abstract: We would then, on Adler's theory, have no more rights than the carbon atom. If we accept the biblical justification for human rights and the limitations of government, we are compelled by intellectual honesty to accept its further limits on both rights and government--even if this goes against our prejudices. Adler, for one, is right to insist that government is limited (though he cannot justify this view), but the state is far more limited than he imagines.

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by Christopher Alexion

In this enlightened age of tolerance, civil and political judgments are supposed to be religiously neutral--neither favoring nor condemning any particular worldview. Our society has resoundingly decided to take no decisive position on religious matters. At the same time, of course, contemporary thinkers (and voters) want to retain certain universal human rights over against the claims of government. They want government to be accountable; when dictators ethnically cleanse their regions or "fundamentalists" try to get elected to office, they need to appeal to some kind of individual rights or transcendent limits on government.

These rights are strictly defended on natural or non-religious grounds; hence they are called natural rights. Modern thinkers may not retain Jefferson's view that inalienable rights derive from the Creator (or that men are created at all), but they do insist that some of the truths of the Declaration of Independence are self-evident--they find their support without reference to theology. They are discovered and expounded through something called "natural law."

The result hasn't been impressive. Non-Christian, secular outlooks fail to secure the foundation of human rights, and, further, obscure their definition and application.

Justifying Human Rights

The first of these points is the most important. Does secular natural law establish certain human rights? Can human reason, as Gordon Clark asked, "discover in nature an order of morality that sets the norm for statutory law"?1 Are the Declaration's truths really self-evident?

Mortimer Adler answers that they are. Human beings, he says, are "equal by virtue of their having the same nature" and "they possess certain rights by virtue of their having that nature."2 The existence of these rights "as natural endowments gives them moral authority."3

Adler is right to mention moral authority, for the question of rights is closely tied to the question of ethics. We have no rights if there is no right and there is no wrong. Moral judgments are necessary. For Adler, these judgments must be based on a self-evident proposition; they must be derived from human reason. Adler's self-evident proposition stems from natural needs:

Whatever we need is really good for us. There are no wrong needs. We never need anything to an excess that is really bad for us. The needs that are inherent in our nature are all right desires. We can say, therefore, that a prescriptive [ethical] judgment has practical truth if it expresses a desire for a good that we need....[R]eal goods are the things all of us by nature need, whether or not we consciously desire them as the objects of our acquired wants.4

With this material laid down, Adler tells us his first principle of moral philosophy: "We ought to desire whatever is really good for us and nothing else."5 Adler identifies this real good with the pursuit of happiness. All other natural rights are "founded on natural needs,"6 since they are instrumental in our pursuit of happiness. This right, in turn, "rests not on our needs, but on our moral obligation to make morally good lives for ourselves."7 "If we were not under that obligation in the first place," says Adler, "we would not have a right to whatever is needed as means for the achievement of that end."8

Adler's moral philosophy, however, fails as a defense of natural rights. Though Adler realizes that "a prescriptive conclusion cannot be validly drawn from premises that are entirely descriptive,"9 his attempt to "combine a prescriptive with a descriptive premise in order cogently to argue for the truth of a prescriptive conclusion"10 suffers from this very mistake.

The prescriptive premise by which he hopes to avoid the naturalistic fallacy begs the question by assuming that the fulfillment of our natural human needs is good --the very point under debate. If there is no moral significance to our needs (and it does Adler no good merely to assert this point), then we are under no more obligation to pursue happiness than a carbon atom is obliged to pursue eight valence electrons. We would then, on Adler's theory, have no more rights than the carbon atom.11 In Carl F. H. Henry's words:

If, as champions of natural morality insist, human nature is inherently structured with imperatives, how can humans know that these very requirements are ethically legitimate? The proponents of natural law are self-precluded from appealing to Scripture or special revelation (or even to general revelation). It is difficult to protect any form of intuitionism against the emergence of Hitler or Stalin or Mao who entrench counter-imperatives in vast segments of soci-ety....What humanity affirms solely on the basis of inherent instincts and philosophical reasoning lacks normative force.12

Clark points out further difficulties, noting that moral and political philosophers have differed sharply on the existence of these "self-evident" rights. Jefferson praises equality; Aristotle endorses slavery.13 Aquinas (like Adler) says that the good is based on our natural inclinations; Duns Scotus answers that we have no way of knowing which inclinations are really natural. If the truths Jefferson and Adler hold as self-evident really are so, then wouldn't there be wider agreement? Clark sums it up well: "[T]he theory of natural law is not a satisfactory theoretical defense of minority and individual rights. Human reason, that is, ordinary observation of nature, leads more easily to totalitarianism than to anything else other than anarchy."14

Which Rights Do We Have?

