The Humanist Basis for Human Rights

Humanist, Sept, 2000 by William F. Schulz

William F. Schulz AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION HUMANIST OF THE YEAR

It was a great and undeserved honor to be named the 2000 Humanist of the Year. It is chastening, to say the least, to be included in the pantheon with the likes of Alice Walker, Ashley Montagu, Isaac Asimov, and Helen Caldicott. When I departed the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association seven years ago at the age of forty-three, someone remarked, "He is a young man with a brilliant future behind him." The generosity of the American Humanist Association in honoring me rescued me from that fate and I will be ever grateful.

I'm particularly thankful because the humanist tradition is one I long have cherished--from my early days as a young person in the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the feet of an unreconstructed humanist UU minister, Edward Cahill; through my days at Meadville/ Lombard Theological School, where I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the "Making of the Humanist Manifesto"; through my years in the parish ministry and as president of the UUA.

I have tried to keep alive in my professional life the spirit of a Leon Birkhead who, as humanist minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Kansas City in the 1920s, joined a group of his Christian colleagues in a prayer service designed to alleviate a terrible drought that had struck the Midwest that year. But Birkhead showed up at the meeting with an umbrella--an item his more orthodox colleagues had all forgotten to bring. "I take it," Birkhead later told a reporter, "that I am the only member of the clergy who has any faith."

When Pat Robertson was running for president of the United States in 1986, the second year of my UUA presidency, he announced that he would surely win because he was running with God's blessing. When he came in fourth in the Massachusetts primary, I announced to the public that Robertson should be prosecuted forthwith under the Massachusetts blasphemy laws for losing the election and thereby violating the law that prohibited bringing scorn and ridicule to the name of God.

So I appreciate this honor and trust I will be deserving of it. Part of the way I do that, of course, is through my work as executive director of Amnesty International. But I want to address here not international human rights crises but, rather, the philosophical basis for the whole human rights struggle.

While everyone--even the world's most notorious tyrants--agrees that human rights are codified in that remarkable little document--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)--passed in 1948 by the United Nations at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt, very few people understand the basis upon which that document's authority rests. And that basis, interestingly enough, is one that could quite reasonably be described as derived from humanism.

In one sense it would be wonderful if we could prove to the satisfaction of the world that God has imbued human beings with a set of rights and even better if we could show that those rights happen to coincide with the ones articulated in the UDHR. Such proof would offer human rights such an elevated status that not even the most vicious dictator would dare to challenge them.

But it doesn't take a sophisticated thinker to recognize that, given the diversity of religious opinion in the world, God's injunctions are not going to provide satisfactory grounds for defending the notion of rights beyond a certain circle of believers. Even within singular religious traditions, there is often widespread disagreement about how God wants human beings to order their lives here on Earth.

My favorite example of such a difference of opinion within the Christian tradition concerns the school of devotees in the early church called Montanists who believed that only by eating a steady diet of radishes could a person be saved. Had the Montanists' view prevailed, today's Christians would take vegetables with their communion wine rather than bread. It was exactly because of this recognition--that to base a justification of rights on an appeal to deity or religion was bound to result in endless quarrels--that those who composed the Universal Declaration firmly rejected placing any reference to a deity in the document.

But if God isn't the direct source of rights, perhaps human nature is. The second major argument in defense of rights has been the argument from natural law: that rights are derived from what we share in common as human beings, from the fact, for example, that we are "rational" creatures. But what makes an appeal to the "laws of nature" a problematic basis for defending human rights is not too different from why God fails the test. It is simply impossible to discern to the satisfaction of a fractious world what counts as ethical imperatives derived from observation of human nature. Whose nature, after all, provides the standard? Is it the nature of a Hitler or the nature of a Gandhi? Both, after all, were human beings, much as we have tried to label Hitler a monster. "What is man," Isak Dinessen asked, "but an ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine?" Is that the measure of humanity?