only exists in particular forms.”[139] A norm without a
content is like an outside without an inside. As Nietzsche wrote: “No
people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain
itself it must not evaluate as its neighbor evaluates.”[140]
What about “thou shalt not steal”? Obviously, what counts as stealing
varies widely. What’s property in one society is theft in another
society. That’s from Proudhon! There are societies where “Theft and
adultery are spoken of as admired virtues if one can evade detection and
accomplish them successfully.”[141] I won’t devote much time to showing
that the incest taboo has no universal meaning. In some societies you’re
forbidden to marry the cousins whom you’re required to marry in the next
valley.[142] In American law, some states permit, and others prohibit,
first-cousin marriage. Father/daughter incest (as in the case of Noah)
is sometimes condoned by the Old Testament. Brother/sister marriage was
practiced by the Ptolemy dynasty in Egypt, by Hawaiian royal
families,[143] and elsewhere.[144] In the first through third centuries
A.D. in Roman Egypt, brother/sister marriage was common.[145] Even in
traditional, kin-based societies, “at least 5–10% of young people marry
someone they’re not supposed to.”[146] Truly, as Blaise Pascal wrote –
in the 17^(th) century! – “Larceny, incest, parricide, everything has at
some time been accounted a virtuous action.”[147]
Probably aboriginal Marquesan culture is like the Yanomamo culture and
many others: incest did occur, but, “while disapproved, was not regarded
as very serious.”[148] As zoologist Marston Bates wrote, “perhaps the
universal incest taboo exists chiefly in the minds of social
scientists.”[149] Maybe mother/son incest is universally execrated.[150]
(Freud had his doubts.) But how do you get a human right out of it?
Lying? Jesuits and other subtle Christian theologians have so far
elaborated justifications for lying that there’s a name for what they
do: casuistry. In international politics, it’s called diplomacy. To
mention only one ethnographic example: “Navajo morality is ...
contextual rather than absolute ... Lying is not always and everywhere
wrong. The rules vary with the situation.”[151] Honesty is not always
the best policy: “We probably would never have made it to the Fourth
Glacial Period if our ancestors had refused to tell a lie. Strategically
deployed, deception and self deception are survival enhancing social
tools.”[152]
The foundational texts of Western civilization are the books ascribed to
Homer. The Odyssey is largely a celebration of successful lying.[153]
Indeed, its hero’s greatest lie, the Trojan Horse, antedated his efforts
to lie his way back from Troy to Ithaca. Odysseus is the ultimate “man
of many turns,”[154] twists and turns, full of “twists and tricks.” He
escaped the Cyclops by lying about his own name. He got the jump on his
wife’s suitors in Ithaca by disguising himself as a beggar. Every time
he gets washed up on another shore, he improvises a fresh lie. On one of
these occasions, when he is finally home in Ithaca, he is met by his
patron goddess Athena, who is in disguise. After he ad libs a lot of
lies, she reveals herself – not to reprove his lies, but to laugh at
him.[155]
Except for the custom of hospitality – which is not universal[156] —
there is no trace of morality, universal or particular, in Homer. C.S.
Lewis was a historian of the Middle Ages, and a public school boy, and
thus thoroughly familiar with classical literature. And yet he can imply
that the morality of Homer (and of Aristotle, for that matter) differs
only “slightly” from the Victorian Protestant morality which still
prevailed at Oxford in the 1940’s! It took someone like Nietzsche – a
classical philologist — who rejected that morality, to appreciate just
how utterly different Greek values were.[157]
Lying and cheating are, ironically, on Hauser’s short list of innate
moral universals.[158] But if there is any society where they are
unconditionally reprobated, he does not identify it. The most widespread
moral idea is probably the double standard. The rules are different as
applied to “us” and “them.” The greater the social distance between
people, and peoples, the less virtuous it is to be honest, even to the
point that dishonesty is the norm when dealing with strangers.[159]
Hauser quotes Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “I ought never to
act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should
become a universal law.”[160] In other words, a valid moral maxim must
be universalizable. But that is just a formality, easily gotten around
by careful phrasing. A rule that how honestly to treat people depends on
how closely they are related to one is perfectly general.
Even if there were universally accepted moral values (as of now) – so
what? Everybody used to believe things that nobody believes now. The
earth does revolve around the sun. And it isn’t flat. Thomas Kuhn, the
historian of science, wrote that “all past beliefs about nature have
sooner or later turned out to be false.”[161] This has to be even more
true of human nature, which supposedly generates moral values. These
ideas are obviously based on the religions and moralities of particular
societies. But what most people believe, or what Christians believe, or
what paranoid schizophrenics believe, just because they believe it,
doesn’t prove a thing, except that they believe it.
At the conference that adopted the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, the Saudi Arabian delegate “emphasized the fact that apparently
the authors of the draft declaration had for the most part taken into
consideration only the standards recognized by Western civilization and
had ignored more ancient civilizations which were past the experimental
stage, and the institutions of which, for example marriage, had proved
their wisdom through the centuries. It was not for the Committee to
proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all the others or to
establish uniform standards for all the countries in the world.”[162]
It is by now generally, if grudgingly recognized, that no international
consensus on even the concept of human rights exists, much less a
consensus on their content. It’s a relatively recent, and peculiarly
Western idea. It is not how traditional cultures conceive of social
relations.[163] In most of the world’s states, “human rights as defined
by the West are rejected or more accurately, are meaningless.”[164]
What I especially like is the implication that Western civilization is
still in the “experimental stage.” I hope so.
Morality is a very odd thing. In the words of the Australian philosopher
J.W. Mackie: “If there were objective values, then they would be
entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly
different from anything else in the universe.”[165] About all you can
say about them is what they’re not. They aren’t matter or energy. They
aren’t animal, vegetable or mineral. They aren’t like colors, or
flavors, or odors, or anything you can perceive through your five
senses. Objective values don’t have any of the attributes which
philosophers discuss when they discuss the nature of objective reality,
things like substance, qualities, form, relation, attributes, and
extension.[166]
There’s a word for something which you can only describe by saying what
it isn’t. The word is nothing.[167] “But nothing cannot be an object of
thought.”[168] Consider this. The most influential moral philosopher in
the 20^(th) century, in the English-speaking world, was G.E. Moore. He
decided, in 1903, that objective moral values are non-natural,
unanalysable qualities.[169] To say that moral qualities are non-natural
is to say that they aren’t part of natural reality. Anything not part of
natural reality is not real. To say that they are unanalysable means,
for Moore, that they are simple, atomic, in the sense that you can’t
analyse them, break them down, any further. They’re not based on
anything else. They’re just there. But if moral values are non-natural,
they aren’t there. Just like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there is no
“there” there.[170] Moore later repudiated this theory.[171]
There are no primitive, atomic, irreducible, or unanalysable qualities
of anything. The atom, by etymology if not by definition, cannot be
split, but, it has been split, with grave consequences. Ludwig
Wittgenstein – who had earlier held a different opinion – concluded
“that it was senseless to talk of a ‘final’ analysis.”[172]
But even if moral values are out there, how can you derive natural law
and natural rights from something that isn’t natural? Or vice versa?
Moore didn’t mention rights. I have to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche:
“There are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of
these phenomena.”[173] I think this is the most important idea of the
19^(th) century.
The cause of human rights appeals to tender-hearted people. They like to
think that if somebody wants a new right strongly enough, sure, let her
have it. But that leads to trouble. Millions of Americans believe that a
woman has the right to abort a fetus. They call it the right to choose.
Millions of other Americans believe that the fetus has the right to
life. The true believers on each side explain that the contradiction is
more apparent than real. It’s simple, really. We’re right. They’re
wrong. The only universally accepted opinion about morality is “I’m
right, you’re wrong.”
However, there are some contradictions which are not so easy to dispose
of. Each rights-claim sounds great – until you notice that it
contradicts another rights-claim that also sounds great. An example is
two rights which are in the U.S. Bill of Rights and also in the UN
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One right is freedom of the
press. The other one is the right to a fair trial. How can they
contradict each other? It happens all the time when there’s a
sensational crime in the news. The free press publishes whatever the
prosecutor says about the case, because it’s legitimate news. Many
people read these stories. They don’t have any reason not to believe
them. It’s impossible to prevent potential jurors from reading
newspapers.[174]
But a defendant has, in the United States, a right to a jury trial. The
jurors will be drawn from the population which is reading the news
stories. Because of that, some of them will probably be prejudiced
against the defendant. In a really sensational case, like a political
assassination, it’s impossible to find open-minded jurors. The situation
isn’t much different where there isn’t trial by jury. Judges read the
newspapers too. I will only add that the U.S. Supreme Court has been
struggling with the conflict since 1807,[175] with results which are
universally regarded as unsatisfactory.
In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna declared that
“all human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and
related.”[176] That is certainly false.[177] Rights are pouring out of
multilateral treaties, United Nations bureaus, and semi-official
conferences of human-rights activists. In the 17^(th) century, for
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke there were two or three natural rights at
most. In the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
there are, by my count, 13 rights. In the American Bill of Rights, I
count 23. In the UN Universal Declaration of 1948 there are at least 44.
In the 2010 edition of a collection of just the “basic” human rights
documents there are 1,261— not rights, but pages.[178]
Here is my thesis: as rights increase arithmetically, contradictions
between rights increase geometrically. Do the math.[179]
Trial by jury is not on everyone’s human rights list. It is not
practiced in much of the world. But there’s one contradiction between
rights that everybody’s heard of: Majority rule vs. minority rights.
Every right is a restriction on the majority’s right to govern as it
sees fit. But majority rule is a human right too. There’s no getting
around that one.
The claim that rights cannot conflict is absurd.[180] Rights are
“trumps.”[181] They prevail over laws, customs, policies, good manners,
majorities, and the preferences of other people. A right is a
(metaphorically) irresistible force. But a right is also a
(metaphorically) immoveable object. A right trumps everything, but
nothing trumps a right. It follows that the possibility of rights in
conflict, as William Godwin saw, renders the concept of rights
incoherent: “The rights of one man cannot clash with or be destructive
of the rights of another; for this, instead of rendering the subject an
important branch of truth and morality, as the advocates of the rights
of man certainly understand it to be, would be to reduce it to a heap of
unintelligible jargon and inconsistency.... From hence it inevitably
follows that men have no rights.”[182] Rights called absolute “may
easily conflict with one another.”[183]
With his usual obtuseness, Noam Chomsky denounces this truth – which is
closer to self-evidence than any right is – as sinister “relativism”:
“There are no moral grounds for self-serving ‘relativism,’ which selects
for convenience; still less for the particularly ugly form of relativism
that converts the UD [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] into a
weapon to wield selectively against designated enemies.”[184] There are
no moral grounds for self-righteous absolutism, either.
Even if rights don’t contradict each other, every right has a dark side.
