 This program is brought to you by Emory University. Building on this morning's session, on the three traditions of the book and the future questions they pose, this morning we'll be, in this session, we're asking law, religion, and human rights. The session is chaired by my colleague and brother, Johann von Deweyver. Johann came to Emory Law School roughly in 1995. He came to Emory Law School at the same time that he came to the Carter Center of Emory University. He came to work as a senior fellow for President Carter and we were able to steal him half time. We then were able to persuade him not to return to South Africa, but to join our faculty permanently as the IT Cohen Professor of International Law. Professor von Deweyver's background is extraordinary. His scholarship is mammoth. He's over 200 articles. But in the midst of doing his scholarship, he was doing the tough issues in life as well. He is the principal architect with the ANC of the post-apartheid constitution. Partially because of his work with the ANC, he lost his professorship at Pashtunstram, became a distinguished professor at Witt's Waterstron at Witt's and then continued his work with ANC and then was able to come to join us here at Emory. We're delighted to have him part of the Law and Religion Program as a senior fellow in Law and Religion. Delighted to see what he has done, what he continues to do, and his own vision for the future. I turn it over to you, Professor von Deweyver. Our first speaker in this session is Abdulay Ahmed Anayim who received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and an LLB from the University of Cambridge. He's currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and a highly respected and appreciated colleague. His specialities are international human rights, comparative constitutional law, and Islamic law. Professor Anayim has lectured throughout the world and published numerous articles and 15 books, including the future of Sharia, secularism from an Islamic perspective, African constitutionalism and the role of Islam, and to warden Islamic reformation, civil liberties, human rights, and international law. Professor Anayim is not only an Islamic scholar, he's also an Islamic reformist addressing some of the really difficult questions in Islam and trying to impose a human rights ethos on the Islamic community. I give you Professor Anayim. Thank you very much, and if I may add my voice of welcome to all our guests, I am part of the Law and Religion Center program here at Emory Law School, in that capacity I welcome you all. And I think also I will not to show lack of appreciation, but also the problematic of my being part of the Law and Religion program at Emory. So it's a real privilege and challenge for me to be part of this wonderful Center of Excellence. And the challenge, I may begin by highlighting that because it is relevant to what I'm going to say, the challenge of quote-unquote representing Islam. Because although we are often cited, I mean we as Muslims are often cited as part of the Abrahamic family and part of the Western legal tradition and religious traditions, but there is a little ambiguity about the way in which we are part of this, and who are the we that who are part of this. I'm very glad that I am following Dr. Johansson's remarks earlier this morning because let me be very clear and personal. There is a very long tradition, I'm a Muslim and I'm a lawyer and I try to be a scholar, but in the Muslim tradition there is a hesitancy and inhibition about speaking in the name of Islam. You wouldn't guess it from the way that now Muslims are holding force all over speaking in the name of Islam so categorically and without any hesitation, but in fact the religious command is not to speak in the name of Islam or not to present yourself as speaking in the name of Islam. And I think that inhibition I'm sure also exists in the other religious traditions. So how can one, and again in an American legal environment where lawyers are very confident about what the law is and which is often what they think it is but they never qualified in that way, how can one who is a Muslim claim to speak about something that is quote unquote Islamic in a legal environment and also in a very popular American environment as well. The second aspect of this also is the extreme diversity of Islamic societies in historical terms as well as in contemporary terms. Muslims make about one fifth of the total world population that's about 20% of the total global population are Muslims. But in the ways in which they are Muslims are extremely different and varied and complex. And again the question of Islamic identity and what that means. The third element of my challenge is the post-colonial in the sense that I am from Sudan, I grew up in Sudan, lived all my life in Sudan and now is speaking from a highly prestigious and very powerful American institution but also with a lot of ambiguities about what that means for parts of the world to which I still remain part of or belong to and in whose name I'm supposed to speak. I think there is an ambiguity about Islamic, the term Islamic we use so frequently. In fact, if you travel in certain parts of the world you will see all sorts of things Islamic, this Islamic, that Islamic laundry, Islamic butchery, so the term is really diluted and confused by the ways in which people tend to use it. And that is not different from applying it to the Islamic societies in my title. So what is Islamic about these societies beyond the demographic of personal identification as Muslims? And what does that identification mean? Also that's ambiguous. And I think the question of fidelity to Sharia, the assumption that Muslims are committed to the upholding of the principle of Sharia is also a very ambiguous and also often exaggerated notion. As I said, I'm grateful to follow Professor Johansson's remarks earlier this morning because in relation to my title, Sharia is both less and more than law. It is not law in the sense that state law is law, yet it can be profoundly more binding on Muslims than law can ever be. Yet for it to have a legal dimension you have to have the agency of the state. When the agency of the state is implemented or brought in the picture to make Sharia legal in the modern sense of the term, how much does Sharia remain the religious law of Islam and how much is it transformed into something else, something different? Professor Johansson's very, very, very enlightening remarks this morning showed the ambiguity of the sense in which we talk about Islamic law. And we say Islamic law, but what we are talking about really is the role of Islam or some sort of Islamic jurisprudence in relation to and within the context of the modern legal system of so-called nation states or territorial states. So is it about Sharia really or is it about the legal systems and political regimes of the various countries where Muslims are the majority? And the two cases that he cited of Egypt and Pakistan show that really the way in which Islam or Islamic law or Sharia is at issue is really very marginal and very ambiguous. For example, he cited the Egyptian scholar and deputy of the constitutional court, Dr. Sharif, who asserts that Sharia is above the law but below the constitution. What does that mean really? And what makes Sharia above the law if it is below the constitution? Whatever power and authority Sharia has, as we see in the case of Iran, for example, is really very ambiguous in relation to the legal system of a modern territorial state or nation state. So if Sharia is to be above the law, why not above the constitution? What is the sort of legal authority that Sharia has to be above the legal system of the country in question and yet below the constitution of the country in question? The assumptions of my title also include and we are under strict instructions in terms of 20 minutes or so in our presentations, the assumptions that are implicit in the title, law and morality is an assumption of distinction between law and morality, which is of course is in the Western legal tradition. It might correspond to something equivalent or similar in the Islamic legal tradition but it is not the same because I think that the notion of law and Sharia is not the same as law and morality because there is a quote unquote legal dimension of Sharia. There are aspects of Sharia that pretend or are proclaimed to be legal principles but they are legal principles only through the agency of the state. If they are in the speculation of the interpretation of jurists that these are legal principles but they do not become operational in the modern legal system except through the agency of the state. And the other aspect also of my talk is about human rights and again, human rights as law and human rights as morality and there is a difference. In relation to human rights as law, there is also I think a dimension of human rights as international law and human rights as domestic law. The premise of human rights is to create a frame of reference whereby legal systems and constitutional orders can be judged in terms of established international norms but those established international norms do not become part of the legal system of the country in question except through the agency of the state itself. So the paradox in the human rights law is a paradox of self-regulation by the state that these standards are supposed to regulate the conduct of the state but can only operate through the agency of the state because international norms do not become legally binding before domestic courts except through the constitutional and legal