One thing that makes Harsanyi's column interesting is that he defends these ideas despite himself being an atheist. This seems to me to be a very tenuous philosophical position to place oneself in. In fact, I think it's incoherent.
Toward the end of his essay he writes:
As a nonbeliever myself, I’ve been asked by Christians many times how I can square my skepticism of the Almighty with a belief in natural rights. My answer is simple: I choose to.Natural rights such as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of liberty are either grounded in a transcendent moral authority or they're grounded in nothing. We can applaud Harsanyi's decision to embrace natural rights, while at the same time insisting that rights can't just be plucked from thin air. They must be based in something more than arbitrary human preferences or conventions.
He goes on:
“This is the bind post-Christian America finds itself in,” tweeted historian Tom Holland. “It can no longer appeal to a Creator as the author of its citizens’ rights, so [he] has to pretend that these rights somehow have an inherent existence: a notion requiring no less of a leap of faith than does belief in God.”Well, no. Just because something benefits individuals and mankind doesn't mean that its a "right" inherent in our humanity. Governments may codify these things and make them legal rights, but governments that don't care about what works to the benefit of individuals or mankind could as easily dispense with these legal "rights" and they wouldn't be violating any cosmic law or norm in doing so.
No less but no more. Just as an atheist or agnostic or irreligious secular American accepts that it’s wrong to steal and murder and cheat, they can accept that man has an inherent right to speak freely and the right to defend himself, his family, and his property. History, experience, and an innate sense of the world tell me that such rights benefit individuals as well as mankind. It is rational.
Harsanyi adds this:
The liberties borne out of thousands of years of tradition are more vital than the vagaries of democracy or the diktats of the state. That’s clear to me. We still debate the extent of rights, obviously. I don’t need a Ph.D. in philosophy, however, to understand that preserving life or expression are self-evident universal rights in a way that compelling taxpayers to pay for your “reproductive justice” is not.Of course, thousands of years of tradition may predispose us to believe that something is good, like marriage, but good traditions don't make something a "right," much less an inalienable right. Only an intelligent, personal God can do that. Harsanyi almost acknowledges this in his next few sentences:
John Locke, as far as I understand it, argued as much, though he believed that the decree of God made all of it binding. Which is why, even though I don’t believe my rights were handed down by a superbeing, I act like they are. It’s really the only way for the Constitution to work.In other words, Harsanyi seems to confess to basing his belief in rights in a fiction. He chooses to live as if God exists even though he believes that He doesn't.
It's very difficult to understand how one can see that their most deeply held beliefs can only make sense if there's a God and yet refuse to believe that God exists and then insist that this position is rational, as Harsanyi does a few paragraphs above.
He closes with this:
The question is: How can a contemporary leftist who treats the state as the source of all decency– a tool of compulsion that can make the world “fair” — accept that mankind has been bequeathed a set of individual liberties by God, regardless of race or class or political disposition? I’m not sure they can anymore.I'm not sure what he means by this, but what I think he means is that our rights are either handed down by God, in which case they're genuine rights, or they're granted by the state in which case they're just words on paper, arbitrary and relative to time and culture. Leftists believe the latter which means that they cannot hold that our liberties are genuine rights appertaining to all persons regardless of race, class or political disposition.
The problem is, neither can he.