More rights don’t mean more freedom. If they did, we should invent even
more of them, thousands of rights, tens of thousands of rights. Rights
are unconditionally good, so you can’t have too many rights, right?
Wrong. Every right in one person imposes a duty on other people to
respect that right, “for, as all social duties are of a relative nature,
at the same time that they are due from one man, or set of men, they
must also be due to another.”[185] A right imposes a duty on someone
else, or maybe on everyone else, or maybe on the state.
Superficially, that last part looks good to those of us who want to
reduce state power. But it’s not that simple. Even a right against the
state isn’t usually just a right against the state. Enforcing it will
often involve limiting the freedom of other people besides government
functionaries. The right to a fair trial, which I’ve discussed, doesn’t
impose any duties on the general population, except that taxpayers pay
for the court system.[186] But, as I explained, even that right may
impose duties on the press — duties which blatantly restrict the freedom
of the press. That’s just one example.
And if there are rights against the State, what about the rights of the
State? How can the State enforce your precious rights unless it has
rights too? Unless it has the right to enforce rights? And the power.
Rights believers talk as if there can be rights without power. That’s
impossible. To enforce rights, the state has to use coercion, violence.
That’s what the State is — institutionalized coercion. We are told that
the State, unless maybe it is tyrannical, has the right to the
allegiance of the people.[187]
It may well be that the more rights the State enforces, the more power
it needs to enforce them. But a State with more power to enforce rights
has more power to do anything. It has more power to violate rights.
Enforcing rights might not be its highest priority. As far as I know, it
never is.
Rights strengthen the State. They also legitimate it. Most contemporary
political philosophers argue that if a State is somewhat respectful of
human rights, then the citizens owe it a duty of obedience. The State
then has a right to be obeyed. And the State will make sure that that
right will be respected. Human rights can be spun in such a way as to
justify anything, such as America’s current aggressive wars against
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. The State of Israel regards Jewish
colonization of the West Bank, which it has illegally controlled for
over 60 years, as an exercise of human rights by the settlers. Their
removal would be “ethnic cleansing.” This is an egregious, but by no
means unique example of the human right to dominate.[188] Human rights
are part of the new ideology of Western domination. According to Simon
Crichley,
Military neoliberalism is what best characterizes the state of the
western world. At the heart of this category is the idea of a
unification of neoliberal economics with a certain universalization of
democracy and human rights talk – which is ultimately back up with
military force. So the situation we’re in is one where other regimes
have to accept the logic of capitalism, accept the ideology of democracy
and human rights – and if they don’t accept that, they’re going to be
bombed.[189]
You never get something for nothing. The inflation of rights doesn’t
enhance, or even sustain, the value of rights. It devalues rights in
general.[190] The idea that inventing more rights increases freedom is
like the idea that printing more money increases wealth.[191]
Rights are supposed to single out certain choices or interests for
special protection.[192] I claim that the more rights are multiplied,
the more they’re likely to interfere with each other. But even if they
didn’t, rights, as they proliferate, can only be extended to choices and
interests which are less and less important. That means that people will
be less and less inclined to respect them. The Universal Declaration
recognizes the universal right of conscience. But is also recognizes a
universal right to paid vacations. Rights are supposed to be special.
But if everything is special, nothing is special.
And do we want to live in a society where, every time there’s a conflict
or a problem, people reach for their rights? Where, whenever people have
a dispute, instead of trying to resolve it mutually, everybody cries
out, my right is bigger than your right? Primitive – anarchist –
societies are innocent of the idea of rights, and commonly they address
interpersonal conflicts, not as winner-take-all combats or occasions for
punishment, but as problems to be resolved as harmoniously as
possible.[193]
Where do human rights come from? Modern legal rights come from law,
usually from legislators. In some legal systems, they also come from
monarchs or from court decisions. Law comes from a lawgiver. There was a
time when philosophers and others thought that God was a Lawgiver. He
decreed the moral law, just as He decreed the laws of science. Even
Thomas Paine, a notorious freethinker, believed in “the illuminating and
divine principles of the equal rights of man (for it [sic] has its
origin from the maker of man) ... “[194] In order to believe this, you
have to believe in God, if only the minimalist Deity of Paine’s Deism.
But the arguments against God are even more compelling than the
arguments against natural law and natural rights. If, as Michael J.
Perry says, the idea of human rights is “ineliminably religious,”[195]
then it is ineliminably wrong.
Even if you do believe in God, the idea of God as the source of moral
laws is fatally flawed. Are the laws of God good because He decreed
them, as William of Occam and Samuel Pufendorf believed, or did God
decree them because they’re good, as Hugo Grotius believed?[196] If
they’re good only because He decrees them, which is what Martin Luther
believed, that makes God out to be an arbitrary tyrant. If He changes
His mind tomorrow, good becomes evil and evil becomes good. He might
require tomorrow everything that He forbids today. Tomorrow He might
require you to covet thy neighbor’s wife and thy neighbor’s ass, or,
like Noah, marry your daughters, or, like Abraham, sacrifice your son.
It’s hard to believe that even religious people, whose capacity for
irrational belief is almost unlimited, believe this.[197]
But if, on the other hand, good and evil exist independently of God (as
Plato and Locke argued), then good and evil would exist even without a
God. He then doesn’t create the moral law: at best, He reveals it. He’s
not omnipotent if He doesn’t have the power to change His mind. You
can’t say that God is good unless you have some independent criterion of
what is good. But if you do, then you don’t need Him to tell you what’s
good. His approval adds nothing, and His disapproval would take away
nothing.
The modern approach to human rights is to ground them in human nature.
This gets around the God problem, because you don’t need to believe in
God to believe in human nature. But if you happen to believe in God,
then the moral law is something God created indirectly, by creating
human nature. That’s the Catholic doctrine, perhaps. However, this move
is out of the frying pan, into the fire. Human nature is almost as
mysterious as God.
The problem here is that nobody, not even Noam Chomsky,[198] knows what
human nature is. And nobody knows how to find out what it is. Human
rights advocates have to insist that human nature is the same
everywhere. If it isn’t, then you can’t derive universal rights from
particular people in particular societies at particular times. Even
Rousseau doubted that it was possible to separate what is original from
what is artificial in human nature.[199] In fact, it is impossible. “No
doctrine of human nature has yet indicated its independence from the
social order in which it has appeared.”[200] But even if that could be
done, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz says, the question still
remains whether such universals should be taken as central elements in
the definition of man: whether a lowest-common-denominator view of
humanity is what we want anyway.[201] Is man’s essence what is best in
him, what’s most important to him, or what’s unique to him, or what’s
universal about him? Is there any reason to believe that these are all
the same thing?
There is a long history of specifying what is uniquely human. It has
been so unsuccessful that it gets to be genuinely funny. Primatologist
Frans de Waal writes: “True, humanity never runs out of claims of what
sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over
a decade.”[202] Stephen Jay Gould wrote: “The intellectual world is
littered with systems that pushed consistency to the ends of the earth
and the bounds of rationality, but then stepped aside and made an
exception for human uniqueness.”[203] Man, it was said, is uniquely a
tool user. Tool use is so common among other animals that this one had
to be dropped.[204] Well, then, maybe animals can use tools they find
lying around, but they can’t make tools as homo faber can. Alas, some
animals make tools. Friedrich Engels thought that work is what turned
apes into men: “In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and
brings about changes in it merely by his presence; man by his changes
makes it serves his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential
distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour
that brings about this distinction.”[205] Well, this draws the line, as
usual, in the wrong place, because hunter-gatherer bands often use their
environments without changing them. In this respect, we should follow
their example. There’s this big problem: “Recent work with some great
apes has blurred some human/nonhuman distinctions.”[206] No recent work,
or not so recent work, has ever confirmed any human/nonhuman
distinctions.
Language, according to Noam Chomsky and too many others, is uniquely
human. Alas, quite a few of the higher primates – including one named
Nim Chimpsky – have been taught American Sign Language. They converse,
not only with humans, but with each other. Did they invent language? Not
that we know of. But who knows whether they would have, if left alone
for another million years or so? As far as I know, no contemporary human
has invented a natural language either. Koko and Nim Chimpsky and Noam
Chomsky and I all speak English and we all had to learn it. None of us
invented it. I might be accused of a certain inventive use of language.
No one will ever accuse Chomsky of that.
Cognitive psychologists – none of whom have actually studied animal
behavior – have made up one distinctive (and presumably defining) human
characteristic after another, and every time one of them gets knocked
down, they trick up another one. All animal behavior cannot, as they
used to claim (when they were behaviorists), be explained as conditioned
responses. Animals don’t anticipate the future, they claim. But some of
them do.[207] Primate ethologist Frans de Waal calls this ploy “moving
the goalposts.”[208]
The traits which supposedly define us as human are always — except for
authors who are being ironic or satiric — fine and noble. But there’s no
reason why the human essence, if there is one, has to be something to be
proud about. If humans are the only animals capable of lying, as Edmund
Leach suggested, or capable of instituting private property, as Paul
Elmore More suggested,[209] it might be better if we were not so
special. But we don’t deserve even these dubious plaudits. Chimpanzees
are capable of deception.[210]
Traditionally, the great champions of human uniqueness were Christians.
Man is unique because of Original Sin. Modern human rights-mongers never
mention this, not even the Catholics. Indeed, for Christians, human
nature is both divine and bestial – both more than human and less than
human. According to Pascal: “Whence it is clearly evident that man
through Grace is made like unto God and shares his divinity, and without
grace he is treated like the beasts of the field.”[211]
Might there be specific sins which are definitively anthropocentric,
such as gay sins like fellatio, tribadism and mutual masturbation? Once
again, alas, these perversions are popular among bonobos, a species of
ape which is closely related to humans.[212] Some biologists have
asserted that female orgasm is unique to humans. However, female
stump-tailed monkeys and chimps (who have a clitoris) have orgasms.[213]
Man is not even the only primate which smokes pot, or rolls joints.[214]
I will quote the great one, Noam Chomsky,[215] again. Chomsky has
written, at various times, that we don’t know what human nature is, but
that we have to “posit” what it is, in order to engage in left-wing
politics.[216] “Posit” means, make up something you like and pretend
that it’s true. Thus spake Chomsky:
“The core part of anyone’s point of view is some concept of human
nature,” he lectures us, “however it may be remote from awareness or
lack articulation.” That’s condescending. Chomsky must believe, as Lenin
believed, that consciousness has to be brought to the unaware,
inarticulate masses by aware, articulate Marxist intellectuals like
Lenin and Chomsky. But, Chomsky goes on to say: “At least, that is
people who consider themselves moral agents, not monsters.”[217] There
he goes again. Unless you believe in a fixed, innate human nature from
which you can read off human rights, you’re a moral monster and you
should have the decency to shut up. But you can’t expect decency from
moral monsters like me.