and political mechanisms of the state in question. How would you expect the state to incorporate international law in a way that limits its own jurisdiction and authority territorially within its own country in a way that correspond to international obligations? But ultimately, human rights violations can only happen on the ground in real time and space. So it is someone doing something to someone else or failing to do something to someone else that triggers the legal obligation of the state to protect human rights. So I think there is, what I'm saying here is that there is an ambiguity in relation to human rights that we have to acknowledge regarding legal systems. And then human rights as morality. And here the question becomes, is it the morality of Sharia as an ideal? And I prefer to use the term Sharia rather than Islamic law because it's not an accurate translation. Is it the ideal of Sharia or is it the actual morality of the society in question? Because the same are not identical or corresponding. That is, the morality of Muslims is not always necessarily the morality that's prescribed by the ideal of Sharia. So if it is the morality of the society in question, in what sense is it Islamic? Who decides what is Islamic and what is not about it? And I think by contrasting some societies that we are familiar with, we might see the point in the sense that Saudi Arabia is supposed to be an Islamic state or Islamic country. Islamic society. Iran is supposed to be an Islamic state, Islamic country. But yet they are very different in what Islamic means to both of them. Senegal is an Islamic country in a sense, but it is a secular state. Uzbekistan, is it an Islamic society? Is it an Islamic state? And in what sense? So the point is really that the morality dimension, I would rather focus it on the society in question rather than on the ideal of Sharia. Because there is no agreement on what the ideal of Sharia is as you have seen with the Jewish tradition in particular this morning. So basically I think that working within the parameters of my title, what I see here is a dialectic or a relationship between law and human rights. Whereby human rights become law only through the agency of the state. And yet human rights are supposed to regulate what can be or cannot be law. And morality influences law, but also against through the agency of the state, and influences popular conceptions of human rights. Which may not necessarily coincide with the international norms of human rights. That is international norms are defined by international treaties. Which are negotiated among states. But they are not likely to have a practical implications or practical application except through the motivation and through the mobilization of political forces within society. So for human rights to have an impact on law, it has to be through somehow incorporation into popular consciousness into social commitments. Those social commitments are influenced by Sharia, but by many other factors as well. So I would like also to emphasize once again that we should not take Islamic society or society where Muslims are the majority as coincidental with fidelity to Sharia. So we have these two, I think in a way, you can think of, and I don't know to what extent this has come across in our deliberations, you have the state dynamic and the state dimension and you have the social dimension. And between the two, both human rights and law are supposed to be negotiated or mediated through notions of morality. But what is the morality and how is it articulated? Whose morality it is? That is also a dynamic process of social and political and economic factors as well. So to be, and I will come to this point of what I see in terms of projections for a research agenda for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion and also a social public engagement agenda. For the research agenda, I think that we need to engage in clarifying the relationship between Sharia and the secular state. And this may not have been said so explicitly, but I think it was implicit in Professor Johansson's remark this morning that the state is secular. It is never Islamic. There is no Islamic state anywhere, neither historically nor contemporary nor in the future because it is conceptually impossible for the state to be secular, to be religious. The state is a political institution that cannot have religion. So the state is secular and yet it is supposed to relate to embody and implement and incorporate principles of Sharia which is supposed to be divine. And again, I'm grateful for Professor Johansson's to have made the point that Sharia is jurist law and as such, it is not divine. In fact, I would make it very clear, Sharia cannot be divine. And that's a dimension of how we use terms that often do not really, without clarifying what we mean by them. When we say that Muslims, many Muslims would say, most Muslims would say, I'm sure many Muslims in this room would say, Sharia is divine. But when you come to think of it, really, what do you mean by divine? In what sense can it be divine? When it is a product of human agency, human interpretation, for a so-called divine revelation to enter into human comprehension in a way that relates to human experience, how can it still remain divine? And what do we mean by that? So I think that is a field that we need to clarify. And to be brief, my position on that is to say, and recalling again, the inhibition I should have as a Muslim is speaking so categorically, but I don't have a choice but to speak categorically for my own convictions. And my conviction is that the state cannot be Islamic. Sharia cannot be enforced by the state as such. That is, when the state enacts Sharia principles into state law, it is no longer Sharia. It becomes the political will of the state. And what makes it law is the coercive authority of the state, not the so-called divine authority of Islam. But that is a field that we need to clarify scholarly and theoretically. The second aspect of which I see, and I don't see how we can do it without coming to my third item or dimension, is to deepen commitment to constitutionalism, citizenship and human rights. Because since we are dealing with law and with state law, I'm very much as Professor Johansson also emphasize that we have to take very seriously the notion of constitutionalism and the notion of citizenship. And then we are talking about Muslims who are citizens, not Muslims who are Muslim. That is, our relationship to the state is defined by our citizenship, not by our religious affiliation. And it is very dangerous really to link relationship to the state to religious affiliation. Because then that brings in the whole notion of who decides who's a Muslim and who is not. And Pakistan was mentioned as an example. In 1953, Pakistan, there was a very high level constitutional commission that was charged by defining who is a Muslim. And that constitutional commission concluded that it's impossible to define who's a Muslim. In Pakistan, so how can you relate sort of citizenship to religious affiliation? I would rather say, my affiliation, my relationship to the state is as a citizen. What it means for me to be a Muslim and how I relate to other Muslims is none of the business of the state. It is my business in relation to other citizens. And human rights and constitutionalism are to safeguard that. We need to deepen that commitment and clarity of these identities. Finally, I come to the point about what I call the public policy engagement of the center. Of course, it's difficult really. I think my colleagues individually may have that commitment, but whether we can institutionally have that commitment to make our scholarship relevant to public policy and social policy. So until and unless we can be able to act institutionally in that capacity, which I doubt very much because of the nature of the American academia and in relation to a variety of other limitations, I would rather keep it personal. That is my personal commitment as a Muslim lawyer from Sudan at Emory is to make my scholarship relevant and to actually take it into the public domain and make it part of public debate about current issues. That I do as an American citizen at this point in the American public space. And yet my sympathies, my affiliations, my experience would resonate with many African and other Islamic societies which are also in this post-colonial paradox sort of predicament of having to make sense of a state system that they did not invent, which was imposed on them through colonial experiences, but that is the only way that they can make sense of their identities as Muslims, as citizens, in relation to constitutionalism and human rights and so on in their own respective societies. Those will be the sort of agenda that I will bring forward. But finally I would conclude and I think that my chair is getting a bit nervous about this, but I will conclude by this that we have been talking, especially yesterday I noticed several times, we speak of American experiences, American context, as if it is a global norm and it is not by far. And I think we have heard a very powerful moving presentation from Dean Howard Hunter, who to me remains Dean Hunter, even if he is the president of Singapore Management University, Dean Hunter who really gave us a very, very sobering sense of where the United States is stand in the world today and how much we have fallen behind and below the level of our commitments, constitutional and moral and religious and otherwise. That charge is a charge for me personally as a Muslim American by challenging very much the high-finated