A Response to Nero’s Fiddle Neil Patterson Orriginally published in Issue XXI of Vulgata, 2009   Nero's Fiddle was orriginally published in Issue XX of Vulgata. Read it here.

I have been out of academia for three years now and am loosing my taste for the kind of highly technical argument presented by my old and venerable friend Mr. Elliot. However, his excellently argued piece has spurred me to take up my pen and engage him in a few polemics. I fear my sword is not as razor sharp as my battle-hardened opponent’s: a professional always keeps his equipment in prime condition. Nonetheless, Mr. Elliot has weighed in on an important question and I think it is incumbent upon me, in the mystery of divine election working in salvation history, to point out a few of his errors.

I reject Mr. Elliot’s thesis that the notion of human rights is unintelligible, or at best groundless, when built upon a foundation of atheism. I argue instead that the notion of human rights is insupportable when built on a foundation of materialism. This is because the claim that human beings have certain rights because they are human beings is an unavoidably metaphysical one. It is not conceptually necessary to suppose a divine will bestowing rights upon individuals, but only a facticity of human nature that is in some real sense distinct from individuals. As far as I can tell, a materialist cannot make any claims about human nature unless human nature is a very ontologically weak thing indeed. So, I will proceed to give a metaphysical grounding of human rights in contrast to Mr. Elliot’s specifically theistic understanding, but first I will deal with two objections which the astute reader may already have leveled against me.

I

The first objection is simply, “who cares?” Elliot’s complaint is that the predominant atheism of our civilization renders human rights an empty concept. But is it not equally true that our civilization since Kant has been dropping as much metaphysical ballast as we have been able? If we need metaphysics to ground our notion of human rights, are we not still groundless? And if we are still groundless, is not the argument between Elliot and me mere senseless jousting? I think not. While it is true that no one uses the word, it is my contention that human rights claims as they are actually made in common discourse are metaphysical claims. If I were to ask a dreamy-eyed undergraduate in an Amnesty International club (an accurate description of me at age 19) if he believes that all persons have a right not to be tortured simply because torture is a violation of their dignity as a human being, I’m sure he would agree. If I were to press further and ask, by this do you mean that a human being is a kind of thing that has the property of dignity inherent in it by its very existence, how could he but agree to this also? I’m sure that I could also induce him to launch into a speech about how all people are one family living in a global village. From there all I would need to do is point out that all these claims are of a metaphysical nature. He will realize that he has always believed implicitly that there is a real thing called human nature that we can talk about in a rational manner and assign properties to. It has some kind of real existence, either as an Aristotelian formal cause, a Platonic idea, an embodied ghost or whatever—in fact, if my undergraduate friend and I are not in an overly philosophical mood we don’t have to say much about it at all. It is only necessary that we agree that human rights claims are claims about properties shared by all human beings as human beings and that we can have a rational discussion about such claims. This, I believe, is how most serious discussions about human rights are framed.

This brings us immediately to the next objection that I must deal with before starting the main part of my argument. The objection centres around this supposed rational discussion. “Certainly,” might say Elliot’s sympathizers, “you have an optimistic view of the kind of discussions that surround human rights in every place from the United Nations to the Canadian Supreme Court, to a University seminar room. It seems that people assign whatever rights they want to themselves with no reference to anything like solid moral principles. Examples: the supposed right to abortion, the supposed right to homosexual marriage.” It is true that there are some thinkers and legislators who are legal positivists when it comes to human rights. Wither explicitly or by their actions they say, “People have whatever rights we choose to give them.” This is usually phrased something like, “Human rights legislation is a process of setting goals that express our shared values,” but for our purposes it amounts to the same thing. This kind of thinking leads to excess, abuse and error, but it so leads not because of atheism, but from a failure to ground human rights in human nature, in unchanging metaphysical reality. This kind of positivism sees human rights only as a political process and not a philosophical one. So even if I am overly optimistic, my criticism, I believe, still stands.