Human nature is historical, contingent.[218] Don’t we have to face the
dread possibility that different kinds of humans have different human
natures and therefore they have different human rights, if they do have
rights? According to the feminist Luce Iragaray, “The natural is at
least two: male and female.”[219] If that’s true, it blows the hell out
of the idea of universal rights. Men and women would have different
rights, at least some different rights. It would then be impossible for
men and women to co-exist in the same society. The idea that there are
“natural kinds” of anything is, as W.V. Quine demonstrated, a primitive,
pre-scientific prejudice:
In general, we can take it as a very special mark of the maturity of a
branch of science that it no longer needs an irreducible notion of
similarity and kind. It is that final stage where the animal vestige is
wholly absorbed into the theory. In this career of the similarity
notion, starting in its innate phase, developing over the years in the
light of accumulated experience, passing from the intuitive phase into
theoretical similarity, and then disappearing altogether, we have a
paradigm of the evolution of unreason into science.[220]
“It may be neither accident nor immaturity that science has managed
until now without consistent, uniform definitions of natural
kinds.”[221]
Something else science has learned to do without is “purpose.” As
Bertrand Russell said, “’purpose’ is a concept that is scientifically
useless.”[222] “Sciences could not get started,” wrote legal philosopher
Lon L. Fuller, “until interest shifted from the why to the how.”[223]
A psychologist named Carol Gilligan studied what men and women think
about morality.[224] She concludes that men tend to think about morality
as rights against other people. Women tend to think about morality as
caring for other people. So there may be important differences between
the ways men and women think about morality and rights. The very concept
of rights may be gendered.
I don’t believe in this theory of a gendered dual theory of human
nature. If it were true, now we would have to identify two human
natures. We have yet to identify even one. But I share the feminists’
skepticism about a generic, unisex human nature. They’re quite right
when they say that declarations of the rights of man are really
declarations of the rights of men.
It seems to me that, if human rights are based on human nature, they
should be individualized. Everybody should have his own special rights
because everybody is unique. Everyone should live in his own
cathedral.[225] All people can then be individual and universal at the
same time.[226] Here I shall quote Max Stirner: “The ‘human being,’ as
concept or attribute, does not exhaust you, because it says what is
human and what a human being is, because it is capable of being defined
so that you remain completely out of play.” For Stirner, the abstract
human being doesn’t exist. As he puts it: “Are you a concept?”[227]
I’ve said that you can’t detect moral truths by the use of the five
senses. Admitting this, some moral philosophers claim that you can
detect moral truths with a sixth sense: the “moral sense.”[228] Marc
Hauser cites Smith.[229] The modern word for it is “intuitionism.” An
occult third eye. Just as there’s a sense of smell, there’s a sense of
moral. Adam Smith believed this. Amazingly, the anarchist sage Kropotkin
expressly agreed with him.[230] So does Noam Chomsky, who can always be
counted on to get something wrong. Like Spiderman, he has a sense that
tingles when evil lurks. Modern philosophers have been brusque about
this.[231]
Rene Descartes located the soul in the pineal gland, because he thought
it didn’t serve any other purpose, and every organ must serve a purpose.
Actually, it does serve a function. It produces melatonin, which
regulates our sleep cycles.[232] Maybe the moral sense is in there too.
We know the moral sense isn’t in the appendix or the tonsils, which
serve no purpose. When they’re removed, the patient’s moral views remain
the same.
Human rights are said to be the rights which belong to human beings,
just because they’re human. That can’t be taken seriously. Being human
means being human, but that doesn’t require or entail that humans have
rights. Do cockroaches have cockroach rights which belong to
cockroaches, just because they’re cockroaches? I hope not. I hate
cockroaches. I don’t respect their rights. What about poor Gregor Samsa?
To say that human rights are the rights of humans, doesn’t say anything.
It doesn’t do anything to show that human rights are any more real than
cockroach rights. We have no special claim to be the center of the
universe.[233]
Human rights are also said to be inherent. Ever since the American
Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man, everybody says this. Everybody says that everyone is born with
these inherent rights. But nobody has proven that humans are born with
human rights the way that humans are born with eyes and ears. Humans
have always known about their eyes and ears. They haven’t known about
human rights until very recently. Some people still haven’t heard about
their human rights. And even some people like me, people who have heard
of human rights, don’t believe in them.
In the 18^(th) century, the French philosophes announced that there are
various natural rights. They said that they are “inscribed in the human
heart.” These thinkers included Denis Diderot and various speakers in
the French Assembly in 1789. This led directly to the Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which is the ancestor of all modern human rights
declarations. But no cardiologist ever found natural rights inscribed in
any human heart. If he did, the condition might require human rights
bypass surgery. According to the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain:
“[Natural rights are] written, they say, in the hearts of men. True, but
in the hidden depths, as hidden from us as our own heart.”[234]
In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence declared that there
are “self-evident” rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.” But self-evidence is a very weak support for anything. If
rights are self-evident, everybody would know them. Everybody would have
always known them. But everybody doesn’t know them. If I may quote the
contemporary moral philosopher Jeremy Waldron, “No one in the trade now
believes that the truths we have come up with are ‘self-evident’ or
that, if two people disagree about rights, one of them at least must be
corrupt or morally blind.”[235] Noam Chomsky, as we saw, thinks
otherwise.
The modern fashion is to assert that the human person has rights because
he is (or is it that his rights are?) inviolable. But if he were
inviolable, or they were, he wouldn’t need human rights. People, and
their rights, are very violable. If a person is defined as “a being with
which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties,”[236] then the
derivation of rights from personhood is a tautology, and so is the
derivation of personhood from rights, if that is what this fumbling
philosopher is trying to say. Persons must surely be a very recent
arrival on the political scene.
Another popular ploy is that human rights are derived from the
fundamental value of human dignity. The Preamble to the UN Universal
Declarations begins:
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation
of freedom, justice and peace in the world ... “ Now this is blatantly
obscurantist. Inherent dignity and inalienable rights — are these one
thing or two? By is does the Preamble mean would be? As Bentham wrote,
reasons for wanting rights, are not rights, any more than hunger is
bread.
Some people say that respect for human dignity entails human
rights.[237] Other people say that respect for human dignity is a human
right. This is circular. I can’t call it a circular argument, though,
because it isn’t even an argument. This is such drivel that I don’t feel
like saying a lot about it. Tenured academics write this rubbish. I have
often wondered how tenured philosophy professors can pass each other in
the hall without laughing.
Obviously conceptions of dignity and respect are radically different in
different cultures. In many societies, “human dignity is culturally
defined in terms of excelling in the fulfillment of one’s obligation to
the group, a concept that has been incorporated in a radically different
form [this is an understatement] in socialist ideology.”[238]
Traditional Muslim women and Western feminists have utterly different
ideas about dignity and respect between men and women. What some people
want proves absolutely nothing except that some people want something.
Although this is difficult for Westerners to accept, Muslims who concern
themselves with human rights sincerely believe that, properly
understood, human rights are compatible with state “implementation” of
Sharia law.[239] (This is where the Saudi delegate was coming from.) The
intellectuals who justify some authoritarian regimes (such as Singapore)
promote an ideology of “Asian values” which “places the welfare of the
whole society over the rights of any individual. The basic human right,
in this argument, is to participate in a ‘harmonious society,’ and
individual interests may have to be sacrificed to this end.”[240] That’s
soft fascism. It is the right not to have rights.
What these servants of power really mean is the sacrifice of the
individual, not to the “society,” but to the state. There’s nothing
especially harmonious about hyper-capitalism in Singapore and Indonesia,
or in the African kleptocracies, where a similar ideology is peddled. It
is only after traditional society is beleaguered that anybody worries
about traditional values.[241] One reason why the Third World is not
very receptive to Western-style human rights is that after World War II
these rights were “part and parcel of Cold War politics,” they were “by
and large, at the service of the economic and geopolitical interests of
the hegemonic capitalist states.”[242] Chairman Mao was right: that part
of the world has no use for natural rights.[243] Neither does any other
part of the world.
According to another recent formulation, “for some, the foundation of
human rights can be traced to the twin ideas that human beings are born
equal in dignity and rights” – exactly: they are born with neither –
“and that all human beings have to be treated with equal concern and
respect.”[244] If they are “twin ideas” they are one idea – but which
one? The first is a statement of purported fact – an “is” statement —
about newborn babies. It is false. They are often, by any standard,
undignified, and certainly not of equal dignity. The second is a
typically bullying “ought” statement telling people what they have to
do. The author fails to explain what he, or anybody, means by
“dignity.”[245]
Somebody might say that the human rights idea, even if it isn’t really
true, is useful. It’s what Plato called a “noble lie.” That of course
confirms my thesis that human rights (in which Plato did not believe)
are a myth. Now I don’t believe that honesty is an objective moral
value, since I don’t believe in objective moral values. But for me, it’s
a subjective value, and for many other people too. A moral crusade
shouldn’t rest on an immoral basis. If only because eventually people
will catch on. The noble lie told by Plato’s Guardians is “a remedy
which in in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might
have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure.”[246]
But, is the human rights idea useful? At certain times, for certain
people. In the American and French Revolutions, for example, it was
especially useful for merchant-smugglers, slave-owning plantation
owners, pamphleteers, upwardly mobile provincial lawyers (such as
Robespierre and John Adams), and urban demagogues. I agree with Marx –
and I don’t do this very often – that there’s something inherently
capitalist about rights-talk. Rights aren’t suitable for all forms of
society. They aren’t suitable for the kind of society I prefer. Today,
“Universalism never provides a framework for action. We see this very
clearly with respect to humanitarianism and human rights.”[247]
You can sometimes mobilize people politically around an idea of rights.
The American civil rights movement of the 1960’s is the example usually
cited.[248] It might be the only example. It may that human rights is
just about the only political idea that people now understand,[249]
although there’s no reason to believe that they do. But rights aren’t
inherently progressive. I mentioned the so-called right to life, which
means, the right of fetuses (of which the fetuses are unaware) not to be
aborted, and the duty of women not to have abortions. That claim
mobilized millions of religious conservatives who had been politically
quiescent until then. Rights are often politically useful to their
advocates, at least.[250] Human rights are metaphorical rights:
rhetorical rights. They can be proposed ironically or satirically, for
example, The Right to Be Lazy and The Right to Be Greedy.[251] Raoul
Vaneigem was probably only half-serious about his A Declaration of the
Rights of Human Beings.[252]
But there is reason to doubt the efficacy of really existing human
rights as set forth in national constitutions. In a survey of such
guarantees, they were widely disrespected, in the sense that there was
less than 50% compliance with them in 11 out of 15 nation-states. Even
for such important rights as freedom from torture, and the right to a
fair trial, compliance rates were only 12.3% and 22.9%, respectively. In
a final rebuke to rights enthusiasts, “Not only do countries often fail
to live up to their promises, they perform worse than countries that
refrain from promising in the first place.”[253] “For all the legal and
bureaucratic energy invested in creating the global HR regime, the
standards set out in international law continue to be infringed
widely.”[254]
My suggestion is: Don’t claim that your rights be respected. Demand that
your interests be served. Better yet, if you can, serve them
yourself.[255]
By proclaiming human rights, a state claims legitimacy. That enhances
its power. By violating human rights, a state also enhances its power.
