Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason (Catholic Ideas for a Secular World) - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of numerous books, including Montaigne: Life without Law (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

Ralph C. Hancock is professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University.

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As we observe human beings who obey the rule of their culture, even the most absurd or shocking in our view, we understand that they are not free and that there is no law valid for all human beings, a law that they would be free to obey or to disobey. We understand at the same time that we can and we must practically order collective life not according to a natural law, which does not exist or in any case has no power, but by taking as our foundation a freedom to which all human beings are entitled and of which they are capable once we have renounced imposing some law on them, once we have resolved to concern ourselves exclusively with their “rights.”

This division of the mind between human rights that we must put into effect and the diverse cultures that we are obliged to declare equal entails uncertainty and finally a weakness of judgment. Caught between the diversity without rule of cultures on the one hand, and, on the other, the lawless freedom of human rights, we no longer have a solid basis for exercising practical judgment. The arrangement that brings together the affirmation of the equality of human rights and the affirmation of the equality of “cultures” or ways of life throws the faculty of judgment into an insurmountable perplexity that tends to paralyze collective action.

Thus laws that are exotic or barbarous and our limitless freedom come together on this point: the former implicitly refute and the latter explicitly rejects the idea of a natural law, that is, the idea of freedom under law – under a law not made by freedom but that finds its support and its reason in human nature. The argument that the philosophy of human rights is constituted in opposition to the idea of a natural law, and particularly in opposition to the way this idea developed in a Christian context, finds sufficient proof in the philosophical construction that was the basis and the matrix of the doctrine of the rights of man, that is, the notion of the state of nature. The Christian or biblical idea of humanity as beginning under the law and, whether obedient or disobedient, as remaining under the law, is replaced by that of a humanity that begins in a freedom that ignores all law and that, once forced by necessity to give itself laws, will do so only under the condition and with the intention of preserving its freedom whole without law: the modern citizen, by putting himself under the law that it has produced, means to remain, according to the formula of Rousseau’s Social Contract, “just as free as before.” In other words, the law henceforth has validity or legitimacy only if it aims to guarantee human rights and limits itself to this purpose.

One might argue that, although the philosophy of human rights was elaborated and refined in a Christian context in opposition to the philosophy or doctrine of natural law nourished in this context, these conditions surrounding its production, which it is easy to show from the history of philosophy were intensely polemical, take nothing from the intrinsic legitimacy of this philosophy. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality in which the rights of man are rooted seems at first to offer enough consistency and meaning, enough clarity and motivation, for the citizen to be able and even obliged to forget the history of philosophy. No doubt the idea of human rights speaks to us directly and powerfully enough that we do not feel the need to inquire concerning its genesis. Still, even if we consider the notion of the state of nature to be scaffolding that is no longer needed once the edifice of rights has been constructed, a little attention to the stones of this edifice will force us to admit that we cannot speak of human rights without referring implicitly but directly and concretely to “nature.” And however repugnant we may find it to consider that “nature” in any sense plays a role in the principles by which we organize the human world, we must concede that the modern doctrine of rights depends upon a specific understanding of the human being that is nothing if not “natural.” The doctrine of human rights derives from a “right” that is nothing if not “natural.”