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Rights and Wrongs Without God: A Non-Religious Grounding for Human Rights in a Pluralistic World
Unformatted Document Text:  Rights and Wrongs Without God: A Non-Religious Grounding for Human Rights in a Pluralistic World In this paper, I offer a persuasive refutation of one of the central claims in Michael J. Perry’s The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries. He argues, in the first chapter of that book, that “There is no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious…The conviction that every human being is sacred is, in my view, inescapably religious—and the idea of human rights is, therefore, ineliminably religious.” 1 Conversely, in his most recent book, Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, Alan Dershowitz shrugs off Perry’s claim and argues that “It is more realistic to try to build a theory of rights on the agreed-upon wrongs of the past that we want to avoid repeating, than to try to build a theory of rights on idealized conceptions of the perfect society about which we will never agree.” 2 While I am generally sympathetic with Dershowitz on this point – indeed, I will ultimately argue for what I take to be a more persuasive variant of this claim – he seems to have quite clearly failed to specify how one might determine whether some action is right or wrong. Consider the following paragraph: In one important respect…this theory of rights is a theory of wrongs. It begins with the worst injustices: the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the Stalinist starvation and purges, the Holocaust, the Cambodian slaughter, and other abuses that reasonable people now recognize to have been wrongs. The ongoing nature of the righting process—and the fact that there is no consensus with regard to perfect justice—does not require that we ignore the wrongs of obvious injustice or allow those who advocate or inflict them to fall back on moral relativism as a justification for immorality. 3 1 Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11- 12. 2 Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 7. 3 Ibid., 81.

Authors: Kohen, Ari.
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Rights and Wrongs Without God:
A Non-Religious Grounding for Human Rights in a Pluralistic World
In this paper, I offer a persuasive refutation of one of the central claims in
Michael J. Perry’s The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries. He argues, in the first
chapter of that book, that “There is no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version
of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are
religious…The conviction that every human being is sacred is, in my view, inescapably
religious—and the idea of human rights is, therefore, ineliminably religious.”
1
Conversely, in his most recent book, Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the
Origins of Rights, Alan Dershowitz shrugs off Perry’s claim and argues that “It is more
realistic to try to build a theory of rights on the agreed-upon wrongs of the past that we
want to avoid repeating, than to try to build a theory of rights on idealized conceptions of
the perfect society about which we will never agree.”
2
While I am generally sympathetic
with Dershowitz on this point – indeed, I will ultimately argue for what I take to be a
more persuasive variant of this claim – he seems to have quite clearly failed to specify
how one might determine whether some action is right or wrong. Consider the following
paragraph:
In one important respect…this theory of rights is a theory of wrongs. It
begins with the worst injustices: the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the
Stalinist starvation and purges, the Holocaust, the Cambodian slaughter, and
other abuses that reasonable people now recognize to have been wrongs.
The ongoing nature of the righting process—and the fact that there is no
consensus with regard to perfect justice—does not require that we ignore the
wrongs of obvious injustice or allow those who advocate or inflict them to fall
back on moral relativism as a justification for immorality.
3
1
Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11-
12.
2
Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (New York: Basic
Books, 2004), 7.
3
Ibid., 81.


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