No wonder that, as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice wrote: “Every banana
republic has a bill of rights.”[256] We return to where I began. Human
rights are myths. First, because they’re false. And second, because they
justify authority. For the state, human rights are a win/win situation.
I can think of some important political issues. Economic globalization,
for instance, or global warming. Does it advance the critique of
globalization to claim the right not to be globalized? Does it advance
the critique of global warming to claim the right not to be warmed?
Human rights are, in fact, part of the globalization package.[257]
Imagine, if you can (I am talking like Rod Serling on The Twilight
Zone), a utopia of rights. Every aspect of social life would be dictated
by rules. Because rights imply duties, rights impose rules. In every
interaction, the actions of individuals would be mediated by rights and
determined by rights. If the list of rights gets that long, it would
dictate a rigid code of behavior. A bill of rights would look like the
code of etiquette of the Chinese imperial court or the court of Louis
XIV. Maybe such a society would be more just that what we have now. But
would you want to live in it?
I began with an outrageous claim and I’ll end with another one. I say
that human rights are anti-social. The rights-holder is an isolated,
lonely individual. His relations with other people are mediated by legal
and moral abstractions. In fact the rights-holder is an abstraction, as
Max Stirner (and the Marxist E.B. Pashukanis[258]) pointed out. And as
Karl Marx wrote, in criticizing the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man:
“The right of man to freedom is not based on the association of man with
man but rather on the separation of man from man. It is the right of
this restriction, the right of the restricted individual, restricted to
himself.” [259] For philosophers, “the separation of persons [is] the
basic fact for morals.”[260] The world of rights is a cold and lonely
world. Everyone would live, not in his own cathedral, but in his own
stockade, armed to the teeth – with rights.
Rights-talk is a language of conflict, not harmony. Arguing about rights
is adversarial, like a fist fight, or a lawsuit, or an election.[261]
Once you start talking about your rights, all dialogue is at an end. A
dispute becomes a win or lose (or a lose and lose) situation. I quote
from Mary Ann Glendon, an American legal scholar: “Our rights talk, in
its absoluteness, promotes unrealistic expectations, heightens social
conflict, and inhibits social dialogue that might lead toward consensus,
accommodation, or at least the discovery of common ground.”[262]
An appeal to rights is an appeal to authority. An English legal
philosopher, John Austin,[263] criticized the idea of sacred and
inalienable rights (and I quote): “Parties which rest their pretensions
on the jargon to which I have adverted, must inevitably push to their
objects through thick and thin ... “ And he adds that if that doesn’t
work, “they must even take to their weapons, and fight the difference
out.”[264] Every claim of right is a veiled threat of violence.
Nowadays philosophers try to derive human rights from respect for human
dignity. That’s circular, since they usually assert that respect for
human dignity is one of those rights. And surely it is to trivialize
rights to consider all insulting and (in the normal meaning of the word)
disrespectful behavior as violations of universal human rights.[265]
There was some respect for human dignity long before anybody thought
about rights. Aristocrats have always been touchy about their dignity.
There should be more respect for human dignity, but, that has nothing to
do with the human rights ideology.
This is obvious from the historical reality of “shame cultures” (as
depicted in the Iliad and still practiced in traditional Mediterranean
societies).[266] Courtly manners were exquisitely dignified, without any
thought of rights. Human rights activists can be very undignified and
very rude.[267] Our era of human rights hasn’t made people more
dignified. And it hasn’t made them respect the dignity of others.
Conceptions of human dignity are culturally relative. Islamic or
Confucian ideas of human dignity are radically different from modern
Western ideas of human dignity. The Saudi Arabian delegate was right
about rights.
For most of the world’s oppressed people, their problem is not just that
their governments deny them “equal concern and respect,” in Ronald
Dworkin’s phrase.[268] Their problem is that their economies, societies,
governments and religions deny them the conditions for self-respect.
Among these conditions is a respect for what others call moral autonomy,
which governments, as governments, necessarily deny.[269] These include
the material conditions for the good life. People need, not rights, but
revolutions.
There is hardly a more preposterous idea about human rights – not even
the idea that they are universal and innately recognized – than the idea
of prominent political philosopher Alan Gewirth that human rights are
“necessary conditions of human action.”[270] If that were true, there
has been hardly any “human action” in human history and prehistory, and
not much of it even in our time. I have often brushed my teeth without a
thought for human rights.
Less extravagant, but just as ridiculous, is Neil MacCormick’s
contention: “The more basic the good, the more basic the right. Life and
factual liberty of action being among the conditions I shall abbreviate
as self-respect and the pursuit of contentment, he [the abstract man]
would suffer deprivation of his essential humanity.”[271] This academic
philosopher does not define “essential humanity,” but it’s easy to
recognize it as the “human nature” which I have, at least with respect
to objective morality and human rights, debunked. Human nature is much
ado about next to nothing. MacCormick mentions “respect for persons as
autonomous agents,”[272] but he does not explain whether this merely
means feeling warm and fuzzy about other people, or whether it means
letting anybody do whatever he pleases. Anything less than that, does
not respect people’s autonomy, because what use is autonomy unless it
means doing whatever you want?
My reader may think, MacCormick can’t be such an idiot as not to know
what I’m talking about. He probably does know. But I can only address,
not what he really thinks, but what he writes. Once Wile E. Coyote has
noticed that he has run off the cliff, he might as well keep running. He
was doing all right until he looked down.
According to the ideology: “Human rights aim to envisage and guarantee
the conditions necessary for the development of the human person
envisioned in the underlying moral theory of human nature, thereby
bringing into being that type of person.”[273] This formulation puts all
the rotten eggs in one basket. In the absence of a credible universal
moral human nature, “that type of person” is imaginary. Human beings
have in fact developed in highly diverse ways in, and out of, highly
diverse circumstances. Until recently (it must be, according to this
fairy tale), that higher types could not develop in states without
comprehensive guarantees of human rights, because until recently, no
such states existed. But the higher types developed all the same, not
only in states, but in stateless societies.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration “seems to assume that the
‘community’ one participates in and with which one identifies culturally
is the dominant one of the nation-state. There is no hint here of
multiculturalism or pluralism.”[274] The nationalist rulers of newly
independent states often more aggressively invade the rights of their
indigenous peoples (if these rights include their land base and their
cultural autonomy) than the European colonialists did. In so doing, they
follow the American example.
Some people might regard Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, or Jesus as
highly evolved paragons of virtue. Other, more tough-minded people might
consider to be the men of the highest type (it is always men) such men
as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Robespierre, Napoleon, or even
Lenin or Hitler. Over a billion people would unhesitatingly identify
Mohammed as the greatest man who ever lived. Most of these great ones
knew nothing of rights. Clearly human rights are not the necessary
condition of greatness, however defined, if any of these men were great.
Are they a sufficient condition either? “But a government which does in
fact protect human rights will radically transform human nature.”[275]
Is there a single example of this happening? Or is this like Trotskyist
and Stalinist promises to create the New Socialist Man through social
engineering?[276] It’s better to keep the lid on the Skinner box.
For a utopian anarchist like myself, the good society isn’t based on
claiming rights and following rules. It would be a decentralized, mostly
face-to-face society, not a society of strangers. It would be based on
mutual familiarity and understanding, and common interests, not on
individual rights. I prefer a face-to-face society to an in-your-face
society. It would not impose a morality of duty. Its members might
prefer an ethics of aspiration.[277] Or just act as intelligent egoists.
Aristotle wrote that when people are friends, they don’t need
justice.[278] The gay socialist Edward Carpenter wrote that, between
lovers, there are no duties and no rights.[279] I say that when people
are friends, they don’t need human rights. We need, not more rights, but
more friendship. And more power. As Nietzsche wrote, once all are equal,
nobody needs rights any more.[280]
[1] Speech at Hangchow, Dec. 21, 1965, quoted in Chairman Mao Talks to
the People, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 234–35.
The Prime Minister of Iran said, in a 1976 interview: “We seek the
West’s technology only, not its ideology. What we wish to avoid is an
ideological transplant.” Quoted in E.F. Schumacher, “Technology &
Political Change,” This I Believe and Other Essays (Foxhole, Dartington,
England: Resurgence Books, 1997), 99.
[2] Lewis Henkin, “Introduction,” The International Bill of Rights: The
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ed. Lewis Henkin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980).
[3] Joel Feinberg, “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations,”
Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 160.
[4] Jules L. Coleman & Allen Buchanan, “Preface,” In Harm’s Way: Essays
in Honor of Joel Feinberg, ed. Jules L. Coleman & Allen Buchanan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), v.
[5] William G. Doty, Mythography (2d ed.; Tuscaloosa, AL & London:
University of Alabama Press, 2001), 28–29.
[6] Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge; Cambridge University
Press, 2001), xi-xii & passim.
[7] Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1954), 181–84 (originally1926); idem,
Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1926), 8.
[8] Enrico Manicardi, Free From Civilization, trans. Will Schutt &
Alberto Prunetti, ed. Alice Parmon (n.p.: Green Anarchy Press, 2012),
107. Jared Diamond has recently written: “I don’t use the word ‘myth’ in
its pejorative sense of ‘a lie,’ but instead in its neutral sense of ‘a
traditional story, ostensibly with a historical basis, but serving to
explain some phenomenon or to promote some purpose.’” Upheaval: Turning
Points for Nations in Crisis (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2019), 433.
[9] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins
and Spread of Nationalism (2d ed.; London & New York: Verso, 1991).
“Myth,” wrote anthropologist E.R. Leach, “is a language of signs in
terms of which claims to rights and status are expressed, but it is a
language of argument, not a chorus of harmony.” Political Systems of
Highland Burma (3d ed.; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 78. Leach was a
student of Malinowski.
[10] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Holme & J. Roth
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1994). “It had to be believed in
suspension of judgment.” Irving L. Horowitz, “A Postscript to the
Anarchists,” in The Anarchists, ed. Irving L. Horowitz (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1964), 591.
[11] Peter N. Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: A
Cause Without Rebels (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1971); Horowitz, “A Postscript,” 591.
[12] Dorothy Emmet, Function, Purpose and Powers (2d ed.; Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1972), 93.
[13] Sorel’s concept of myth is illustrative of what has been called his
“sociological mysticism.” H. Stuart Hughes. Consciousness and Society:
The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (NY: Vintage
Books, 1961), 176.
[14] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949),
23.
[15] The Christian story has also been seen as myth in a less pejorative
sense: “A distinguished German theologian [Julius Schniewind] has
defined myth as ‘the expression of unobservables in terms of observable
phenomena.’ All stories which occur in the Bible are myths for the
devout Christian, whether they correspond to historical fact or not.”