Natural law compounds this problem by muddying the proper application of rights. For Adler, this confusion centers around Jefferson's use of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration. Writes Adler:

This right differs from the rest [i.e., life, liberty, and the others] by being concerned with an end or objective for the attainment of which the others serve as means. That one is the right of each person to pursue happiness--that is to try to make a good human life for himself or herself. The most precise way of stating this truth is to say that our natural rights consist in our rights to life, liberty, and anything else that we need in order to pursue happiness--goods that the government of an organized society can confer upon us, or can aid and abet our efforts to obtain.15

In other words, when Jefferson declares that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights--among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--we are to understand him as asserting that the right to pursue happiness is the primary or fundamental right, and all the other rights "are rights to things that every human being needs in order to succeed" in this effort.16

The startling thing is that Adler does not argue for this view but asserts it rather dogmatically. It is not necessary to read the Declaration the way Adler does; and even if Jefferson does hold the view of the pursuit of happiness Adler attributes to him, that view is not necessarily right. It is our job to evaluate it, which I'll attempt to do later.

So what are these "instrumental" rights to which Adler refers? They are the "natural needs" mentioned in the last section. "On the biological level, all of us need food, drink, sleep, and shelter of some sort. On the specifically human level, we need freedom and knowledge."17 Adler has more:

A just government can...aid and abet the pursuit of happiness on the part of its people by securing their natural rights to the real goods they need--life, liberty, and whatever else an individual needs, such as the protection of health, a sufficient measure of wealth, and other real goods that individuals cannot obtain solely by their own efforts.18

These real goods may also include education, since "schooling of one sort or another is certainly instrumental to the fulfillment of our need for knowledge. To whatever extent that is the case, we may have a right to schooling."19

The Biblical Alternative

The biblical view differs sharply from Adler's on these points. In the first place, it asserts a different foundation for human rights and individual liberties. Rather than beginning with unaided human reason, this view looks beyond man and begins with the self-authenticating propositional revelation of the Old and New Testaments. We base our ethical and political views on an unproved presupposition or axiom--just as every system must do.20

The Christian who accepts this position has, as Clark put it, "no wish to deny that God at creation wrote the basic moral law on man's heart" or that "even yet this conscience acts after a fashion."21 Paul says that the Gentiles, who don't have the law, still do some of the things required by it because the law is "written in their hearts" (Rom. 2:15). But this witness is severely distorted by sin and hence is not a reliable independent guide of ethics or politics--as argued above. Again, Henry:

The dual reference to law of nature and law of God presumably arose from the Apostle Paul's teaching in Romans 1 and 2. John Murray in his volume on Paul's epistle to the Romans in The New International Commentary series argues that the term "law of nature" is a Christian concept rooted in Scripture, not a secular concept to be grasped independently of a revelatory epistemology. To interpret Romans 1 and 2 in deistic terms of natural religion is unjustifiable.22

Natural revelation must always be interpreted in the light of biblical revelation.23 And when we accept this revelation, we are able to articulate a consistent basis for limited government and individual rights. Scripture asserts that God is above all: "He is before all things, and by Him all things consist" (Col. 1:17). This is not merely an ontological and epistemological precedence; it's political as well: "For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee" (Rom. 9:17). The Old Testament is full of judgments on nations and kings that rejected God's Word, so that we cannot help but conclude that "the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will" (Dan. 4:25) or that "the kingdom is the Lord's: and He is the governor among the nations" (Ps. 22:28). In Paul's words: "Of Him, and to Him, and through Him, are all things" (Rom. 11:36).

This means that "there is no power but of God" and that "the powers that be [i.e., civil rulers] are ordained of God" (Rom. 13:1). The state is not supreme; it is very much under the jurisdiction of God's law. The ruler is actually the servant of God (Rom. 13:4), and thus is morally accountable to Him. To put it simply: God alone is supreme; the state is not God; therefore, the state is not supreme. Therefore it is limited.24

One aspect of the limitation of the state is that it is not the only government. God has ordained three distinct spheres of government: family government, church government, and civil government.25 Each of these governments is legitimate: it is ordained by God, the supreme Authority. Each has its own particular responsibilities, jurisdictions, and limits,26 and the Word of God sets these limits.

