Gods and rights

As regular visitors here will know, I have my reservations about the 'new atheism'. But in criticizing some of its representatives, Andrew Brown tries to persuade us of a dubious analogy: between religious belief, on the one hand, and belief in human rights, on the other. Brown starts from the concept of sacredness, which he calls a 'social reality'. In chess the king is sacred - 'incomparably valuable' - but that's only because we make it so through the rules of the game of chess. His analogy then follows:

Human rights are stronger, or metaphysically more real, than a king at chess because we think they still persist even - perhaps especially - when all the players ignore them. So, of course, are gods, at least to believers.

I don't want to get into arguments about the metaphysical realities of either human rights or deities. I merely want to observe that both have a metaphysical dimension if anything does. We want to say that they exist even when they are ignored, and even when no instances of their being can be observed. We who believe in them say that human rights are not abolished by their absence. Instead we say that they are violated. But an atheist, at least, has to conclude that both gods and rights exist only in virtue of our belief in them. We have to face the possibility that if we were not here to believe in them, and to act on our belief, our human rights would be as dead as the gods of Olympus.

Later on Brown adds:

I... think that commitment to human rights involves... some of the same aspects of belief as a commitment to organised religion must do. In particular, it demands that we act as if certain things existed whose existence is in fact unknowable.

The analogy is misconceived in a number of ways. On the part of the believer, God's existence is thought to be a reality of a similar ontological status to the existence of realities like the sun, the planets, life on Earth and oxygen. What I mean by this is that God and these other entities are thought, by all those who think so, to exist independently of the belief that they exist. For unbelievers, this is true of the sun, the planets etc, but false of God; but even by unbelievers it is recognized that the status claimed for Him by those who do believe in Him is the status of a real and independent existent.

Human rights are not the same kind of entity - at least, not for all those of us who subscribe to them. Rights are values or norms; in this, they are not like planets or oxygen. No one goes around trying to find human rights; as in 'Hmmm... I wonder whether we can locate them under that rock - or by looking at the human body through this powerful new instrument'. Because they are values or norms, their mode of existing is a different one. They are prohibitions, enablements, liberties, not things or beings. Without the valuers who value them - without human beings - human rights would indeed not exist, whereas if God had not created humankind (or so I understand this), He could still have existed; He might have stopped short at a world full of trees and insects, I suppose. Does this mean, then, that human rights are relativized, that we can take them or leave them, make them up at will? I wouldn't say so. We argue to human rights from the nature of human beings and the fundamental interests they have in virtue of their human nature and of other properties of the world they conjointly inhabit.

Whether or not God is knowable, human rights are; or, at any rate, they can be argued about in a rationally intelligible way, and this even though they would not exist without human beings.