notion. So I refuse to be a Muslim American. I'm a Muslim, I'm American, but I'm not a Muslim American. The two types of identities do not really match or fit each other. And I would call on each of us to see how that resonates with our own scholarship and as our own social engagement. Thank you very much. Speaking to us next as human rights as divine entitlement is Professor David Novak, PhD of Georgetown University and holder of the J. Richard and Dorothy Shift Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He's the author of 13 books and more than 200 articles and has edited four books. His Covenantal Writes a Study in Jewish Political Theory won an award from the American Academy of Religion for Best Book in Constructive Religious Thought in 2000. I give you David Novak. Thank you very much. It's first of all incumbent upon me and a happy pleasure as well to congratulate the center of the Study of Law and Religion here at Emory University, which I've had contacts with from time to time on its magnificent achievements during the past 25 years and its hopes for the next 25 years. And I think that I can say as many of the scholars here that our contacts with this center have greatly enriched our work and hopefully our work enriches others as well. There's little doubt in the democracies in which both in most of us live in which almost all of us want to live, the question of human rights is ubiquitous in both specifically legal and more general political discourse. However, what role does this great moral question play in religious discourse? And if it does play a role there, can anything from that religious discourse about human rights be cogently brought into more secular legal and political discourse yet without making either triumphalist demands or losing its religious independence and integrity? Now, many both outside and even inside religious traditions grounded in historical revelations assume that even the moral discourse conducted within religious communities like the Jewish people or the Christian church or the Islamic Ummah, which is discourse about inter-human relations as formally distinct from the God-human relation. Even here, there is no idea of human rights at all. In this view, all rights as ultimate claims belong to the divine sovereign and that sovereign's human subjects only have duties or obligations to him. In other words, in this view, the cogency and legitimacy of the inter-human realm is totally derived from the divine human realm. Hence, from this assumption it follows that the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have nothing to contribute to human rights talk in secular democracies precisely because these polities, these secular democracies, do not ground their legitimacy in any historical revelation and they often do so quite explicitly. You might add that it's very common to refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the children of Abraham or Abrahamic religions. I think that it's much more accurate to call them the three religions of monotheistic revelation and I think that describes better, especially in this context. As such, these societies, these secular societies are precluded seeking the moral approval of any faith community for any of their norms or public policies. In fact, it is often assumed by both outsiders and even insiders that these religious traditions and the communities that receive them, sustain them, and transmit them are antithetical in principle and hostile in fact to the idea of human rights. And for religious people who do hold this view, human rights is an illegitimate secular intrusion into a sacred domain, a domain where human duties are essential and human rights are either non-existent or even demonic. Now some see the modern idea of natural rights which has subsequently become the idea of human rights to be a complete break with the classical idea of natural law. As such, in this way of thinking, any similarity between the way classical natural law theory conducted by Jewish, Christian, or Muslim thinkers deals with God and the way modern natural rights theory deals with God is erroneous. Modern natural rights theory is taken to be essentially atheistic, implicitly if not explicitly. So when modern natural rights theorists do speak of God, perhaps they are really winking at the few philosophers who can appreciate what they mean. One can see how this conclusion about the inherent atheism in modern natural rights theory was reached. None of the modern natural rights theorists regard revealed law with its commanding God to be authoritative anymore plus the assumption that even any evocation of natural theology, let alone revealed theology is too obtuse to be capable of any philosophical value. So how can we speak of human rights as divine entitlements and still expect any kind of philosophical hearing today? I would like to now argue that one can cogently connect God to a natural human rights discourse without natural theology altogether and aside from revelational theology, at least for the time being. I attempt to do so now by a radical reading of the most famous sentence in the United States Declaration of Independence written and published by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. My reading is radical because I tried to see meanings in that sentence that Jefferson himself would probably not have seen but meanings that he nonetheless could not reject as contrary to his own intentions in principle. My reading of that sentence takes it to be a philosophical statement that admits of ongoing philosophical interpretations. Some might say I am deconstructing him. Although I'm usually not accused of being a deconstructionist. We all know the sentence by heart but let me for a profess your memory anyway. Quote, we hold these truths to be self-evident and all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Close quote. First, what is meant by a self-evident truth? Surely the equality of all human beings is not self-evident. Wouldn't it be more self-evident to most people to say that all humans are not created equal? Humans are patently different. Some younger, some older, some weaker, some stronger, some smarter, some dumber. And of course we normally treat different humans differently. What is appropriate treatment of a child is quite different from what is appropriate treatment of an elder. What is appropriate treatment of a man is at times inappropriate treatment of a woman. So where do we treat all humans equally? Where is the self-evident equality to be found? Nevertheless, the one place where the self-evident equality of humans is inherent is in the proceedings of a court of law. That is in a court where the constitution of the polity of which it is a part mandates that the due process of law obtain. Here doesn't every person have an equal claim to justice because every person is equally subject to the commands of the law and the protection of the law. The same law whose violation is being adjudicated in that court of law. That is why the due process of law is evidently contradicted if a court of law treats those standing before it for justice unequally. Deuteronomy 1619 states, you shall not pervert justice by privileging any person, lo ta k'er panim, in judgment. Close quote. This is the best expression of the truth of the law not being a respecter of persons. So taking a bribe to treat one litigant more favorably than the other is the prime example of such partiality, such unequal justice. That is why the prohibition of taking a bribe follows upon the more general prohibition of respecting persons in judgment in the norm just cited by the Bible. Not as an exact, and I didn't cite it as an example of biblical authority, but as a prime enunciation of this universally evident truth. If persons are to be treated equally as litigants in a court of law where the due process of law obtains and this is because they are all equally subject to the law by which they are being adjudicated, where does that prior law come from? Where from are all these human beings commanded to practice the law by which they might be adjudicated? Should they be summoned as litigants in a civil or criminal trial? If one says that this commanding source as authority to foundation is the state, that begs the question since one can then ask what is the source of the state's authority? Why do I have to obey its commands? Why does this obligation make me subject to the adjudication of the state's courts if I am indicted for a possible violation of these commands? Two answers are usually given to this overall question. One of them answers the question in a morally objectionable way, the other essentially begs the question. To answer that the state has prima facia authority is to assume that the power of the state need not justify itself. But if that is the case, then the state cannot make moral claims on our obedience because the state cannot justify those claims to be rights. Moral claims must be justifiable or rightful, justim est, in order to elicit rational consent. That consent is wholly different from terrified surrender. Therefore the state so unjustifiably conceived can only exercise its claims by the use of force. Accordingly, we only obey the commands of the state because we fear its power to harm us if that is the case and if we disobey or harm us if we disobey the commands. Nevertheless, needless to say, this approach makes any rational opposition to any kind of tyranny, whether of the ancient medieval or modern variety, impossible. Especially if that tyranny can find authorization within an extant system of positive law. And in