No Stable Rights without Intrinsic Human Value
Kelsey Hazzard, the president of Secular Pro-Life, is not
religious, so in her response
to a pro-choice rabbi’s article pleading with pro-lifers to not impose their
religion on the country, she counters that the rabbi is actually insisting that
pro-lifers not “impose their science”
on the country. An excerpt (the rabbi’s remarks are indented):
You possess a (not THE) definition
of what constitutes life
The Princess Bride was
wrong; there is no such thing as mostly dead and slightly alive. You are one or
the other. It is a scientific question with a right or wrong answer. The “many
truths” approach does not work when the issue is one of
objective fact.
and you won’t back down from
trying to defend it. There is much integrity to that consistency.
But, like all things religious, it is also potentially dangerous.
How is it “religious” when there
are millions of pro-lifers in the United States with no religion?
It can’t just be because there are religious folks who agree with us; most
religious people also agree that human trafficking is immoral, but we don’t
call human trafficking a religious issue.
Hazzard is right about being able to scientifically pinpoint
exactly when a human being begins to exist as a live, whole organism. It always
amazes me that pro-choicers who take the more mystical approach, saying that
life is infused into a human organism at some date after the beginning of its
existence, accuse pro-lifers of making an inappropriately religious determination on the beginning of life.
But of course, most pro-choicers know that the fetal human
being is scientifically alive. What
they’re really
objecting to is the idea of intrinsic human value—i.e., the idea that every
member of the Homo sapiens species is
valuable, regardless of his or her individual characteristics and abilities, because
every human being shares the same valuable human nature (which reflects the
objective value of God). And usually, it’s this idea of intrinsic human value and
its corresponding universal equality
and human rights that they’re dismissing as being “religious” (which to them
means “not part of objective reality”).
Hazzard recognizes that human value and rights are
objectively real, and she can argue for them by appealing to our moral
intuition (see here, for
example), but not by appealing to science. Universal human rights depend on a
shared human nature and intrinsic human value, which can’t be verified
scientifically because the scientific method is not capable of detecting things
like intrinsic value. Unfortunately, in a society infected by scientism, people have all
the wiggle room they need to illegitimately dismiss a scientifically
unmeasurable idea they disagree with from the public square by labeling it
“religious,” since they can count on our culture interpreting that to mean “a subjective
matter of preference.”
I found Hazzard’s comment, “[W]e don’t call human
trafficking a religious issue,” to be particularly instructive as an
illustration of how unstable rights are when the idea of objective, intrinsic
human value is rejected. For of course, human trafficking was labeled a subjective religious issue when it suited the
purposes of those who wished to traffic in African slaves.
From Chuck Colson’s preface to William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of Christianity:
Pitt moved that a resolution be
passed binding the House to discuss the slave trade in the next session. The
motion was passed. But then another of Wilberforce’s friends, Sir William
Dolben, introduced a one-year experimental bill to regulate the number of
slaves that could be transported per ship.
Now sensing a threat, the West
Indian bloc rose up in opposition. Tales of cruelty in the slave trade were
mere fiction, they said. Besides, warned Lord Penrhyn ominously, the proposed
measure would abolish the trade upon which “two thirds of the commerce of this
country depends.” Angered by Penrhyn’s hyperbole, Pitt pushed Dolben’s
regulation through both houses in June of 1788.
By the time a recovered Wilberforce
returned to the legislative scene, the slave traders were furious and ready to
fight, shocked that politicians had the audacity to press for morally based
reforms in the political arena. “Humanity
is a private feeling, not a public principle to act upon,” sniffed the
Earl of Abingdon. Lord Melborne angrily agreed. “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade
public life,” he thundered.
The time and place may change, but the objections never
change. “There is no real harm! Our quality of life depends on it! A belief
in universal human rights is religious and has no place in politics!”
Thankfully, in terms of the pro-life fight in this country,
our legal system is already built on the foundation of universal, unalienable
human rights, so we don’t have to fight for legal recognition of their existence.
And happily, since atheists are capable of apprehending moral truths, many
accept unalienable human rights, even though objective rights and
value—grounded in a standard above human beings, and not dependent on our
preferences—are inconsistent
with their worldview. What we must do is clarify the indisputable fact that the
unborn are members of the human race (as Hazzard does in her article),
and then hold
people to our nation’s established ideals.