Now for specific issues: e.g. abortion and homosexual marriage. Although both Mr. Elliot and I believe that there exists no right to abortion or homosexual marriage.ⁱ Further, we both believe this on the basis of divine revelation. But, in the sphere of morals, divine revelation is just another way of knowing that this or that is contrary to human dignity. It does not change the fact that my claim that there exists no right to an abortion is a metaphysical one; it is based on what I believe about the human person. The opposite claim is likewise. I recently read a letter to the editor in the National Post in which a woman argued that “the moral status of the fetus is irrelevant” because women have a right to complete sexual freedom and ensuring that freedom necessitates abortion. Ignoring the faulty syllogism, we have, once again, a metaphysical disagreement. She believes that absolute sexual freedom of choice is necessary to preserve human dignity. I believe that chastity is necessary to preserve the same thing. To answer this question, we will have to have a serious, rational discussion about what is a human being and what are true human goods.

Mr. Elliot takes up these points in his discussion of natural law (Part III of his essay). He successfully identifies the metaphysical nature of the disagreements over what rights obtain to which people. As Elliot puts it: “This means that a difference in metaphysical anthropology makes what looks like an agreement in normative ethics come falling apart at the level of applied ethics.” Elliot and I are on the same page here. Metaphysical anthropology is the point of disagreement. The point where we disagree is whether it is possible to have a rights-granting anthropology outside of a theistic context. Elliot’s argument about unpersonsⁱⁱ is a red herring. “Who is a person” is part of the same metaphysical question as “what is a person”. Since your answer to the “what” question will tell you how to answer the “who” question, agreement on one constitutes agreement on the other.

Elliot tries to cite Greek/barbarian distinction of the ancient Greeks as a “pre-moral and pre-political” question of who is a person that takes the place of our universalism (every human being is a human person). However, it will not do the job since Greek/barbarian is precisely a political distinction. I am not aware of any ancient writer (and I would be surprised if Elliot could cite one) who argues explicitly that barbarians do not possess a human nature. Tyrants, thugs and racists, have justified themselves (when they’ve bothered to do so) on the basis of such metaphysical (or quasi-metaphysical) principles as the rights of the strong over the weak, the rights of one class or race over another. They have not argued that the oppressed group was not in possession of a human nature as such, but that they constituted a lesser example of a human nature because of their race, nationality etc. They may also argue that retribution against such and such a group is necessary to render justice. In this case the target group is not ontologically deficient, but morally deficient (e.g. the bourgeoisie). In none of these cases is an appeal made to human rights obtaining to human beings. The argument is not: “all human beings have rights, but they are not human beings.” Rather, the claim is “they are defective/deficient/evil human beings and so we will kill/enslave them.” This latter argument, while it obviously a moral argument, is not metaphysical, but political. Any metaphysical considerations of universal human rights are simply not invoked. The former argument, however, is precisely what advocates of abortion use: “All human beings have rights, but the fetus is not a human being.” While I would not say that philosophical debate is the most important tool in ending abortion, and while most women, I suppose, who have abortions do not think about their choice in a metaphysical way, the question is at its heart metaphysical in a way that Aryan/Jew, Proletarian/Bourgeois or Greek/Scythian is not. Therefore, whether or not the fetus is a human being is pre-moral and pre-political. However, the fact remains that it is a metaphysical question that has nothing directly to do with theism.

Human rights are not “a napkin filched from Christianity’s table,” as Elliot claims. Such a filching cannot take place, for it is all there for the taking. What thief would steal what is lavished upon him freely? Christ does not grasp at anything or horde secrets. We should not be afraid that the truth will fall into enemy hands unless we plant our flag upon it and hold on for dear life.

II

Let us finally be done with this preliminary posturing and get into the meat of the argument. I am perfectly aware that it is far easier to pick an argument to pieces point by point than to venture a well-developed position of ones own. So, I will explain and defend my own position first, although I will make much reference to Elliot’s argument in the process. I will then proceed to deflect Elliot’s primary thrust, the keystone in his logical arch: the notion that value is unintelligible without a person to bestow value.