fact, it is no accident that states who equate might with right, that is their might with what is right for everybody under their rule, such states frequently see themselves to be divine. They act in the political realm according to Anselm's definition of the name God in the ontological realm, namely that which nothing greater can be thought. And of course, if there is no higher ontological realm, then the political realm takes its ultimate place by default. Now the declaration speaks of all men, today we would rightly say all humans, being endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. These are clearly human rights. They can only be thought of as pertaining to human persons, whether individually or collectively. But how is one endowed with a right? And why is that endowment, though self-evident, not self-referential? How, why can these rights not be something the bearers of these rights by themselves give to themselves? Indeed, why do these rights have to be endowed or given at all? Why can't these rights simply be considered as innate or inborn, as Kant says, in all human persons, or at least in all human persons capable of rational free choice? In other words, why are these rights examples of heteronomy understood to be a law from an other rather than autonomy understood to be a law from oneself or within oneself? One needs to look upon his or her rights as endowments, rather than as innate properties because of the inescapable sense that we are commanded to pursue our rights and the rights of all others like ourselves. Following our reading of the declaration, that means that we feel commanded to pursue our rights to make our claims to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, we are only able to intelligently exercise these rights to intelligently make these justified claims because we regard them ultimately, if not immediately, to be commandments from our creator. Indeed, we might say that God creates our human uniqueness by commanding us to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. And one can see how the pursuit of these three rights can be taken as three instances of the exercise of one right, which is the right to practice one's religion. So in this way, God entitles us, or to use a more contemporary term, God empowers us. Furthermore, because I have been so commanded by God, I'm empowered to make claims for my life, my liberty, and the pursuit of my happiness. And since I experienced these commandments to be categorical imperatives, these commandments pertain to any and all of God's human creatures. They are universalizable. They pertain to anyone under the same general circumstances. As such, my pursuit of what I've been commanded to do must include my pursuit to help others keep these commandments as well. Like all categorical imperatives, the subject of these commandments is we, not I. They are public, not private. Now at this point, we can thus appreciate the insight of the great Christian theologian, Carl Bart, who rejects conspacing morality and autonomy, thus implying, that is, cons thus implying, that there is no transcendent source of moral law. Bart writes, quote, if there is an ought, it must not be the product of my will, but touch from the outside the whole area of what I can will of myself. The essence of the idea of obligation is not that I demand something from myself, but that with all that I am demanding of myself, I am myself demanded. Indeed, what Bart has exposed is the great paradox of Kantian ethics. How can I be both the source and the subject of the same act? Isn't the verb command a transitive verb? As such, how can the one who commands and the one who is commanded be the same identical person? And if one attempts to resolve this paradox by splitting the self into a higher commanding self and a lower command itself, then wouldn't it be better to see one's rational will, that higher self, as being obedient to the will of God who creates it through divine commandments, commandments addressed to one's rational will? Isn't a real transcendent other more authoritative than an imminent imagined other? As Bart puts it, quote, conscience is the totality of our self-consciousness insofar as it can receive and proclaim the command of God as it comes to us. The command is not revealed and given by conscience, but to conscience. That is what makes a commandment more than mere auto-suggestion. I, by the way, differ with Bart though by arguing elsewhere that divine command can be the authentic substance of natural law. Now this understanding of human rights most immediately the human right to life does not require an acceptance of either revealed theology or natural theology to be a valid philosophical argument. This understanding of human rights does not require an acceptance of anyone's revealed theology since there need be no historical paradigm in order for one to have an experience of being commanded by God to fulfill God's purpose in creating him or her or anyone else in the first place. And in a larger version of this paper, I discuss Emil Fakenheim's treatment of Pallagia Levinska, a Polish inmate in Auschwitz, a not-religious person who nevertheless attributed her survival to the fact that she felt commanded by something greater than herself to survive the dehumanization and death that was decreed for her by the Nazis. Now indeed such experiences have been reported by persons from a variety of religious traditions as well as by persons who do not consider themselves as part of any religion tradition at all. And even when experienced by persons from religious traditions, a self-evident truth has been shown through that general experience. Historical revelation is clearly a special, in fact a singular experience. That is the truth presents itself here to be affirmed in action by those who have so experienced it. It is not necessarily derived from any commandment written in any one scripture, even if there is such a commandment in someone's scripture with which this self-evident truth is wholly consistent. In fact, one could say that such scriptural commandments themselves presuppose what is experienced either before or outside of historical revelation. Thus the commandment of the Decalogue, Thou shalt not murder, Exodus 2013, presupposes Cain's knowledge that killing his brother Abel is wrong and thus his knowledge of his responsibility for actually committing that wrong. What the Decalogue did then was to take an intuitive precept, then indirectly regarded as if it came from God and turn this precept into a commandment directly commanded by God. Now, this requires our postulating, in a constant sense, God is the source of moral law. That is not deriving it from proofs of the existence of God, nor from historical revelation, but simply seeing that this best explains as a good hypothesis best explains something that clearly we can recognize in reality. Postulating God as the best source of human rights does not make a judgment on whether or not God exists or lives independently of our moral experience. Such moral postulation of God's existence cannot answer the question of whether or not humans can have a direct relationship with God in some other sphere of human experience and activity. Yet it might seem that if one leaves the question of God's existence at the level of morality, merely functioning as a postulate or practical hypothesis when it's bound to regard it as functioning like a legal fiction. And as we know from legal history, legal fictions, fixiojuris, are tentative and easily replaceable with some other fiction closer to the current popular imagination. Thus, when discussing natural rights as divine law as did Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, Professor Alan Dershowitz writes, quote, in his book on the Declaration of Independence, quote, it is one thing to say that natural law is a useful, even essential legal fiction. It is quite another thing to say it actually exists. The reality is that natural law simply does not exist, no matter how much we need it or wish it existed. Close quote. Here, of course, Dershowitz is far less sober than Wisconsin, who knew he could not prove the non-existence of the reality represented by an idea any more than he could prove its existence. Moreover, one could certainly argue against Dershowitz's assertion that we no longer have a moral need for God as the source of human rights. Nevertheless, if morality can only postulate God rather than represent God as does theology, basing itself on God's revealed word, then it is quite likely that those for whom this idea is their only relation to God as distinct from a personal relationship with God will tire of this hypothetical relation moving either to a theological relationship with God or an anti-theological stance against God. All this not withstanding, though, even those who do have this theological relationship with God ought to avoid any futile attempt to deduce rational morality from theological premises. Morality only implies religious reality. It does not necessitate it, however. Now how are human rights unalienable? If one postulates that these rights come from God through God's commandments, however indirect and remote, to all humans to live, to be free, and to seek happiness as the ultimate good, then isn't it so that, as Job said, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away? That is, these endowed rights, these individent titlements can be taken away from us by their divine giver. And our experience tells us they are, in fact, taken away from us all the time. As far as God is concerned, considering what we do know about God from