Rights must always be justified and ethically grounded ...
The religious usually ground their claims about abortion in their understanding of
God's laws. Since she is an atheist, her claims have nothing to do with any god or her laws. I'm not sure how we ground human rights - aside from legal rights - but I believe it is important that we do so.
The March 3rd edition of "The Nation" had a
review by Michael Rosen of Ronald Dworkin's last book,
Religion Without God. In it, he discusses Dworkin's views on the law, morality and human rights.
A brief excerpt:
...
Grant the idea that human beings are surrounded by this invisible shell of inherent rights and everything fits together. But there are still two obvious (and connected) objections: What reason is there to think that these strange things called “rights” exist, and what lets us recognize them in enough detail to determine how far they extend? If we turn back to the eighteenth century, the authors of the Declaration of Independence make it clear where they think rights come from: God. Men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” a view that the American founders took more or less directly from the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke. At about the same time, in Germany, Immanuel Kant was equally emphatic: “the Rights of Man,” he wrote, are “God’s most sacred institution.” So is the idea of rights as prior to law no more than a hangover of religion? Bentham certainly thought so: “Right, the substantive right, is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons”—Bentham means, no doubt, Christianity and its priests—“come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters, ‘gorgons and chimaeras dire.’”
One reply—Richard Rorty was among its best-known advocates—is to say that, although rights don’t have a foundation in religion, they don’t need them: morality is just about the ways that people judge and respond to various situations, and rights theory is the name for one kind of response. To say that you believe in “rights” is no more than a substantivized way of expressing that you are convinced there are things that ought not be done to people, even in pursuit of a good end. There’s no need to think that rights are some spooky kind of entity hovering behind the ways that people think and behave. To borrow a phrase from Rorty, ascribing rights to people is “the way we do things around here.”
Yet there is a very important difficulty with this “subjectivist” position. When ruthless utilitarian aggregators defend their view, they can justify it by pointing to the way it leads to the advancement of something that is evidently good (happiness) or the avoidance of something bad (suffering). It means that there is an immediate, intuitively plausible response when utilitarians are asked what kinds of values underpin their moral theory. Yet what justification can be given by someone who rejects that view? What is it about the individual whose life would otherwise be sacrificed for the collective good that makes the sacrifice wrong? To say that she or he has a right not to be put to death in order to save others is just to put a name to the problem. We also need, it seems, a satisfying reason why—something about the victim that explains why he or she has a value that overrides instrumental calculations about the greatest good. It is at this point that religious-sounding vocabulary tends to slip back into the discussion. Rawls, for example, talks about each person having an “inviolability founded on justice,” although he does not explain just what “inviolability” might amount to.
I think Dworkin took something like Rorty’s position when he published Taking Rights Seriously in 1977. But thirty-six years later, by the time of Religion Without God, he held a different and far stronger view: human beings do indeed have a special value that can’t be overridden (religious thinkers commonly call it “human dignity”), though not because it comes from God. To the contrary, values exist independently of God.
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