The question before us is about human rights, i.e. goods that I am responsible to render unto others. This is distinct from virtue, which are goods that accrue to myself through my own good actions. Both rights and virtues are sort of opposite ends of the broader category of morality. So, if I volunteer to serve the homeless, I am rendering unto them their right to eat. It is also a virtuous action on my part, since giving of myself in service to others is unto my own good.ⁱⁱⁱ As in the above example, whenever we try to discover which actions constitute being virtuous and which actions constitute respecting or rendering the human rights of others, we discover that while these two concepts are distinct in the abstract, they always come together as a pair. Your rights and my virtues are two sides of the same coin. In the final analysis, there is nothing that is good for me that is not also good for you. That is to say there is no way I can respect your human rights (i.e. refrain from violating them) or render your proper rights unto you which does not constitute a virtuous act on my part. My sense of virtue^iv tells me that rape, pillage and murder are wrong, and so does the UN charter. Positive rights to education, food and shelter call us forth to practice the virtues of instructing the ignorant, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Why should this be the case? It is because the ground of both virtue and rights is in the same human nature that we all give instance to. It is an observable fact that it is our nature to love and serve one another. The man who turns selfishly inward on himself, caring not for his brothers, becomes petty, miserable and unfit for human company. The torturer is himself tortured. The murderer murders himself. Every violence I commit comes back on my own head.

Following J.L Austin and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, Ursula Le Guin wrote a thought-provoking short story, Those Who Walked Away from Omelas. She imagines an utopia in which everyone lives happily and harmoniously and in which all our most noble human potentialities are actualized. This harmony, however, is brought about, in some obscure fashion, by instrumentality of keeping a single child locked in a closet never seeing the light of day or being given any human affection. Everyone in Omelas knows that this is the case. Some choose to stay and others choose to leave. Well, clearly such a situation would be insupportable. Not only could I not be truly happy knowing that my happiness was caused at the expense of another and not only would the rights of the child be violated—these are the two sides of the coin I spoke of above—but I would also point out that this is very close to Elliot’s idea of people losing their rights because no one values them. Omelas has chosen not to value this child, and therefore he loses his rights. I will return to this later, but for now notice how closely entwined are the rights of others and the dictates of my own moral self-awareness in this strange thought experiment.

If it is true that human virtue and human rights go hand in hand, then I carry my argument further. There is no way that I can fail in virtue that does not violate your rights. If I am proud and arrogant, even though I serve you, I am not only failing in virtue because I am not respecting the truth about myself (i.e. I am not a privileged reference point), but I am also not respecting your claims upon me (your right) to be treated as an equal. You have such a right for the same reason that I should be humble: ontologically speaking, you and I are in fact equal. Note that this is often phrased as “you and I are equal before God.” This is true, but it is only true because we are in fact equal in dignity, possessing of the same nature. Otherwise, God would see two unequal things as equal, which sounds awfully close to making God into a liar. In this case, saying, “you and I are equal before God” is like saying, you and I are not really equal, but we will pretend we are. This makes it actually a stronger statement to simply say, “you and I are equal.”

All this reminds me of an illustrative story told by Catherine Doherty (the founder of Madonna House, the community to which I belong). It was the 1920’s and she was working as a laundress for starvation wages. Because she could not always afford to eat, she went to a Christian Mission house, which handed out coffee and doughnuts to poor women. However, to drink your coffee and eat your doughnut, you had to listen to the woman who ran the place preach sermons to you while you ate. If this was not bad enough, the content of the sermons assumed that you were an unrepentant reprobate. This woman, (falsely) assuming that Catherine was a prostitute, went up to her and said “so young, and yet you have fallen so low.” Now, I am not saying that we should enshrine the right not to be judged or served arrogantly in the UN charter, that would clearly be an excess of legislation, but it is still clear that Catherine’s rights were violated that day; it was not just a failure of virtue on the part of the missionary.