biblical revelation, and I think that's all we know about God, these human rights are most definitely alienable. God kills us by sending death. God removes our liberty by making some of us mentally incompetent. God prevents our attainment of happiness when he condemns some of us to oblivion in this world or in the world to come. In other words, God's judgment trumps any claims we might have on him for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As commandments, the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness are surely alienated when God takes away our ability to fulfill them. Instead, these rights are only unalienable in relation to the other humans whom we claim, either that they not interfere with our commanded pursuits, these Iberlin called negative liberty, or that they actually help us pursue them, what he called welfare rights. Now, of course, the unalienable character of rights is itself a claim and not a fact. It is an ought, not an is. We all know too well that other humans can and do take away our capacity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Nevertheless, we do have a persistent claim on others for life, liberty, and happiness, a claim we certainly do not have on God. As a right, but not as a fact, these other humans cannot take it away from us. Furthermore, when they do take it away from us, in fact, we then have a claim against them. In a society where the due process of law obtains we can claim, or others can claim on our behalf when we cannot make our own claims ourselves, we can claim that the crimes that did alienate us from our life, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness be avenged either by the payment of the criminal's property, restitution, the loss of the criminal's liberty, imprisonment, or even perhaps the loss of the criminal's life, capital punishment. By understanding, now, the right to life, to be the right to pursue life, requires a slight emanation of Jefferson's own words in the declaration. It will recall that we have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But I think then when we ponder just what the right to life means, and by the way, it's more than a slogan for those who oppose abortion, we realize that the right to life is the right to pursue life, especially to pursue life as something to be actively furthered and not just as something to be passively accepted as already granted. The same is true as we shall see shortly with liberty. So I would reinterpret Jefferson's sentence to now say the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is what comes from the creator. These pursuits then are unalienable rights which only God may ever take away from me, but which any other human being, except on those rare occurrences when I so grossly abuse these rights, that my society needs to remove them from me, both this punishment and for my past abuse of them, or for prevention of my future abuse. Other than that, humans have no right to take them away from me. When it comes to the pursuit of life, we must see this pursuit as entailing the pursuit of communal life, which is endemic to our human nature. The first community we seek is our family, not so much as the family we already have, but the family we desire to found to establish in marriage. And that pursuit of marriage is the foundation of family as a norm and not just as a fact, is itself the pursuit of life. When it's prime, although not exclusive purpose, is the procreation and rearing of new human life. Furthermore, this pursuit of the procreation of life is not just the fulfillment of the biological urge for genetic reproduction, it is even more so the moral choice to further our communal identity into a new generation. As such, this pursuit is the fulfillment of a commandment, which then leads to the exercise of a right claim on those having political power over us to enable us to keep the commandment. Once again, it is a minimal claim of non-interference and the fulfillment of this commandment by one's society and its government, and it is a maximal claim for active political and legal support of one's pursuit of a fully communal family familial life. At last, we come to the pursuit of happiness. When we believe we are endowed by our creator with the right to pursue happiness, just what sort of happiness are we commanded to pursue? Before we can exercise our right to pursue happiness, which is our claim upon our society and its government to let us pursue happiness and for that society to even support that pursuit, we need to understand what it is we are claiming. If happiness means whatever we happen to regard as a good to be pursued, then what is being pursued might well be as multifarious as the number of people in such hot pursuit. That's why the main point of John Rohl's The Theory of Justice. We simply cannot talk about the good because there's just too many varieties of it. Such happiness could be at almost anything that is as long as its exercise doesn't harm or threaten others with harm. Usually society does not interfere with one's pursuit of his or her desire that is within the limits of one's respecting the rights of other people with whom he or she has to live in society. But if almost any pursuit is what is meant by the pursuit of happiness, can one also insist with any cogency that this right is unalienable, that it is a prior personal claim on society and its government rather than being a very much revocable or alienable entitlement from the state. In fact, the pursuit of happiness is too precious to be rightly exercised for anything less than the pursuit of the sumum bonum, the highest good. That highest good is so high that it is inevitably pursued in the way most people have always pursued God. Only that which nothing greater can be thought, which is the most minimal definition of the name God, could possibly qualify as the sumum bonum, the highest good, whom one either pursues or flees. But to whose claims on us, no one can be indifferent. On that point, I agree with Nietzsche. We either have a living God or a dead God, but never know God. That is why civil society cannot be indifferent to either the free pursuit of the one highest good. But that free pursuit must admit the right of a free anti-pursuit if it is to be liberal in the original sense of the term. Therefore, the pursuit of life in its fullness becomes the pursuit of the liberty to pursue happiness as a transcendent reality who religious people believe is both the origin and the end of human life. I am the first and I am the last. And besides me, there is no God, Isaiah 44.6. The duty of society, both formally and even informally, is to enable us to pursue or flee from the one who beckons us as the highest good. Negatively, that means society does not interfere in that pursuit, either by dictating it specifically or even generally, or by society claiming divine prerogatives for itself in the purpose of, in the person of either its leaders or its institutions, thus substituting itself for God. Positively, that means that the state sees the pursuit of God being conducted by the majority of its citizens to be in the interest of the common good. Here the common good is somewhat ironically itself negative. I think it means that it is in the interest of the state that it restrain itself when its citizens look elsewhere for their ultimate happiness. Accordingly, in such a self-restraining state, one that does not present its claims on us to be salvific, citizens can have more realistically modest expectations of what the state can do, which is to facilitate its citizens' pursuit of imminent rather than transcendent ends. By ordinary criteria, which are the only criteria philosophy can employ, we can only postulate that God commands. But by these ordinary criteria, which only let us speak of a trace of the divine in our most basic moral norms, we cannot constitute what a real direct relationship with this God is. As a Jew, I believe that such a relationship, at least for me and my people, obtains in our covenant with God the Brit and the law, the Torah, that gives that covenantal relationship its content. Hence, my philosophical invocation of God here is my minimal, not my maximal, existential position. The name God I have invoked here is not the same name of God I invoke in prayer, and it is not the name of God I would invoke where I require to die as a martyr for the divine name, Kirish Hashem. It is the same God, but the relationship with the same God is quite different when viewed theologically than when viewed philosophically. As such, God is named differently there than here. Finally, although I do not obey God or pray to God in the way a philosopher could postulate God's existence, as a philosopher, but not as a theologian, I can speak of this God as the one who entitles or enables or makes the assertion of human rights possible in the world. That is why and that is how I can speak of this God in secular space without forcing my faith on anyone there and without compromising my faith by subordinate its direct and ultimate object to his God to any worldly power or authority. Thank you. Can and should religion play a role in the struggle for human rights? Ask Nicholas P. Waltersdorf, who holds a PhD of Harvard University. He's now a Porta Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University and senior fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. After teaching for 30 years at Calvin College, he joined the Divinity School at Yale where he was also adjunct professor in the Philosophy Department and in the Religious Studies Department. Waltersdorf's most recent