Scripture and Rights

In the second place, the biblical view reserves the exclusive right to define our rights. If we accept the biblical justification for human rights and the limitations of government, we are compelled by intellectual honesty to accept its further limits on both rights and government--even if this goes against our prejudices. Adler, for one, is right to insist that government is limited (though he cannot justify this view), but the state is far more limited than he imagines.

A good place to begin is with the enumeration of rights Adler gave us above. Adler said that we all are born with a right and an obligation to pursue happiness, and hence civil government is obligated to provide us with whatever we need to do so. It can "aid and abet" our pursuit. I said earlier that this was not necessarily Jefferson's view, and is not necessarily right even if it was. Actually, it is emphatically not right. The right to pursue happiness doesn't exist.

It is more accurate, in fact, to avoid speaking of "rights" at all. God alone is absolutely entitled to anything, and His sovereignty precludes our having any such claims apart from Him.27 We don't have a "right" to life or liberty or property; what we do have is a biblical prohibition of murder, kidnapping, and theft, as well as the office of the civil magistrate to punish and prevent such offenses. We may speak, in a sense, of a "right to life," but this is actually a negative liberty--an assertion that others are not entitled to take our lives without just cause--and not a positive entitlement to exis-tence.28 A right is, as Douglas Jones put it, an "enforceable moral claim against others,"29 but we must be clear that it is a negative claim. Adler is mistaken to say that "the prohibition of murder and of violent assault and battery implements our right to life and our bodily health, which is adjunct thereto."30 Rather, this prohibition is our "right."

The same thing is true of the liberties we assert over against civil government. We do not have a right to be secure in our persons or properties (God, in fact, lays claim to both31). We have God's strict limitation of civil government, which is forbidden to act in such ways against citizens (see 1 Kings 21:1ff). We don't have a right to reasonable taxes; we have a biblical prohibition of economic tyranny and a promise of divine judgment against it (Prov. 22:22-23).

So when Adler insists that we have a right to "economic equality"32 or education or health care, the consistent Christian disagrees. He rejects the conclusion because he rejects the major premise. The state exists to punish those who murder, not to provide us with health care. The civil magistrate is there to execute wrath against thieves, not to ensure that we all have a "sufficient amount of wealth."

Further, these imagined rights are not only unbiblical but produce contradictory results. These "rights" can only stand on the denial of the foundational "rights" (to use the term colloquially) which we really have. For instance, the "right" to economic equality violates the eighth commandment's prohibition of theft. The "right" to non-discrimination in employment violates private property and thus 1 Kings 21. The "right" to education (with the ever-accompanying vices of compulsory attendance and school regulation) violates parental responsibilities to bring up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.33

Surprisingly, this point comes up in Adler's argument against the hedonistic view of happiness: "[The attainment of happiness] by one individual [such as a poor man, homosexual, or school superintendent] may depend on the deprivation of it for another [i.e., another poor man, a business owner, or Christian parent]. Hence no government can attempt to aid and abet two competing individuals in their pursuit of happiness."34 If only Adler had taken this point more to heart.

Conclusion

The central issue in all of this is the question of authority. The problem with so many thinkers like Adler is that they have rejected God's Word as the axiomatic starting point for all of thought. They have tried, by neutral, non-religious, or natural means, to provide a consistent basis for human rights, individual liberties, and limited government. Yet they have failed, not merely to avoid religious dogma, but to avoid tyranny.

But the biblical view succeeds in doing what neutral naturalism cannot do. It embraces propositional revelation as supreme, affirming, in Henry's words, that "only what God says in Scripture and has disclosed in Christ is normative." It exalts the revealed commands of God, not the autonomous rationalism or inalienable rights of man. The result is a consistent theoretical defense of limited government and individual liberties. Neutrality and autonomy have indeed been sacrificed--but is that such a great loss when we consider the anarchy and tyranny sacrificed with them?

Christopher Alexion is a homeschool graduate living in New Castle, Delaware. He can be reached at cmalexion@netzero.net.

Endnotes

1. Gordon H. Clark, Natural Law and Revelation, The Christian Statesman, vol. 143, no. 4.

2. Mortimer J. Adler, We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 47.

3. Ibid., p. 48.

4. Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 124-125.