If we think about this for a while we begin to arrive at startling truths. Maybe everything I do and say and think has a real effect on everyone around me, on everyone in the whole world. Maybe the little evils that I do contribute to or even enable the war crimes tried at The Hague, and maybe the little acts of goodness I do like serving a cup of coffee and a doughnut to my sister somehow lends strength and consolation to my brothers in a refugee camp. Maybe there really is, and only ever was, one Man.

But I don’t have to go that far; in our public discourse we are not reaching for the horizon of human rights, we are just trying to agree that everyone has a right to certain basic freedoms and to ensure that these rights are protected under our laws. This is a much less ambitious goal and can be provided for with even a loose and underdeveloped notion of human nature, never mind the shimmering eternal edifice of Christological anthropology.

Now if, as I’m sure Mr. Elliot would agree, that the notion of virtue is grounded in human nature and if, as I believe I have demonstrated more than adequately, human rights claims are also grounded on human nature, on what basis does Elliot allow the first but not the second?

IV

Let us speak now of noble pagans. Elliot makes it clear that the ancient pagans had a notion virtue, but not rights. This is not the whole story, to be sure, but I will grant it to him for the moment. Presumably then, his argument is that, likewise, a modern atheist can legitimately hold a notion of virtue, but not rights. Yet if the two are so intertwined why should this be the case? Surely they both stand and fall together. Or is Elliot’s real argument that no moral notions at all are possible without a notion of God? But this statement defeats itself since all people everywhere have had definite moral ideas whether or not they were theists. It might be argued, I suppose, that all those moral non-Christians throughout history were being logically inconsistent. If this is the case, then I say let them be inconsistent. We can’t simply ignore all of human civilization that falls outside either the special or temporal bounds of Chritendom. This is indeed where Elliot’s argument leads. Allow me to demonstrate.

Elliot states atheism as being his target, but when he specifically lists creation, divine intentionality and the imago Dei as among the minimum conditions for a supportable notion of human rights, he has ruled out every religion and philosophy except Christianity and maybe Judaism. Nobody but us is allowed to have moral ideas except for a vague deficient sense of virtue or an absolute divine voluntarism. He does not give the pagans enough credit. Why does Antigone bury her brother, even though the king has forbidden it? Elliot would have us believe that it is only because she is thinking of her own virtue. Are we to mimic his sentence^v -- “it is true that my brother does not deserve to be buried, but I’m not the sort of person to leave my kin unburried.” Surely not! Nor can we believe that Antigone has any care for what Polynices political rights as a citizen may or may not be. Again, according to Elliot this is all that she should care about. On the contrary, Polynices deserves burial. She has a duty to burry him. It is a moral imperative and where can that moral imperative rest except in Polynices’ infinite dignity and worth.^vi There is no way Antigone would die for Elliot’s weak sense of virtue. We need Plato’s sense of virtue where a man must be prepared to die in the knowledge that he is just, even if the rest of the world—and indeed the gods— thinks he is a criminal.^vii Of Course the ancient Greeks, it might be argued, even though they were not monotheists, sought after some kind of divine reward or were following what they saw as the laws of the gods. However, remember Antigone’s line “who can say what the gods find pure and what they find corrupt” or Socrates’ ambivalence about death. But what is all this talk of reward and punishment or karma or however we want to phrase it but the assertion that metaphysics and morals go together. It is more than that, of course, but it is certainly no less than that. To do good or evil is to set yourself to be judged by the laws that underlie all reality, no less than jumping off a cliff or standing in the way of a bullet.

Some kind of notion of rights is clearly implicit in pagan thought. In fact it is not only implicit. Antiphon declared that there is in fact no distinction between Greek and barbarian since both breathe through their noses. Alexander the Great, in contrast to his teacher Aristotle, said that the only barbarian is a bad man and the only Greek is a good man. Thus we already see a universalizing tendency in the Greeks—I won’t carry this argument too far since Antiphon was not a major or influential thinker (although he really was a secular humanist centuries before he had any right to be so). Alexander’s case is interesting however, since it was his kind of thinking that allowed the possibility of Greek culture expanding beyond Greece.