Edmund Leach, “Genesis as Myth,” Genesis as Myth and Other Essays
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 7. Modern physics incorporates some
unobservables, but it is not, for that reason, mythical.
[16] Fulton Oursler, The Greatest Story Ever Told (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1949). In keeping with the traditional iconography of Western
Christendom, the actor cast as Jesus in the movie (1965) was Max von
Sydow – a Swede.
[17] Bob Black, “20 Questions,” The Abolition of Work and Other Essays
(Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, n.d. [1986]), 58.
[18] Quoted in Kyle Stevens, “Tossing Truths: Improvisation and
Performative Utterances of Nichols and May,” Critical Q. 52 (3) (2010),
34, available at www.academia.edu.
[19] Jeremy Waldron, “A Right to Do Wrong,” Liberal Rights: Collected
Papers, 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72.
[20] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York:
Penguin Books, 2005), 30.
[21] “Anarchist Morality,” Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed.
Roger N. Baldwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 100.
[22] Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. Louis S.
Friedland & Joseph R. Piroshnikoff (New York: The Dial Press, 1924).
Moral reasoning and legal reasoning, at least in their idealized forms,
are closely related. Samuel Stoljer, Moral and Legal Reasoning (London &
Basingstoke, England: The Macmillan Press, 1980).
[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Basic Writings
of Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern
Library, 1968), 501.
[24] Peter N. Stearns, Human Rights in World History (London & New York:
Routledge, 2012), 26–27.
[25] Leif Wenar, “Rights,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2011 ed.), 13, available at
http://plato.sanford.edu/archives/fall
2011/entries/rights.
[26] Bob Black, “Justice: Primitive and Modern: Dispute Resolution in
Anarchist and State Societies” (2016), available at
; e.g., Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone Books, 1989), 154
[27] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History
of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press,
2009), 113–14.
[28] Lucy Meir, Primitive Government (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books,
1961), 65. According to Pierre Clastres, “if there is something
completely foreign to an Indian [in South America], it is the concept of
giving an order and or having to obey, except under very special
circumstances such as prevail during a martial expedition.” Society
Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert
Hurley & Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 12; for other examples,
see Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern
Bolivia (rev. ed.; Garden City, NY: American Museum Science Books,
1969), 148–49; Bruce G. Trigger, “All People Are (Not) Good,” in The
Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice, ed. Jacqueline Solway
(New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 23 (Huron Indian communities
as recently as the 1970s).
[29] The Concept of Law (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1961), ch. 2.
[30] According to natural rights philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf: “It
is impossible that the divine promises not be fulfilled; but it would be
too arrogant for a mortal to presume that he had acquired a right over
God ... “ Quoted in Karl Olivecrona, Law as Fact (2d ed.; London:
Stevens & Sons, 1971), 290. The first edition of this book, published in
1939, does not include this quotation. The author writes: “The book here
presented in the usual sense; it is an entirely new book.” Ibid., vii.
[31] The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Steadman Jones & Ian
Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75.
[32] Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 261.
[33] Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense Upon
Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Phillip
Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin & Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002), 231; see also H.L.A. Hart, “The United States of America,”
Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 57.
[34] Southwest Africa Cases, 1966 I.C.J. 6, 48, ¶ 91, quoted in Daniel
J. Bederman, Custom as a Source of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 246.
[35] Tony Evans, Human Rights in the Global Political Economy: Critical
Processes (Boulder, CO & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011), 60.
[36] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3d ed.;
Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame Press, 2007), 69.
[37] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton &
Mary J. Norton (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 302.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett wails: “If ‘ought’ cannot be derived from
‘is,’ just what can it be derived from?” (quoted in Sam Harris, The
Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free
Press, 2010), 196 n. 13. Answer: it can’t.
[38] Except for societies, such as the Siriono of eastern Bolivia, where
people can only count to three.
[39] C.S. Lewis, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the
Universe,” The Case for Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1966), 4; Maurice Cranston, What Are Human Rights? (New York: Basic
Books, 1962), 18–19.
[40] Cf. Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law (Port Townsend, WA: Breakout
Publications, 1999), 24.
[41] Bob Black, “If You Do Go Against Nature, That’s Part of Nature
Too,” Beneath the Underground (Portland, OR: Feral House, 1994), 154;
Wilson, Natural Law, 10–16. “Laws of nature are not fiats.” Gilbert
Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), 76. If all
laws were like Newton’s laws, “the phrase ‘breaking a law’ would be
nonsense ... Unfortunately, traffic laws and similar products of
legislation can be broken, which makes the confusion easy.” Thomas S.
Kuhn, “Postscript,” The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d, enl.
ed.; Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 194 n.
13; see also Martin Landau, “Science and Political Science: Some
Observations on Prevailing Complaints,” Political Theory and Political
Science (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 28. “Anyone who
believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited
to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment.
(I live on the twenty-first floor.)” Alan Sokal, “A Physicist
Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May-June 1996),
http://www.physics.nyu.edu//faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
. He was the perpetrator of the Sokal Hoax. He got Social Text, a
leading postmodernist journal, to publish his article on the
“Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” – which was a gibberish
parody of PoMo jargon. Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge & London: The
MIT Press, 2018), 130–33 &190 nn. 11–13.
[42] Alf Ross, On Law and Justice, trans. Margaret Dutton (London:
Stevens, 1958), 261. Also: “Unfortunately, the domain of individuals who
have human rights poses a moral question which cannot be settled by
fiat.” Diana T. Meyers, Inalienable Rights: A Defense (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985), 2.
[43] Robert L. Carneiro, The Muse of History and the Science of Culture
(New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 199–200.
[44] Ibid., 201–202.
[45] H.A. Prichard, “Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of
Morals,” Moral Writings, ed. Jim MacAdam (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2002), 57–58; Hart, Concept of Law, 182.
[46] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, ed. Maudemarie Clark & Brian Leiter,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
103.
[47] Emile Durkheim, “The Determination of Moral Facts,” Sociology and
Philosophy, ed. J.G. Peristiany, trans. D.F. Pocock (New York: The Free
Press, 1974), 47. “The concept of morality, when imposed upon rational
and self-interested persons, gives rise to certain definite
constraints.” John Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” in Moral Concepts, ed.
Joel Feinberg (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123.
[48] Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View: A Rational Basis of Ethics
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 1. “Propitiation and
sacrifice, which are near-universals of religious practice, are acts of
submission to a dominant being.” Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The
Unity of Knowledge (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 258–59.
[49] Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 85. “Blame is the
characteristic reaction of the morality system.” Bernard Williams,
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 177. “Moral indignation is only a refined form of ancient
vengeance. Once anger spoke with daggers, now words will do.” Lev
Shestov, “All Things Are Possible,” All Things Are Possible &
Penultimate Words and Other Essays (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1977), 36.
[50] People do report strong intuitions about what is morally wrong –
but they can’t provide principled explanations. John Haidt, “The
Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to
Moral Judgment,” 108 Psych. Rev. (2003), 814.
[51] Lewis, “Right and Wrong,” 6. “In my impression ... any study of
anthropology will bear out the popular impression that just about the
only rule all tribes agree on is that is the one that says that people
who criticize the rules should be burned, toasted, boiled in oil or
otherwise discouraged from such heresy.” Wilson, Natural Law, 36.
[52] Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner (London
& New York: Verso, 2001), 60.
[53] Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time,” The Culture Industry: Selected
Essays on Mass Culture, ed. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 167.
[54] John Locke, Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, trans. Robert
Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, & Diskin Clay (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell
University Press, 1990), 141, quoted in Bob Black, “Chomsky on the Nod,”
Defacing the Currency: Selected Writings, 1992–2012 (Berkeley, CA: LBC
Books, 2012), 116–17. The essay on Chomsky was reprinted by Incog Press
(Manila, Philippines, 2015).
[55] Peter Laslett,”Introduction” to John Locke, Two Treatises of
Government (rev. ed.; New York & Toronto, Canada: Mentor Books, 1965),
95.
[56] John Dunn, Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 36. Locke knew that he had failed to do this.
Ibid., 37.
[57] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin
Books, 1966), 46.
[58] “Defense of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality,” Civilisation: Its
Cause and Cure and Other Essays (new & enl. Ed.; London: George Allen &
Company, 1910), 106 (originally published 1889). There is no such thing
as a permanent moral code. Ibid., 109, 110, 112, 123, 139.
[59] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? trans. Donald R. Kelley &
Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
[60] Quoted in Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46. Proudhon “preached a
fanatical morality.” No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, ed.
Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA & Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press and London:
Kate Sharpley Library, 2005), 39 (editor’s preface); see also Stewart
Edwards, “Introduction,” Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Frazer (Garden City, NY: Anchor
Books, 1969), 26–27. For an attack on his moralistic misogyny, see
Joseph Déjacques, “The Human Being, Male and Female,” available at
. “In New York, in 1858–1861, he [Déjacques] edited an anarchist
newspaper entitled Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, which may
be the first use of this word (in English, “libertarian”) “as a
convenient synonym for anarchist.” George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History
of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Press,
1965), 281*.
[61] Nietzsche, Daybreak, 2. Nietzsche, like Tolstoy, was an anarchist
who refused to call himself an anarchist because he did not want to be
identified with the people who were calling themselves anarchists.
[62] “Chomsky on Human Nature and Understanding,” in The Science of
Mind: Interviews with James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 102. I am not the first or the only anarchist to notice
that Chomsky isn’t one of us. “Chomsky’s Anarchism,” Anarchism and
Anarchists: Essays by George Woodcock (Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Quarry
Press, 1992), 224–228 (originally 1974); John Zerzan, “Who Is Chomsky?”
Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Los Angeles, CA:
Feral House, 2002), 140–143.
[63] Chris Bright, Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics
(New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 2016), 38.
[64] Black, “Chomsky on the Nod,” 125.
[65] John Monaghan & Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology (New
York & London: Sterling, 2010), 195.
[66] Karl Llewellyn, The Case Law System in America, ed. Paul Gewirtz,
trans. Michael Ansaldi (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 77.
[67] Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 78.
[68] Lewis, “Right and Wrong,” 5 (emphasis in the original).
[69] Ibid., 4.
[70] “Just think what a quite different morality would mean. Think of a
country where people were admired for running away in battle,” etc.
Ibid., 5. (Lewis’ polemic is based on a propaganda broadcast for the BBC
during World War II.) I can think of countries where pacifists refused
military service altogether: such as the Christians in the Roman Empire,
before they took it over. Courage in battle is a poor candidate for a
universal value. According to Wilfred Scawen Blunt: “What men call
courage is the least noble thing of which they boast.” Quoted in Benj.
R. Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One (2d ed.;
New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897), 422. Cowardice may not be
“admired,” but prudence is. Presumably this is why generals sometimes
order retreats. “If I were inlisted [sic] in an army of cowards, it
might be my duty to retreat, though absolutely considered it should have
been the duty of the army to come to blows.” Godwin, Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice, 392. While C.S. Lewis was exhorting Christian
soldiers onwards, British pacifists were going to prison. There are
primitive societies in which the approved reaction to aggression is for
everyone to run away. E.g., Robert Knox Dentan, The Semai: A Nonviolent
People of Malaya (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).
[71] Wilson, Natural Law, 36.
[72] Keith F. Otterbein, The Ultimate Coercive Sanction: A
Cross-Cultural Study of Capital Punishment (New Haven, Connecticut: HRAF
Press, 1986), xi-xii, 37–38.
[73] Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organization (3d ed.; Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1963), 202.
[74] “The slaying of a man is scarcely held by the law of any people to
be of itself a crime, but on the contrary it has been regarded as an
allowable or praiseworthy act under certain conditions, especially in
self-defense, war, revenge, punishment, and sacrifice.” Edward B. Tylor,
Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (New
York: D. Appleton and Company, 1907), 412. As Edmund Leach remarks,
“there is no particular action which is universally considered to be
sinful in all circumstances: to kill a neighbor is a crime, to kill an
enemy may be a duty.” Social Anthropology (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982), 115.
[75] Franz Boas, “Foreword” to Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
(New York: Dell, 1961), 10 (originally published 1928).
[76] Harris, Moral Landscape, 28
[77] Ibid., 28, 12, 34,
[78] Ibid., 182.
[79] Ibid., 62, 67.
[80] See, e.g., J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), 125–148; Derek
Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Bernard
Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in J.J.C. Smart & Bernard
Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973), 77–150.
[81] Harris, Moral Landscape, 72–73. He disposes of another difficulty:
“Free will is an illusion.” Ibid., 102–106.
[82] Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (Darien,
CT Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), 1 n.1, 1–3.
[83] Aristotle, “Ethics,” in Ethics and Politics, trans. William Ross &
Benjamin Jowett, ed. James H. Ford (El Paso, TX: El Paso Norte Press,
2006), 7, 8–9, 13 & passim.
[84] Ibid., 195 n. 9, 197.
[85] Julia Driver, “The History of Utilitarianism,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (rev. Sept. 22, 2014),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism/
[86] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 288. He goes on to mock
“the scientific standing of a ‘science’ whose ultimate masters [such as
Schopenhauer] still talk like children and little old women.”
[87] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans.
Walter Kaufman & R.J. Hollingdate (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 147
(§ 253).
[88] Ludwig Feuerbach, “The Essence of Christianity,” in The Young
Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 129–155 (quotation at p. 154).
[89] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995) 34.
[90] Quoted in Max Stirner, “Stirner’s Critics,” in Stirner’s Critics,
trans. Wolfi Landstreicher (Berkeley, CA: LBC Press & Oakland, CA: CAL
Press, 2012), 87.
[91] Stirner, “Stirner’s Critics,” 87–88. “Moral faith is as fanatical
as religious faith!” Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 45. This conclusion,
pertinent to our purposes, follows: “Stirner’s ‘conscious egoist’
doesn’t merely not adhere to the consciousness of sin, but also to the
consciousness of law, or of universal human rights.” “Stirner’s
Critics,” 95 (emphasis added) (in this essay Stirner refers to himself
in the third person).
[92] “Stirner’s Critics,” 74.
[93] Ibid., 55.
[94] Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and
Wrong (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
[95] Ibid., 37–48 & passim.
[96] Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, & W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of
Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298
(5598) (Nov. 22, 2002): 1569–1579.
[97] Black, “Chomsky on the Nod,” 61–172; see also Paul Ibbotson &
Michael Tomasello, “What’s Universal Grammar? Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s
Theory of Language Learning,” Scientific American, Sept. 7, 2016.
[98] Noam Chomsky, Powers & Prospects (Boston, MA: South End Press,
1996), 27.
[99] “Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological
experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s claims
about moral grammars.” Jonathan Derbyshire, “Into the Moral Maze,” The
Guardian, May 12, 2007,
www.theguardian.com/books/2007/my/12/society1
. The grammaticality of language is rarely a matter of controversy,
whereas moral dilemmas are. Brian Carroll, “Book Review: Moral Minds”
(Dec. 5, 2008), Brian.Carroll.com.
[100] Richard Rorty, “Born to Be Good,” N.Y. Times, April 27, 2006,
www,nytimes.com/2006/08/27/book/review/Rorty.t.html
.
[101] Hauser, Moral Minds, 222.
[102] Ibid., 223.
[103] Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1941); Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic
(2d ed.; New York: Dover Publications, 1952), ch. 6.
[104] Thomas Martin, “Anarchism and the Question of Human Nature,”
Social Anarchism 37 (2006),
www.socialanarchism.org/mod/magazine/display/128/index.php
.
[105] “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Special Effect,”
Oxford Rev. 5 (1967): 5–15. As an aside: In the 1950s, when I was a
child, my father took me on the last ride of the Detroit trolley system.
I liked it.
[106] E.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47–66.
[107] Hauser, Moral Minds, 114–115. I have slightly simplified the
facts.
[108] Ibid., 115–116.
[109] Maurice Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 64–65.
[110] Hauser, Moral Minds, 85. For Sam Harris, presumably the second
hypothetical is the same as the first: human well-being is maximized by
sacrificing one person to save five. If even the intuitions of two
contemporary white male American moral realist neuroscientists fail to
agree, what hope is there of finding moral principles which are so
universal that they must be biologically determined?
[111] Ibid., 122–123.
[112] Ibid., 85.
[113] Ibid., 3
[114] Ibid., 410.
[115] Ibid., 48 (emphasis added).
[116] Ibid., 113, quoting Psalms 137:9: “Happy shall he be, that taketh
and dashes thy little ones against the stones.”
[117] Ibid., 44.
[118] Ibid., 11.
[119] Ibid., 36.
[120] Ibid., 420.
[121] Maurice Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[122] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans.
Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
[123] Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, & Leda Cosmides, “Does Morality Have
a Biological Basis? An Empirical Test of Factors Governing Moral
Sentiments Relating to Incest,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270
(1517): 819–826 (2003).
[124] The History of Human Marriage (New York: Macmillan, 1891), quoted
in Hauser, Moral Minds, 199–200 (misspelling Westermarck’s name).
[125] Arthur Wolf, “Childhood Association, Sexual Attraction, and the
Incest Tabu: A Chinese Case,” American Anthropologist 68 (1966):
883–898.
[126] Edward Westermarck, Ethical Relativity (New York: Littlefield,
Adams & Company, 1932), a book which philosopher J.W. Mackie considers
to be “unjustly neglected.” Ethics, 241.
[127] For evolutionary psychologists, “innate” is the equivalent of
“product of natural selection.” Stephen M. Downes, “Evolutionary
Psychology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Sept. 5, 2018),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/evolutionary-psychology/
[128] Hauser, Moral Minds, 200.
[129] William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark
Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 53.
[130] Editorial notes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and
Other Later Political Writings, ed. & trans. Victor Gourevitch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 321 n. 16. “Rousseau
consistently expressed admiration for Fénelon.” Ibid.
[131] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Preface,” “Discourse on the Origin and the
Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” The Discourses and Other Early
Political Writings, ed. & trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 125 (emphasis in the original).
[132] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 6.
[133] This jargon is Hauser’s (222), not mine. “At present, none of
these studies pinpoint” – i.e., none of them support his theory of – “a
uniquely dedicated moral organ, circuitry that is selectively triggered
by conflicting moral duties but no other.”
[134] Kenneth R. Miller, The Human Instinct (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2018), 105–106; Charles Gross, “Disgrace: On Marc Hauser,” The Nation
(Jan. 9–16, 2012),
www.thenation.com/article/disgrace-marchauser
.
[135] On which was based Mikhail’s later book, Elements of Moral
Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral
and Legal Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). John
Rawls originated the idea of a biological moral faculty analogous to
(Chomsky’s) linguistic faculty in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1971), 46–47, quoted in Hauser, Moral Minds,
43. Rawls knew nothing about the brain. Hauser’s entire book is riddled
with more factual errors than it is worth bothering to identify. But,
for example: “Most major universities include a mandatory course in
moral reasoning.” Hauser, Moral Minds, 1. I assume that Harvard
University is what Hauser considers a major university, since that was
where he was teaching in 2006. I have attended seven major universities
at various times (1969–2006) – including Harvard (where I took a course
on Ethics by John Rawls in 1970) – and none of them had a required
course on moral reasoning. None of them, as best I recall, even offered
a course on moral reasoning.
[136] Mackie, Ethics, 30; Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism (New York:
Picador, 2008), 27–28; R.M. Hare, “’Nothing Matters,’” Applications of
Moral Theory (Berkeley, CA & Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 1972), 39.
[137] Lukes, Moral Relativism, 53.
[138] Will Wilkinson, “Moral Minds” (Sept. 24, 2006),
willwilkinson.net/2006/9124/
[139] Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology, 75.
[140] Quoted in R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
(rev. ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158. Another
translation: “No people could live without esteeming; but if they want
to preserve themselves, then they must not esteem as the neighbor
esteems. Much that was good to one people was scorn and infamy to
another: thus I found out.” “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” The Portable
Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press,
1954), 170.
[141] R.F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the
Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1932), 78. Ancient Sparta was one such society.
[142] Marshall D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1968), 56–61 (discussing patrilateral, matrilateral and
bilateral cross-cousin marriage). “The Yanomami disapprove of incest but
don’t always take it seriously; ....” It is the rare Yanamomo man who
has not had sex with a forbidden relative. Jacques Lizot, Tales of the
Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest, trans. Ernest Simon
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press & Paris: Editions de la Maison
des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985), 48. This is corroborated by Napoleon A.
Chagnon, Yąnomamő (5^(th) ed.; Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,2009), 153.
[143] Patrick Vinton Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and
the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai’i (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2010), 205–06.
[144] “In many societies, incest between king and queen is the norm; the
king marries his sister in order to maintain the purity of the
bloodline.” Marcel Mauss, Manual of Ethnography, ed. N.J. Allen, trans.
Dominique Lussier (New York & Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books,
2007), 113. Cleopatra and her brother, who married each other, were
descended from a long line of brother/sister marriages. She had him
killed.
[145] Keith Hopkins, “Brother/Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt,”
Comparative Studies in Society & History 22(3) (July 1980): 303–354;
Leach, Social Anthropology, 51, 168. Even Hauser (Moral Minds, 299) has
heard of this. At least 96 societies had some permitted intrafamily
sexual activity. Robin Fox, The Red Lamp of Incest (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1980), 6.
[146] David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago IL:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 52.
[147] Pascal, Pensées, 46.
[148] Robert C. Suggs, Marquesan Sexual Behavior (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1966), 128.
[149] Marston Bates, Gluttons and Libertines: Human Problems of Being
Natural (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 81.