5. Ibid., p. 125, italics his.

6. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 56.

7. Adler holds the ethical view of happiness as a whole life well-lived as opposed to the psychological conception of happiness as the fulfillment of desires.

8. Ibid., p. 57. Adler also says, page 61, that "our need for freedom of action and our consequent right to it has its natural foundation in our natural endowment of free choice."

9. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, p. 118.

10. Ibid., p. 121.

11. Adler admits as much in the case of animals (We Hold These Truths, pp. 60-61).

12. Carl F. H. Henry, Natural Law and a Nihilistic Culture, First Things magazine, no. 49 (Jan. 1995). Available at http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9501/articles/henry.html.

13. Though I have omitted for brevity's sake Adler's discussion of human equality as a self-evident truth, it might be pertinent to insert Chesterton's comment on this portion of the Declaration: "The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." (G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America, 1922, chapter 19) [There is another chapter of this Chesterton book posted at What is America?, by G. K. Chesterton.]

14. Clark, Natural Law and Revelation. Clark also points out that, on the view of natural law, "Caesar, Napoleon, and Stalin can take pride in their crimes. Looking carefully on nature and seeing it red in tooth and claw, they can conclude that the universe is indifferent to the fate of any individual and that it is the law of nature for the brutal to rule the meek. There are natural inclinations for domination and a will to power. And if Aquinas says otherwise, he can't see straight and reasons like a bourgeois gentilhomme."

15. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 41

16. Ibid., p. 52.

17. Ibid., p. 55. One should ask on what grounds Adler moves beyond bare biological needs and whether the other needs he mentions are self-evident.

18. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, p. 135.

19. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 59.

20. For more on the necessity of unproved axioms or presuppositions, see Clark's essay Atheism (http://www.trinityfoundation.org/reviews/journal.asp?ID=032a.html) [looks like the Trinity Foundation changed its URLs, tsk, tsk] or my article "H.M.S. Modernity" (http://www.reformationonline.com/modernity.htm).

21. Clark, Natural Law and Revelation.

22. Henry, Natural Law and a Nihilistic Culture,

23. Greg Bahnsen, in his critique of Classical Apologetics, also emphasizes the important distinction between natural theology and natural revelation: "When the authors [Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley] go on and try to demonstrate that the Bible itself endorses 'natural theology,' they are unable to do so, for all the evidence they adduce pertains rather to 'natural revelation.' The Psalmist and Paul say absolutely nothing about inferences and proofs devised by human reflection." (A Critique of Classical Apologetics, Presbyterian Journal, vol. 44, no. 32).

24. America has profited much from a biblical view of the state. Many of our founders, if not actually biblical Christians, were strongly influenced by the Christian worldview. Some Britons caught this idea when they termed the War of Independence a "Presbyterian rebellion." Even the Declaration makes reference to "the laws of nature and of nature's God" and the truth of creation as foundations for human equality and liberty. Well has it been said that John Calvin was "the virtual founder of America."

25. Our dictionaries once reflected this truth. Webster's dictionary of 1828, for example, begins the definition of the term government with "Direction; rule." Yet most modern dictionaries begin with civil government, and some acknowledge no definition but civil government. The very phrase "civil government" is, on this view, redundant. The Christian, in the other hand, insists on the use of the qualifying adjective civil before government to distinguish it from the other two equally legitimate governments.

26. For family government, see Ephesians 6:1, 4; Deuteronomy 6:7; Matthew 7:9-10; and 1 Timothy 5:4. For church government, see Titus 2:1ff; 1 Corinthians 5:12-13; Acts 6:1; and 1 Timothy 5:16.

27. c f. Job 1:21; Romans 9:15. It is interesting to note that Arminian arguments against divine predestination often assume a sort of system of "spiritual rights" when they charge Calvinism with "unfairness."

28. An abstract "right to life" would seem to rule out the biblical insistence on capital punishment for murder. Interestingly, Adler draws this conclusion (We Hold These Truths, pp. 49-50).

29. Douglas Jones, Disposing of Health Care Rights, Credenda Agenda, vol. 6, no. 4.

30. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 64.

31. c f. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, 16:2.

32. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 145ff.

33. The point might be summed up in one word: coercion. Civil government is by nature a coercive institution, and when it tries to also be a benevolent institution, coercion clings to it still. Everything the state does is coercive.

34. Adler, We Hold These Truths, p. 56.

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