If we move east, we find Confucianism with its constant reference to the way of heaven (t’ien tao) which is expressed through li (which translates, interestingly enough, into both “right action” and “ritual”). The whole cosmos is a liturgy in which each thing has its place. Li can be known by anyone through reason and he who practices the tao^viii possesses jen, human-heartedness or universal compassion. The only thing that makes barbarians lack this virtue is that they are poorly educated. Notice that the appeal here is to heaven, which is the right ordering of everything in the cosmos. This order is to be mirrored on earth in all things. So, jen is a virtue, but ultimately Confucian meta-ethics is based on more that my own personal good (the weaker sense of virtue that Elliot imputes to the pagans), but rather to the grand metaphysical ordering of things in which individuals, and in fact all things, have value. Nowhere does Confucius, or his disciples, talk about God or the afterlife and yet to speak of their ethical system as mere illusion would be ridiculous. Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit missionary to China, read Confucius and declared that he saw nothing in it contrary to the Gospel. John C. H. Wu, the first Chinese ambassador to the Vatican, when translating the Bible into Chinese rendered the prologue to John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Tao and the Tao was with God and the Tao was God.”

I can see no evidence that Christianity tells men how to be good. Christianity is about the recreation of the entire cosmos, the divinization of man, and the conquering of death. It’s not that we didn’t know that we had to love each other before Christ came, it is rather that we didn’t know that such actions were the very currency of the eschatological drama that we now see is unfolding before us.

V

Now it is time to test the strength of the central pillar holding up Elliot’s thesis. His entire argument, and mine, stand or fall on the proposition that for something to possess value (rights) it must be valued by a person; that is, the notion of something having value is unintelligible outside of some person deciding to give it value. Elliot clearly realizes that this is the crux of the issue and indeed the second section of his essay in which he takes up this point is the most carefully and expertly argued. That being said, he is deeply wrong in his conclusions.

Elliot’s view of creation is that of an undifferentiated chaos, for in it nothing, per se, has value. The only thing preventing him from being a nihilist is that he has placed God at the bottom of the sink, preventing all meaning from draining out the bottom. It is not that we observe that things have value, that there are gradations of goodness and beauty to be seen in nature, and then infer that there is perhaps a being which is the sum of all these perfections.^ix Rather, according to Elliot, for us to observe any kind of value, we have to first posit the deity. But this is contrary to our everyday thinking where we make these kind of valuations all the time. No one but the most thick headed of reductionists really believes that if we all decided that mud were more beautiful that gold that this would really be the case. Or that a woman is considered beautiful because there is something about the shape of her nose that causes men (for some reason which geneticists have not yet been able to penetrate) to believe her offspring will be healthier and stronger. Perhaps we are to suppose that the pretty girls give off better pheromones.

Now I know that Mr. Elliot believes in transcendent beauty, excellence and goodness and that it is indeed very dear to his heart. Unfortunately, he has accidentally jettisoned it in his polemic zeal. According to Elliot’s argument, if God does not value something, there is no sense in which it can be considered valuable. But on what basis does God consider things to be of greater or lesser value? Let us consider the possibilities. Either God has some standard of valuation or not. If not, and what he considers good and what he considers corrupt is entirely his own arbitrary choice, then we live in the chaos I described above. God is an artist who has splattered some paint on the wall and then said, because there is no one to contradict him, “look upon the beautiful thing I have made.” The only reason why we mortals might choose to agree with him is out of some hope of reward, fear of punishment, or out of some baser consideration (since these would be the only ones available, the higher ones being illusory) such as the pretty girls giving my offspring a survival advantage. So much for that world—it is very bleak but I don’t see how Elliot’s argument can lead anyplace else.