[150] But not necessarily with much vehemence: “Son-mother incest, after
the father’s death, is not interfered with actively. It is a private
sin, not a public attack on the social system.” Fortune, Sorcerers of
Dobu, 61. “He [the Trader] knows just what native is living with and
have sex intercourse with his own mother, nothing being done about it by
the village concerned.” Ibid., 243. “The concepts good and bad in the
purely moral sense do not exist in Dobu.” Ibid., 177.
[151] Clyde Kluckhohn, “The Philosophy of the Navajo Indians,” in
Readings in Anthropology, ed. Morton H. Fried (New York: Crowell, 1959),
2: 434.
[152] Chagnon, Yąnomamő, 222–223.
[153] Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth
and Enlightenment,” Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York: Continuum, 1993), 43–80. “What did the Greeks admire in Odysseus?
Above all, his capacity for lying, and for cunning and terrible
retribution; ... “ Nietzsche, Daybreak, 305.
[154] Sophocles, “Ajax,” in All That You’ve Seen Here Is God, trans.
Bryan Doerries (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 83.
[155] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books,
1997), 295–96. The gods even lie to each other. “They have been lying
since Homer.” Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher
(Cornell, NY: Ithaca University Press, 1991), 173 & n. 78. According to
the feeble old literary critic Lionel Trilling, the reality of an
“essential human nature” is demonstrated by the reading of Homer,
Sophocles and Shakespeare. Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971), 1–2.
[156] E.g., Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 215; Sahlins, Tribesmen, 10 (in
Fiji, the word for “stranger” means someone good to eat). Several of
Odysseus’ “hosts,” such as the man-eating Cyclops, were far from
hospitable.
[157] Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” The Portable Nietzsche, 32–39. For
Archaic-age Greeks, there was an innate affinity between poetry and
lying. Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood
and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1993), 157. This bothered Plato. “Greek moral philosophy
seems to have had no generalized conception of evil.” Perez Zagorin,
Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader (Princeton, NJ &
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 180 n. 15; see A.W.H. Adkins,
Merit and Responsibility (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1975), ch. 9. “Classical Greece knew nothing of the conception of human
rights ... “ Zagorin, Thucydides, 145.
[158] Hauser, Moral Minds, 48.
[159] Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution
(New York: Macmillan, 1915), 46, quoted in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age
Economics (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972), 191.
[160] Quoted in Hauser, Moral Minds, 12–13. This is one of many
important quotations for which Hauser provides no reference.
[161] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of
Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of the History of
Science, 1992), 14; see also Lawrence M. Krauss, Hiding in the Mirror
(New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 226.
[162] Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 24 (remarks of Jamil Baroody) (emphasis
added). The Saudis objected to provisions on marriage equality and the
right to change religions. These are not universally shared values.
[163] According to Edmund Leach, “the concept of man as a mythical
universal being, born free and equal, which is today so popular among
intellectuals and slogan-spouting politicians in all parts of the world
is not shared by humanity at large.” Leach, Social Anthropology, 58.
[164] Adamantia Pollis & Peter Schwab, “Human Rights: A Western
Construct with Limited Applicability,” in Human Rights: Cultural and
Ideological Perspectives, ed. Adamantia Pollis (New York: Praeger,
1979), 1, 8–9, 13.
[165] J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), 38.
[166] “Resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in
quantity and number, all these relations, ... morality lies not in any
of these relations, nor the sense of it in their discovery.” Hume, A
Treatise of Human Nature, 298. Further: “The rules of morality,
therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.” Ibid., 294.
[167] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild &
James M. Edie (n.p.: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 24
(paraphrasing Malebranche).
[168] Ludwig Feuerbach, “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,”
The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, trans. Zawar Hanfi (London & New
York: Verso, 2012), 213. Also, “nothing” cannot be a cause. Hume, A
Treatise of Human Nature, 57.
[169] G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. Thomas Baldwin (rev. ed.;
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60–61, 72. One definition of
“unanalyzable proposition = one in which only fundamental symbols = ones
not capable of definition, occur.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks
1914–1916, ed. G.H. von Wright & G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(2d ed.; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 111.
[170] Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House,
1937), 298.
[171] Moore, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Principia Ethica, 2–3,
16–17 & passim; see also Simon Kirchin, Metaethics (Houndsmill,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 42.
[172] Quoted in G.E. Moore, “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33,” Mind
64 (1955), 2; cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte, ed. P.M.S.
Hacker & Joachim Schulte (rev. 4^(th) ed.; London: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 26, 28 (§ 47). “It keeps on looking as if the question ‘Are there
simple things?’ made sense. And surely this question must be nonsense!”
Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 45e.
[173] “Beyond Good and Evil,” Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. & ed.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 275 (§ 108)
(quoted); Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 149 (§ 258).
[174] John S. Martell, Comment, “Fair Trial v. Free Press in Criminal
Trials,” Cal. L. Rev. 47(2) (May 1959), 733.
[175] Douglas S. Campbell, Free Press v. Fair Trial: Supreme Court
Decisions since 1807 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publications, 1994) (there
were, as of that year, over 30 cases directly addressing the issue).
[176] Peter N. Sterns, Human Rights in World History (London & New York:
Routledge, 2012), 15.
[177] Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1973), 95.
[178] Brownlie’s Basic Documents on Human Rights, ed. Ian Brownlie & Guy
S. Goodwin-Gill (6^(th) ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[179] I have finally come across a somewhat related observation:
“Differences in the number of moral codes of individuals are of great
significance. Conflicts of codes will increase, as a matter of
probability, with increase of number of codes, and perhaps in something
like geometric ratio.” Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the
Executive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 271 (originally
1937).
[180] John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge &
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 104, 111;
Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights Culture: The Political and Spiritual
Crisis (Waltham, MA: International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public
Life, 2000), 6; Jeremy Waldron, “Rights in Conflict,” Liberal Rights,
203.
[181] Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978), xi.
[182] William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark
Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68 (originally 1793).
[183] John R. Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human
Civilization (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 196.
[184] Noam Chomsky, The Umbrella of U.S. Power: The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 5.
[185] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago,
IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1: 119 (originally
1765). On the other hand, there can be duties without correlative
rights. Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform, 381. I mentioned
the Ten Commandments.
[186] “We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet
clearly it is one.” Quoted in Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the
State,” in Liberty and the Great Libertarians, ed. Charles T. Sprading
(San Francisco, CA: Fox & Wilkes, 1995), 151 (originally 1850).
[187] Blackstone, Commentaries (1769), 4: 74.
[188] Nicola PerUgini & Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[189] Simon Crichley, “Action in a World of Recuperation,” Impossible
Objects: Interviews, ed. Carl Cederstrőm & Todd Kesselman (Cambridge,
England & Boston, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 81.
[190] Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Idolatry,” in Michael
Ignatieff et al., Human Rights as Politics and as Idolatry (Princeton,
NJ & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 90; see also “Stand Up for
Your Rights: The Old Stuffy Ones, That Is: Newer Ones are Distractions,”
The Economist, March 24, 2007.
[191] Stearns, Human Rights in World History, 20; Carl Wellman, The
Proliferation of Rights: Moral Progress or Empty Rhetoric? (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1999), 6.
[192] Wenar, “Rights,” 11–13.
[193] Bob, Black, “Justice, Primitive and Modern: Dispute Resolution in
Anarchist and State Societies,” available at www.academia.edu.
[194] Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man. Part I,” Political Writings
(rev. student ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84.
[195] Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15. By religious he means
“sacred.” He’s wrong. The concept of the sacred is absent from some
well-documented primitive societies. E.g., R.W. Barton, The Religion of
the Ifugaos ([Manasha, WI]: American Anthropological Ass’n Memoirs, no.
65, 1946). It is wrong, and insulting, to claim that everybody in
Western societies believes in the sacred. Many human rights activists
are thoroughly secular. So am I.
[196] Mackie, Ethics, 46, 58, 59–61; Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 14–17;
Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian,. Paul Edwards (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1957), 12. “Anything that [God] wills is good and
right for us, and anything he does not will is bad and wrong.” Blaise
Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1966),
325. But for Socrates, “Piety, and by the same token, every other
virtue, is as normative for the gods as it is for us ... “ Vlastos,
Socrates, 165; see “Euthryphro,” The Dialogues of Plato, trans. R.E.
Allen (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1984), 1: 51–52 (§
10A).
[197] Olivecrona, Law as Fact, 48.
[198] Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. Barry Pateman (Oakland, CA & Edinburgh,
Scotland, 2005), 186; Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian, Chronicles of
Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian (Monroe, ME: Common Courage,
1992), 354. He asserts, however, that human nature cannot be malleable,
because, if it were, authoritarian governments might mold our minds.
Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975),
132; idem, Language and Politics, ed. C.P. Otero (exp. ed.; Oakland, CA
& Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 1989), 244. Note the childlike
reasoning: it can’t be true because I don’t want it to be true! Besides
that, if Chomsky knows nothing about human nature, how does he know if
it is malleable or not? Black, “Chomsky on the Nod,” 106–107.
[199] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality Among Men,” The Discourses and Other Early Political
Writings, ed. & trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 125.
[200] Philip Rieff, “Introduction” to Charles Horton Cooley, Human
Nature and the Social Order (rev. ed.; New York: Schocken Books, 1922),
xvii. Edmund Leach: “when individuals who have the mental habits of
university professors are invited to specify the distinguishing criteria
of human beings they end up producing an image of themselves.” Social
Anthropology, 96–97.
[201] Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the
Concept of Man,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), 33–54; see also Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the
Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (new, enl. ed.;
New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1984), 387. Rappaport
taught the first anthropology course I ever took.
[202] Fran de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism
Among the Primates (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2013), 16.
[203] Time’s Arrow, Time’s Circle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of
Geological Time (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press,
1987), 141.
[204] Hans Kummer, Primate Societies: Group Techniques of Ecological
Adaptation (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1971), 147–49. Even
pigs use tools. Christine Dell’Amore, “Pigs Recorded Using Tools for the
First Time,” National Geographic, Oct. 4, 2019. Tool-using species
include 15 species of invertebrates, 24 species of birds, 4 species of
non-primate animals, 22 species of monkey, and 5 species of apes. James
Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots
(New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 63.
[205] Frederick Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition
from Ape to Man,” in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One
Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 395; see also Karl
Marx & Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (3d rev. ed.; Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1976), 37. [“men can be distinguished from animals
by consciousness, by religion or by anything else you like. They
themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they
begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned
by their physical organization.” This was Murray Bookchin’s opinion.
[206] Gregory F. Tague, Evolution and Human Culture: Texts and Contexts
(Leiden, Netherlands & Boston MA: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 2.
[207] Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016).
[208] De Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 123.
[209] More quoted in Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 55) (More must
have been unfamiliar with squirrels); Edmund R. Leach, “Men, Bishops,
and Apes,” Nature 293 (5827) (Sept. 3–9, 1981), 21.
[210] Tague, Evolution and Human Culture, 43–44.