publications are Thomas Reed and the Story of Epistemology, Education for Life and Education for Shalom, Essays on Christian Higher Education. Another book, Justice, Rights and Wrongs, will be published early in 2008 and he's currently working on a companion volume called Justice and Love. Professor Waltersdorf has been President of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division and President of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science and to that I just want to add two personal remarks. Since Frank Alexander has mentioned this in 1978, when I had difficulties with my own university, I was a guest in the house of the Waltersdorf in Grand Rapids and the solidarity and friendship I will never forget to take me through those troubled times. The second personal comment that I want to make, I could never understand why he gave up his position at Calvin College to go to Yale University. And the reason for that is what few people know is that Nick Waltersdorf is also an architect and he lived in this beautiful house in Grand Rapids, which I place in the category of Frank Lloyd Wright and I could never understand how he could move out of that wonderful house. Nick Waltersdorf. Ah yes, Johan, there are missed recent life, aren't there? Thank you. By my count, this is the 21st presentation in this series. Am I right? Close, correct? And by my count with the exception of the first presentation of our panel, they have all begun exactly the same way with a richly deserved and heartfelt accolade to the center for the study of law and religion. And I love architecture, also love music. You know, the finest themes when repeated the 20th, 21st time. So I've been wondering, Frank, where's Johan? There he is. Are you getting a little bit bored? Never, okay. But I'm gonna make it short. I'll just second all the 20 accolades that you've had so far, okay? And add to it this, that I feel mighty pleased and proud to be here at this 25th celebration, 25th year celebration of your wonderful center and may you have at least as many more years. When John Whitty wrote me and invited me to give this talk, he said that he wanted me to be both analytic and prophetic. Now he may have said that to everybody, I don't know. Easy to say, John, but as Kathy Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh mentioned, made clear yesterday, there are many kinds of prophetic mode. So which one? You'll learn. When preparing to compose this talk, I found myself reflecting on the rhetorical style appropriate for what I want to say and for who I am. I know the rules of academic rhetoric instead of using the personal I and me, one is to use the impersonal one, for example. Personally, I have no compunctions about violating that rule every now and then, in fact, quite often and using the first person's singular. But what about the we and the us of my discourse today? Normally, when one gives a lecture, it is audience and speaker combined who are the we and the us for the occasion. But I want, here's the prophetic part, but I want to talk about the troubled relationship between Christians and human rights and I am myself a Christian who has some things he wants to say on this occasion and others to his fellow Christians on this matter. So do I change the we of my discourse and make it we Christians rather than we here assembled? That would have the effect of distancing myself rhetorically from some of you. And I don't like that. Or do I instead hold my fellow Christians at a rhetorical distance and talk as if I were merely an observer and not one of them? I don't see any happy solution to that problem. But a choice must be made. And so for no good reason, I'm going to follow academic convention and speak of all of us here as we and us and treat my fellow Christians as them. Though on a few occasions, I will explicitly speak of we Christians and you will know then that, at least for the moment, I have shifted my reference. I call my talk the troubled relationship between Christians and human rights. Now one obvious aspect of this troubled relationship is that Christians have participated in some of the most egregious violations of human rights. Sometimes this is because they have sold their soul to one or another nationalism or patriotism and serving what they judge to be the interests of their people or country. They have wronged those who are not of their people or country. And sometimes this has been because they have sold their soul to the two mammon. In pursuit of their own wealth, they have wronged the neighbor. But sometimes they have used explicitly Christian reasons for wronging the other. And sometimes they have gone so far as to claim that they were acting out of Christian love. I thought that's what I heard from some Afrikaners. Not all. Not from Yohann. All of us here can give examples of each of these as I've just given one. On this occasion though, I want to focus my brief comments not on the ways in which Christians have participated in violating human rights, but on the discomfort of many American, I'm a confiner to that, of many American Christians with the very conceptuality of rights and with the conceptuality even of justice. Now my evidence for the claim that many Christians do experience this discomfort is necessarily in great measure anecdotal. I know of no social scientific research on the matter. But let me just mention one of the many anecdotes in my bag of evidence that I acquired there very recently. It was reliably reported to me that at the last national assembly of my own denomination, a speaker got up and declared and objecting to one of the documents before the assembly that the word rights should never appear in any document of the church. I'm told that no one arose to disagree with him and that the document was rejected on the ground that the word rights did occur in it. To the anecdotes should of course be listed the writings of various theorists who don't like rights and sometimes not even justice. The O'Donovan's, at least in an earlier incarnation, Alistair McIntyre, Stanley Howard wasp. I must insert a qualification. When their own perceived interests and convictions are at stake, often those same Christians who express discomfort with rights talk happily employ such talk. They defend the rights of parents. They defend religious rights. They argue for the right to prayer in the public schools. They discuss abortion in terms of right to life. I assume that what's going on here is that they have observed that the great reform movements of the 20th century were all conducted in terms of rights and that they have decided for the occasion to borrow the rhetoric of those movements to pursue their own purposes, apparently without noticing the irony of what they are doing. Now I think I understand why many of my fellow Christians are uncomfortable with rights talk. They have several reasons. Among the most important of which I judge to be that they hear such talk as expressing and promoting an attitude of possessive individualism. Rights talk, so they believe, is for insisting on getting what one thinks one is entitled to. And they find such insistence incompatible with the call of the Christian gospel to extend oneself in loving service to the neighbor. The more intellectual among them support this aversive reaction by reciting a popular narrative concerning the origin of the idea of natural rights. The idea of natural rights, so it is commonly said, arose out of the individualistic political thought of the Enlightenment. The word secular, usually prefacing the word enlightenment. A variant on this narrative is that though the political philosophers of the secular Enlightenment certainly employed the concept of natural rights, they did not originate it. It first made it superior in centuries earlier when the nominalist William of Ockham introduced and employed the idea in the course of defending his fellow Franciscans against vigorous attacks from the Pope. There's a second reason why many Christians are uncomfortable, not only with the conceptuality of rights, but even with the conceptuality of justice, whether or not justice is thought of in terms of rights. It is commonly assumed by Christians and non-Christians alike that justice has been supplanted in the New Testament by agopic love. This being understood as gratuitous benevolence. The love that Jesus attributed to God and enjoined on us with respect to our neighbors is said to be a love that promotes the well-being of the neighbor, whether or not justice requires it. In fact, it said that agopic love is justice blind and justice indifferent. And the exemplary, and so it said, the exemplary and paradigmatic example of such love is God's forgiveness of the sinner. Forgiveness in the nature of the case does not render to the wrongdoer what justice requires since justice does not require forgiveness. Given this widespread understanding of Christian love, it is no accident that Christian social agencies and international aid organizations very typically formulate their mission in terms of charity rather than justice. They see themselves as charitable organizations. Jesus' parable of the great besides, the great judgment as it was traditionally called, has long been the grand charter of Christian social work. As you do it unto one of the least of these, so also you do it unto me, says Jesus. That which Jesus cites is done unto the least of these is understood then, not as rendering to her what justice requires, but as extending to her the hand of gratuitous charity. Now it's my conviction that until these roots of discomfort with the conceptuality of