Let me explain why this is so as I explore the other possibilities. If God does have a standard by which he judges things to be of greater or lesser value then our picture is very different. What could such a standard be? Well, “who can know the mind of God?” but it seems to me that such a standard must somehow emanate or proceed from his nature, for what other source could it have? If the standard does not lie within God himself, then God is not God, but a demiurge.^x But even so, for our purposes here I say let him be a demiurge, imprinting the pre-existing forms onto the plastic. The forms (whatever it is by which God makes his valuations) are what are important. Such a law or standard exists and, like all other laws, it is prior to that which it evaluates. So if I were to evaluate something according to this standard and say, “this is good,” would it matter whether or not I believe that implicit in that statement is “this is like God” or “God says ‘this is good’”? Why should it?

I suppose Elliot would argue that unless God gives some kind of authority to this standard it is meaningless since I can simply deny that what the standard says is good is, in face, good. But I can’t do that with other kinds of valuations. If I say that something is illuminated, it had better in fact be illuminated. I may decide that light is darkness and darkness light, but I will quickly loose my way, fumbling in my blindness. And even if I wasn’t around to make any kind of judgement, light would still fall in some places and not others. It is the same way with metaphysical judgements. I may decide that evil is good, but I will surely die, just as surely as if I were to decide that gasoline is as good to drink as water. If I decide that violence and hatred bear with them no consequences, I will soon find myself fighting against the tide of the cosmos, the flow of the very Tao itself. And yes, that elemental spirits that do still inhabit the sacred places of the earth—whether Mr. Elliot has decided to stop believing in them or not^xi—will fight against me.

Let us return to Le Guin’s Omelas. No one values the child and no God is supposed (Le Guin identifies herself as an atheist), that is the whole point of the story. And yet there is something terrible happening, the child’s rights are being violated in the most profound possible way and it is intolerable. Ivan Karamazov^xii puts the problem even more starkly. He cannot imagine a God because it seems that God himself does not value innocent children who suffer. And yet for Ivan, even though neither God (putatively) nor man values the children they still have value and rights. How could this be? Because Ivan values them? He is too smart for that kind of self-deification. Because they value themselves? Elliot has dealt with that objection handily in his own argument.^xiii No, they are humans and they have rights and value inherent in them, even if we have some strange kind of god^xiv who does not respect those rights.

The point is, if God has a standard, whatever its source, then things are judged on the basis of that standard and not on the fact of God’s choice. This option therefore is not open to Elliot, since according to Elliot I cannot simultaneously believe that there is no God and that humans have value. So we are left with the unacceptable “no standard” option to describe Elliot’s theism. But if this standard does exist, which is no stretch since this is what people mean when they say “this is good,” or “this is beautiful” then atheists are allowed to use it too. We may legitimately ask them where this standard comes from, as Aquinas does, but even if they fail to make the connection with God that does not mean they are wrong about the standard itself. I am reminded of Socrates’ comment: “Would a painter be any the worse because, after having delineated with consummate art an ideal of a perfectly beautiful man, he was unable to show that any such man could ever have existed?”^xv

The problem is that Elliot, and I suspect many others, secretly believe that “goodness” is not a real property that something can have. Sure, something can be light or dark, soft or hard, but something cannot be simply good, beautiful, or true. It has to be good for something, beautiful to someone or true in reference to something else. This is simply not the case. Elliot wants to agree with me, but the only way he has found to do it is by making an ad hoc addition—God—to his conceptual framework. Things are valuable because God values them. I can see no difference between this and Berkeley’s esse est percipi—things only exist because God is constantly perceiving them. All theists believe that God holds everything constantly in being and yet no one is convinced by Berkeley who seems to be saying the same thing. God, by all appearances, creates stable, self-subsistent entities and works through laws and secondary causes. Yes, being comes from God, but that does not make the notion of being unintelligible without God. The same is true of the moral worth of the human person.