[211] Pascal, Pensées, 66. This goes some way toward explaining why
Christians have so often treated unbelievers like beasts.
[212] Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 202–204; de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist,
62–64.
[213] Ibid., 149–152; Elizabeth Hess, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would
Be Human (New York: Bantam Books, 2008),168–69.
[214] Hess, Nim Chimpsky, 249. There is also (at 291) a photograph of a
chimp, Lilly (reprinted from High Times), smoking a hash pipe.
[215] “Noam Chomsky is our most famous universalist today.” Ian Hacking,
The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge & London: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 220.
[216] Chomsky, “Containing the Threat to Democracy,” Chomsky on
Anarchism, 173.
[217] Chomsky, “Anarchism, Marxism, and Hope for the Future,” Chomsky on
Anarchism, 185.
[218] “I know that man’s essential nature is unchanging through time and
space. I know that old tune. But that is an assumption, and, I might
add, a worthless assumption for a historian.” Lucien Febvre, Life in
Renaissance France, ed. & trans. Marian Rothstein (Cambridge & London:
Harvard University Press, 1977), 2.
[219] Luce Iragaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within
History, trans. Alison Martin (New York & London: Routledge, 1996), 35;
see also Mauss, Manual of Ethnography, 35. “So it’s not that you have a
universal defining set of features (speaking, reason, language,
production, or whatever) and that on top of that there are men and
women. No, it’s the opposite: to be human is to be differentiated along
the lines of sexual difference.” Slavoj Žižek & Glyn Daly, Conversations
with Žižek (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2004), 81.
[220] W.V. Quine, “Natural Kinds,” Ontological Relativity and Other
Essays (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1969), 138.
[221] Garth L. Hallett, Essentialism: A Wittgensteinian Critique
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 25–26.
[222] The Impact of Science on Society (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1951), 9.
[223] “The Needs of American Legal Philosophy,” The Principles of Social
Order: Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1981), 255 (originally 1952).
[224] Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)
(originally 1982).
[225] Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” in Situationist
International Anthology, ed. & trans. Ken Knabb (rev. & enl. ed.;
Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 6.
[226] “Toward the Collective Nothing,” The Collected Writings of Renzo
Novatore, trans. Wolfi Landstreicher (Berkeley, CA: Ardent Press, 2012),
31.
[227] Max Stirner, “Stirner’s Critics,” Stirner’s Critics, trans. Wolfi
Landstreicher (Berkeley, CA: LBC Books & Oakland, CA: CAL Press, 2012),
55.
[228] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonson
(Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
[229] Hauser, Moral Minds, 36.
[230] Kropotkin, “Anarchist Morality,” 94–95, 98.
[231] Baier, Moral Point of View, 22; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 69.
Hardly any modern philosophers are intuitionists, for the obvious reason
that an intuition “is impotent in the face of conflicting intuitions.”
Alan Gewirth, “Starvation and Human Rights,” Human Rights: Essays on
Justification and Applications (Chicago, IL & London: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 198; see also Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth,
and Logic (2d ed.; New York: Dover Publications, 1952), 106.
[232] Gert-Jan Lokhorst, “Descartes and the Pineal Gland,” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2016 ed.),
available at
http://plato.sanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/pineal-gland
. Noam Chomsky identifies as a Cartesian. Cartesian Linguistics: A
Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, ed. James McIlvray (3d
ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[233] “But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would
learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance,
feeling within itself the flying center of the world.” Nietzsche, “On
Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, 42.
[234] Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (London:
Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 35–36. According to John Locke: “Principles of
Actions there indeed are lodged in Men’s Appetites, but these are so far
from being innate Moral Principles, that if they were left to their full
swing, they would carry men to the over-turning of all Morality.” An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 75 (originally published 1689); see also Dunn,
Locke, 76–77.
[235] Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999), 225. “And it is clear that ‘self-evidence’ is and always was
wholly deceptive.” Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 4e.
[236] Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 39.
[237] E.g., Neil MacCormick, “Against Moral Disestablishment,” Legal
Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 35.
[238] Pollis & Schwab, “Human Rights,” 15.
[239] Abdul Aziz Said, “Human Rights in Islamic Perspectives,” in
Pollis, Human Rights, 87. This is justified in terms of “the dignity of
the human individual – the level of self-esteem that secures personal
identity and promotes human community. While the pursuit of human
dignity is universal” – I’m not so sure – “its forms are designed by the
cultures of people.” Ibid., 86. Of that I am sure. But see Sultanhussein
Tabandah, A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (London: L.T. Goulding & Co., 1970); Khalifa Abdul Hakim,
Fundamental Human Rights (Lahore, India: Institute of Islamic Culture,
1955); Ann Elizabeth Meyer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and
Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
[240] Stearns, Human Rights in World History, 5.
[241] Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” Philosophy,
Politics, and Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 16
[242] Boanaventura de Sousa Santos, “Toward a Multicultural Conception
of Human Rights,” in Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Berta
Esperanza Hernández-Truyol (New York & London: New York University
Press, 2002), 39, 45; see also Evans, Human Rights in the Global
Political Economy; Makau Mutua, “Human Rights International NGOs,” in
NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and Performance, ed. Claude F. Welch
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 159.
[243] Text accompanying fn. 1 supra.
[244] Andrew Clapham, Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction (2d ed.;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 140; but see Do All Persons Have
Equal Moral Worth? On “Basic Equality,” ed. Uwe Steinhoff (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
[245] Ibid., 14–17. This Very Short Introduction would have been better
had it been even shorter.
[246] Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1962), 220 (originally 1908), ---.
[247] François Furet, Lies, Passions & Illusions: The Democratic
Imagination in the Twentieth Century, ed. Christophe Prochasson, trans.
Deborah Furet (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 2014),
28.
[248] Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public
Policy, and Social Change (2d ed.; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2004).
[249] “I mentioned rights: we live in a world where human rights have
become our civil religion. Talk to young people today, it’s the only
idea they have. It’s not much of an idea, and is of no help in
formulating any thoughts about the world situation or our near future.”
Furet, Lies, Passions & Illusions, 76–77.
[250] L.A. Rollins, The Myth of Natural Rights (Port Townsend, WA:
Loompanics Unlimited, 1983), 3, 21; Laurance Labadie, “Excerpts from a
Letter to a Friend,” Selected Essays (Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles
Publisher, 1978), 48.
[251] Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, trans. Len Bracken (Ardmore,
PA: Fifth Season Press, 1990); For Ourselves, The Right to Be Greedy:
Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything (Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, n.d.) (my Preface thereto is
reprinted in The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, 129–31) (recently
reprinted by Enemy Combatant Publications).
[252] London: Pluto Press, 2003.
[253] David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, “Sham Constitutions,” Cal. L. Rev.
101(4) (Aug. 2013), 912–15.
[254] Evans, Human Rights in the Global Political Economy, 135.
[255] “Moralism is retrograde. You want something? Don’t tell me you’re
‘right’ and I’m ‘wrong.’ I don’t care what God or Santa Claus likes,
never mind if I’ve been naughty or nice. Just tell me what you want that
I have and why I should give it to you. I can’t guarantee we’ll come to
terms, but articulation succeeded by negotiation is the only possible
way to settle a dispute without coercion.” Bob Black, “Technophilia, An
Infantile Disorder,” Defacing the Currency, 304.
[256] Antonin Scalia, quoted in Law & Versteeg, “Sham Constitutions,”
934.
[257] Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London & New York: Verso, 2012), 4–5.
[258] Evgeny B. Pashukinis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, trans.
Barbara Einhorn, ed. Chris Arthur (London: Ink Links, 1978).
[259] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” Early Writings, ed. Quintin
Hoare, trans. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage
Books, 1975), 229; see also Marx, “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements
of Political Economy,” ibid., 265. “Every right is the application of
the same measure to different people who, in fact, are not the same and
are not equal to one another; this is why ‘equal right’ is really a
violation of equality, and an injustice.” V.I. Lenin, State and
Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 76. “The egoistic
subject, the legal subject and the moral personality are the three most
important character masks assumed by people in commodity-producing
society.” Pashukanis, Law and Marxism, 152. “When those from the centre
onwards to the Left talk about rights, it is as if these were
free-standing and unrelated to the existence of society, which means
unrelated to the existence of the public good.” John Ralston Saul, The
Unconscious Civilization (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 158. I met
Saul at the Common Action Forum conference in Madrid in 2017.
[260] J.N. Findlay, Values and Intentions: A Study in Value Theory and
Philosophy of Mind (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1961),
35–36.
[261] Gewirth, “Introduction,” Human Rights, 2.
[262] Mary Ann Glendon, Rights-Talk: The Impoverishment of Political
Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 14.
[263] Whose theory that law is orders backed by threats was refuted, as
noted, by H.L.A. Hart.
[264] John Austin, “Appendix: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined,”
in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty, ed. Mary Warnock (2d
ed.; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 249.
[265] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986), 191. Although, the coddled kids on some college campuses are
demanding that “trigger warnings” be provided by their professors
whenever the kids might be offended by learning something.
[266] Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J.G.
Peristiany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
[267] “Anyone who knows political activists knows that they aren’t quite
like the rest of us.” Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction
(2d ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 138.
[268] Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 272–73.
[269] Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper &
Row, 1976), ch. 1; Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ch. 7
(“private judgment”).
[270] Alan Gewirth, “Introduction,” Human Rights: Essays on
Justification and Application (Chicago, IL & London: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 3.
[271] Neil MacCormick, “Civil Liberties and the Law,” Legal Right and
Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982), 41. It is of course true that the dead, in
losing their lives, have lost their essential humanity, but that is the
least of what they have lost. Why is immortality not on any human rights
list? Surely, if human rights are eternal, they might lie dormant for
millennia before the conditions of their realization are possible. Why
not a right of cryogenic preservation? Cf. Robert C.W. Ettinger, The
Prospect of Immorality (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964). I met
Ettinger. His son and I were on our high school debate team.
[272] MacCormick, “Against Moral Disestablishment,” Legal Right and
Social Democracy, 35.
[273] Jack Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights (London & Sydney,
Australia: Croom Helm, 1985), 32. It by no means follows that if the
conditions for full human development are provided, full human
development will actually ensue, although this was the Soviet theory of
the New Socialist Man.
[274] Morsink, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 269. The strongest
opposition to such recognition came from the United States. Eleanor
Roosevelt, who chaired the assemblage, explained that “in the United
States [this was in 1948!], there was no minority problem.” Ibid., 272.
[275] Ibid., 31.
[276] Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1960), 253–56. “Man will make it his purpose to
master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of
consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will
into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to
create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”
Ibid., 255–56.
[277] Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (rev. ed.; New Haven, CT &
London: Yale University Press, 1969), 5 & passim. I discuss this in
“Anarchism and Human Rights” (2019) available at www.academia.edu.
[278] Aristotle, Nikomachean Ethics, ed. & trans. Roger Crisp (New York
& Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144.
[279] “Defense of Criminals,” 124.
[280] Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 306.