justice in general and of rights in particular are rooted out, a great many Christians will be indifferent if not plain hostile to the struggle for human rights, except when it comes to their own interests. And in a world where a billion or more people are Christians that constitutes a serious impediment to the cause of human rights. And I think rooted out those roots of discomfort must be, for in my judgment both are seriously misguided. In the remainder of my talk, let me try to explain why I think that. It is of course true that one can use the language of rights to insist that one get what one sees oneself as entitled to. But I submit that if that is the extent of one's employment of rights language, one is abusing the language. All moral language can be abused. When the authoritarian gets hold of duty language, he abuses it by highlighting the duties of others while downplaying his own. So yes, it's true. When the possessive individual gets hold of rights language, he abuses it by insisting on his own entitlements to the ignoring of those of others. And now on the surface anyway, you're going to hear coming to the surface a somewhat different understanding of natural rights from that of David Novak. Maybe if we talked a day or a week, we'd see it's only on the surface, but here it goes. When you come into my presence, you come bearing legitimate claims on me as to how I treat you. If I fail to honor those claims, I wrong you. Likewise, when I come into your presence, I come bearing morally legitimate claims on you as to how you treat me. If you fail to honor those claims, you wrong me. The situation is completely symmetrical. The language of rights is for bringing those normative social facts to speech. And social facts, they are. Rights like duties require at least two. The difference is that when I think of your and my normative social relationship in terms of my duties, I focus on myself and my agency. When I think of it in terms of your rights, I focus on you and on the actions that respect for your worth require of me. And on the fact that you can be wronged and not simply that I can be guilty. So what then about the narrative, which says that the idea of natural rights was born of either the individualism of the Enlightenment or the nominalism of Occam. And that possessive individualism is in its very DNA. Well, as the result of the work of such eminent legal historians as Brian Tierney, supported by the Center, and Charles Reed, we now know that both of those narratives are flatly false, as false as anything has ever proved to be in intellectual history, it seems to me. Tierney, Reed, and others have shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that the canon lawyers of the 12th century had already articulated and were employing the concepts of natural and human rights, and no one has yet suggested that the 12th century canon lawyers were infected by possessive individualism. That raises the question, and where did the 12th century canon lawyers get these concepts from? Or were they original with them? My own answer is that though the canon lawyers may have been the first to articulate these concepts with clarity, at least in the West, one finds a recognition of what have come to be called natural human rights in the church fathers. For example, in the claim of many of the fathers that the excess goods of the wealthy belong to the impoverished, belong is the language of Cossosthimos and Ambrose and Gregory of Nyssa, and others. And where did the recognition by the church fathers of the phenomenon of natural rights come from, or was it original with them? My own view is that it comes from the New Testament and back beyond that from the Hebrew Bible. I recognize that this is an extremely controversial claim. On this occasion, I don't have time to defend it. In my forthcoming book, Justice Rights and Wrongs, I do so at a great length. Here today I can only give a glimpse of how part of my defense goes. One clue to the fact that rights are recognized in some piece of discourse, even though the concept itself may not be explicitly employed, is that people in that discourse are understood as susceptible to being wronged. To be wronged is to be deprived of that to which one has a right. And in turn, one of many clues to the fact that persons are understood in some piece of discourse is susceptible to being wronged is that someone is said to forgive someone. One can only forgive someone if he has wronged one and only for the wrong. He did one. The declaration that God forgives runs throughout the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. God forgives us for wronging God, for depriving him of the worship and the obedience to which he has a right. Another clue to the fact that rights are recognized in some piece of discourse, even though the concept itself may not be explicitly employed, is that persons are understood as having a worth that requires of us that we treat them in certain ways. Obviously, God is understood as in the Hebrew Bible as having such worth. But so too are human beings. The writer of Psalm 8 exclaims over the elevated status of human beings and the cosmic scale of beings. They bear the image of God. And in Genesis 9, murder is declared to be a deed worthy of corporal punishment because, and I quote, in his own image, God made humankind. Well, I said earlier that many of my fellow Christians have embraced the common narrative which says that the concept of natural human rights was an invention of the secular enlightenment and that it carries possessive individualism in its DNA. Having accepted the narrative, they have proceeded to hand over the concept of natural human rights to the secularists among us and have announced that henceforth they will confine themselves to talking in terms of love and charity and freedom and so forth. I find this painful. The recognition of natural human rights is a gift of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the world and perhaps of the Quran. I'm not qualified to speak on that. It is in my judgment a pearl of great price. Once one has affirmed that each human being has the worth of being created in the image of God and redemptively loved of God, the recognition of natural human rights is right there in front of you. Half right, many of my fellow Christians will reply, right about the Hebrew Bible, wrong about the New Testament and the New Testament justice and rights, they say, have been supplanted by agopic love, by gratuitous justice, blind benevolence. Here I can give you just one of my several reasons for concluding that this interpretation is mistaken. My view is that justice is at the core of the New Testament. Pull justice out and everything unravels. Jesus, one argument, Jesus declares in Matthew 22 that the two greatest commandments in the Torah are that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and that you shall love your neighbor as yourself. What Jesus cites here is the second of the two greatest commandments in the Torah is taken from Leviticus 19. Let me quote the passage that leads up to the command. The situation is that Moses is delivering to his fellow Israelites, God's instructions on how they are to treat their fellow Israelites and the resident aliens among them. The resident aliens are explicitly included. Here's the passage. You shall not render an unjust judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great. With justice you shall treat your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor. You shall not hate in your heart anybody of your own kin. You shall reprove your neighbor or you will incur guilt yourself but you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people. Now the command, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. The injunctions fall into two groups. Some are injunctions to practice primary justice towards the neighbor and some are injunctions on how to treat the neighbor who has violated primary justice. Israelites are not to render unjust judgments neither against the poor nor against the powerful. They're not to slander their neighbors. When a neighbor's in trouble, they are not to stand idly by. They are to reprove those who do wrong but they're not to bear grudges against them, hate them or take vengeance on them. In short, each is to love his or her neighbor. So you see the point. Love and justice are not pitted against each other. Rendering justice is a manifestation of love. To be faithful to our own scriptures, we who are Christians must articulate and employ an understanding of love which incorporates the pursuit of justice rather than being blind and indifferent to what justice requires. New Testament love, I submit, is not super erogatory gratuitous benevolence. I must conclude. Had I conducted this discussion in the usual way, I would have conceded that the UN documents on human rights are a glorious legacy of the secular enlightenment and I would then have gone on to ask whether there are perhaps nonetheless Christian reasons for getting on board with human rights. But I've come to think that the assumptions behind this way of conducting the discussion are all wrong. And I've come to think that the right question to ask and so is the right question I have asked is why so many Christians are so reluctant to embrace human rights as an incredibly important and precious part of their own heritage. And then whether the grounds of their reluctance are tenable grounds. Christians apparently constitute a majority of the American populace. If large members of those of us who are Christians are uneasy about human rights claims and even about rights