VI

In many important respects, this essay is an argument in favour of a more metaphysical way of looking at the world, but with metaphysics come epistemic considerations that must be dealt with. I realized this when I read Elliot’s argument concerning the personhood of the fetus.^xvi I can make nothing of such an argument. To deny that the fetus is a human being is to fall into the errors of reductionism and nominalism. But surely it is not true that the only good reason not to be a reductionist is because there is a God. Throughout his essay, Elliot fails to take metaphysical claims seriously. Metaphysics is not an empirical science, but it is a science and it talks about real things. Elliot’s approach to metaphysics is like the “creation scientist” who criticizes theories in biology and physics so he can ram God into the gap he has created. Michael Behe’s theory of (apparently) irreducible complexity within DNA has offered an interesting and important challenge to evolutionary biology, but instead of trying to solve his own problem, he stops his inquiry and posits a supernatural intelligence. If we had studied the theory of entropy, which leads almost inarguably that the universe must have, for some strange reason, started out in a highly ordered state and is “winding down” towards disorder, and said, “Aha, who could have given us such an order but God? Eat that atheists!” we would never have discovered how when a Higgs field reaches zero energy it generates and incredibly powerful reverse gravity that would space everything out evenly throughout the universe, thereby producing a state of very high entropy. We will never learn anything that way, either about the physical world or ourselves.

I see the same sort of thinking in Elliot’s essay. For underneath his entire argument is the notion that nothing can really have any value or persistent identity without God. Elliot is willing to do just enough metaphysics to prove that God exists and save us all from annihilation, but ultimately the universe is in moral and ontological chaos. This is as ridiculous as the man that denies there are physical laws, only a deity that moves things this way and that—and aren’t we glad he’s beneficent to be consistent about it. No, we do not worry that atheistic astronomers will stop believing in Jupiter because anyone can look up and see it there in the night sky. Just so, I do not worry that the atheist who is aware of the moral dignity of the human being is going to stop believing in it because human nature is there, evident before the eyes of his intellect. It is true that, like Jupiter, those who look through the telescope of a pure and disciplined mind will see it more clearly than others, but only those who fall into the madness of a rigid materialism will deny that it is there at all.

VII

So let’s quickly recap the ground we’ve covered. Firstly, the point of disagreement between Elliot and I is important because human rights claims are metaphysical claims. That is, there is an implicit and inextricable metaphysics behind all human rights claims. Moreover, the great majority of people are not radical materialists, even though metaphysics is out of vogue. Secondly, Elliot artificially separates human rights claims from other kinds of moral claims, but, as I have shown, there is no good reason to do so and, in fact, to do so flagrantly ignores our experience and common intuitions. Thirdly, Elliot’s central argument that something has no value unless it is valued by a person is simply untrue and, even in the context of theism, leads to a very shaky and ad hoc ontology that does not treat metaphysics seriously.

In the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, humanity went through a long and bloody process of syncretising the world’s religions. Usually when writers speculate about this, they make the error of reducing religion to ethics. Star Trek is a good example of this. But Herbert did something more artful, not only in making humanity’s attempt ultimately unsuccessful on the cultic level, but in the proposition that was finally found to be acceptable to all parties. The universal commandment for the entire human race is, “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.” This is different from the more usual suggestion, “love your neighbour as yourself,” because it acknowledges the essential spiritual aspect of man that is injured, made ugly, by evil. The human person is beautiful, but I can mar my own soul, and those of others, buy my actions. This is the moral consensus of man that we have expressed in so many different ways. Now, these modes of expression are not univocal, but neither are they mutually exclusive. It is true that ancient pagans did not speak of rights and that the modern atheist sitting in judgment at The Hague does not speak of blaspheming against the gods. Nonetheless, both shudder to behold a human being, as if a rotting corpse, scarred and gouged to the point that it can no longer mirror that mysterious and awesome beauty that it its very source and essence. We are all, as the Prophet Daniel said, gazing into the vision of the night, and behold we see one coming on the clouds like unto a son of man. But who is this man? He seems to be like me, but is he also the Messiah; is he also a son of God? He is some kind of strange wonder. If only we could see a little more clearly….