This should be good!
Alan Dershowitz , who wrote a book a few years ago criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court for intervening to call a halt to the Democratic Party's attempt to steal Florida and the Presidency in 2000 through a crooked recount designed to end only when they had, by hook or by crook (more likely by crook), manufactured a phony majority for Al Gore, has undertaken an even less enviable task. He's written a book seeking to establish a philosophically viable yet purely secular argument for the sanctity of human rights.
I have to read this book, since the proposal seems absurd on its face. If the basis for recognizing the rights of other folks is that we decide, on whatever basis, that we think it's a good idea, what's to stop us from changing our minds? Or from recognizing certain rights for certain people, but not for others? It's hard to make an intellectually coherent post-modern argument for anything, but Derschowitz really has his work cut out for on this one. If Thomas Jefferson couldn't do it, I have my doubts as to whether Alan Dershowitz can.
There is a reason why Jefferson was a Deist rather than an agnostic, and the logic of the Declaration of Independence may well illustrate it. For centuries before Mao Tse-Tung articulated the principle, human philosophy- both Eastern and Western- had been unable, by observing the world as it actually works, to come up with a theory of political legitimacy which was not merely some variation on the observation that "power grows out of the barrel of the gun." If there is no God, then it is the way of the universe that the highest power that does exist is sovereign; that the strong oppress the weak, and that whatever rights any of us enjoy are the gift- to be given or withheld at will- by those with the power to make such decisions stick. And in the absence of any higher power to say otherwise, how can such a universal law of nature be other than legitimate?
Jefferson- even a religious freethinker like Jefferson- saw that if human rights are not the gift of a Higher Authority than government or the popular will, then government or the popular will can take them away at any time.
As I said, I haven't read the Derschowicz book yet, but I'm skeptical about his ability to pull something off that no political philosopher in history has ever been able to achieve before.
I have to read this book, since the proposal seems absurd on its face. If the basis for recognizing the rights of other folks is that we decide, on whatever basis, that we think it's a good idea, what's to stop us from changing our minds? Or from recognizing certain rights for certain people, but not for others? It's hard to make an intellectually coherent post-modern argument for anything, but Derschowitz really has his work cut out for on this one. If Thomas Jefferson couldn't do it, I have my doubts as to whether Alan Dershowitz can.
There is a reason why Jefferson was a Deist rather than an agnostic, and the logic of the Declaration of Independence may well illustrate it. For centuries before Mao Tse-Tung articulated the principle, human philosophy- both Eastern and Western- had been unable, by observing the world as it actually works, to come up with a theory of political legitimacy which was not merely some variation on the observation that "power grows out of the barrel of the gun." If there is no God, then it is the way of the universe that the highest power that does exist is sovereign; that the strong oppress the weak, and that whatever rights any of us enjoy are the gift- to be given or withheld at will- by those with the power to make such decisions stick. And in the absence of any higher power to say otherwise, how can such a universal law of nature be other than legitimate?
Jefferson- even a religious freethinker like Jefferson- saw that if human rights are not the gift of a Higher Authority than government or the popular will, then government or the popular will can take them away at any time.
As I said, I haven't read the Derschowicz book yet, but I'm skeptical about his ability to pull something off that no political philosopher in history has ever been able to achieve before.
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