claims in general, we had better expect that our country will continue to treat human rights in the politicized self-serving way that it so often does. We had better expect that our president be that the current holder of the office or another will lecture those countries who are not our allies on their violations of human rights while at the same time treating our enemies as if they were of less worth than Americans. Engaging in legalistic arguments as to whether or not detainees have habeas corpus rights and whether certain forms of extremely hard treatment constitute torture and refusing to join the ancient church fathers and acknowledging that impoverishment amongst wealth, midst wealth is not a violation of gratuitous charity but a violation of natural human rights. We have eight minutes for questions. Yes, please. Just say your name and where you're from. Okay, I'm Elizabeth Berry from Florida State University and this question is for Professor Anayim and I'm just wanting you in short to sort of comment on Professor Novak's discussion about rights and more specifically in connection to Professor Little who just walked out his comments yesterday, whether you think rights must be post-political and a Rawlsian sense or whether they need to be pre-political in a sort of natural rights sense and if so, whether you think that requires us to postulate a commander to sort of provide the foundation for human rights and you can answer this in terms of your own personal convictions not in terms of speaking for Islam as you discussed. I would rather have it all. Okay. I mean, I think we need it all. My commitment to human rights is also a very much strong commitment to multiplicity of foundations of human rights. That the more foundations we can find for human rights and commitment to human rights, the better because we are not likely to find a single foundation that's acceptable to all of us. As the founders of the, actually the drafter said, we are committed to these rights but don't ask us why. We cannot agree on the why. Let's agree on the rights. Professor Waltersdorf, my name is Judd Treiman. I'm a student here at Emory. Has won uneasy with modern rights discourse. I feel like you put the impetus on me to respond to you. So, I would like to suggest that those of us that nevertheless like rights but are uneasy about the rights discourse have a valid claim in that there is something mysteriously simple about the claim of a right but also mysteriously important. The one problem that we have with rights, especially after the false narrative that you're pointing to in the Enlightenment is that autonomy is itself a right. And autonomy as a minimum contact in the ability to follow rights perhaps is a necessary element. But insofar as that claim becomes pressed into very easily using rights discourse into being free from the obligations of the rights of others, then it seems to some of us who are very familiar with the narrative that you've criticized that rights discourse is not sufficient for the problems that we see for political life. And that's just a simple rejoiner that I'd like your comment upon. And if you don't like so, wouldn't like to do so then that's fine too, we can talk later. No, I'll happily do so. Let me begin with something you said way at the end. I don't think that rights discourse is the totality of moral discourse. I hope nobody got that impression. I think it's a precious part of moral discourse but there's a lot more to moral discourse than rights including obligations and love and charity and so forth. Well, insofar as I understand what philosophers have meant by autonomy, I don't think that there is any such thing as a right to autonomy. And a few share that conviction seems to me the appropriate response on your part is not to give up rights talk but to argue with the people who claim that there's a right to this abstract thing called autonomy. That's how it is with moral discourse in general. I mean, the language of duty is beloved by people who abuse other people of course. And so they say, you know, it's your duty to be humble and take it and so forth. When I was in South Africa visiting Yohann that first time, I just, it was the first time I'd come across naive as I was. Sympathy or love, sympathy being, charity, charity, that's the word I want. Charity being used as an instrument of oppression. The Africana didn't want to talk about the issue in terms of justice. They wanted to talk about it in terms of charity and then they gave me recitations of acts of charity. And I was never skeptical about these narratives. I may have said a bit, but I mean, they talked about trinkets that they'd given the children in the backyard for Christmas and secondhand clothes that they passed on and so forth. I had no reason to think that they were lying to me. I think they were telling the truth. But it's an instrument of oppression. But that doesn't mean then that I say, scrap the notion of charity, I'm gonna contest it. So, if you don't like people claiming a right to autonomy, I'm with you on that, argue with them. There is no such right. Don't toss the language out. Yes, please. I would like to follow up with Professor Walters Dwarf on another stance. I'm agreeing with you. And my name is Larry Stratton. I'm a PhD candidate in ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. And I teach in the ethics program at Villanova University and also I'm a lawyer. And one problem which strikes me, especially at Princeton, is the hegeonomy of Bartian thought, which finds it difficult to discuss anything beyond the circle of revelation. And in your context, how do you deal with this since you are an Orthodox Christian who believes in revelation and everything like that? But there's a Bart's nine essay seems to have continual influence in such discourse at places like Princeton and elsewhere. There's also a question that David Novak should reply to. Look, I think human beings get more issues, whether they be issues of justice and rights, whether they be issues of charity and so forth, they get them all mixed up. Nonetheless, I think we have to assume that there is inhumanity implanted by God, some sense of, in the case of rights and justice now, some sense of what the presence of the other requires of me. And what I'm going to do then is elicit, do everything I can to elicit that sense. I mean, I've had students in class, everybody who's a teacher here has taught ethics or anything in the region of ethics has had students in class talking about, well, morality's all relevant and so forth. My strategy has come to be the strategy of incredulity. Oh, really? Do you really think that what Hitler did was okay for Germans? Maybe this is the voice of, intimidating voice of authority speaking, but I've never had a student respond by saying, yep, so often there's a sort of abstract obliviousness in these talks. What are we talking about? We're talking about people like Hitler, right? So now, with my fellow believers, I can appeal to some of them on some issues to scripture. Yeah, I mean, the question there is how one enters this into the discourse, but the prior task, the prior task is, as Nick points out, he has to convince his fellow Christian believers that rights is not something that's just been something tacked on for purposes of accommodation, but that it's inherent within the Christian tradition, as he's shown. His problem with the Christian tradition is a little bit different than mine, but similar in the sense that, whereas many Christians would say, no, we don't have rights and justice, we have love, many Jews would say, we have duties, we have mitzvot, we have chovot, whatever, there are numerous terms in Hebrew for it. We don't have rights. My argument to fellow Jews who make that argument and by the way, the argument became extremely influential in a famous article written by Robert Kover, professor at Yale Law School, died as a rather young man. I mean, it's been quoted numerous times of Jewish laws, obligation, and duty, and this is what we need in less rights talk and whatever. The point there is what I do with fellow Jews as follows. I said, really, we only have duties, and not rights, to whom do we have these duties? Well, we have these duties, you know, if they're religious, of course, we have these duties to God, really. I said, does God have a duty to command us duties? Doesn't God have a right to command us duties? In a covenantal system, well, yes. And cannot God also transfer some of those rights in the very act of covenant? Well, at least then we change the whole, you know, lay of the land. But I agree fully that the problem has been that rights talk has been abused by a kind of individualistic notions of autonomy, or even Kantian notions of autonomy, which I think on philosophical grounds can be shown to be incoherent. Our speakers deserve our drivers applause. The conversation is not ending. It is continuing. But at least for the moment, we need to take a break. Some housekeeping details. For all those who have a name tag, we have a lunch provided on the terrace, what we call around here, Gambrale Beach, it's a main ground floor on North Decatur. If your name tag has on the back of it, a gold strip, please head to lunch on the top floor. You can go there either by elevators or stairways to the ground floor or to the top floor. I also ask that you complete the evaluation form before you leave today and turn it in and you can get one of the posters of our Silver Anniversary Conference. We will reconvene here promptly at two o'clock. The preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University.