Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

“All Men are Created Equal”

I have claimed against certain alt-rightists that the above famous declaration in the Declaration of Independence is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors. For if "All men are created equal" is an empirical claim about the powers and properties of human animals, then it is manifestly false. A second reason why it is not a false empirical claim is because it is not an empirical claim at all. For if all men are created equal, and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," then they have a meta-physical origin, and the claim in question is a metaphysical claim. 

Jacques poses a formidable challenge:

. . . let's agree it's a normative claim to the effect that all 'persons' have certain 'rights'.  What then entitles all of them to these rights?  A normative fact like that doesn't float free from all empirical facts.  There's got to be some reason why all normal human adults have these rights but chickens or pencils don't, some empirical property of these beings only that generates or confers certain rights.  Is it the shared property of being a person?  Or the shared property of being human?  Something else?  I suspect that any of the candidate properties will be either morally irrelevant, even by liberal-leftist standards, or else relevant but distributed so unequally that it will be hard to understand how it could be the basis for 'equal' rights.

For example, on some interpretations the property of being a person is binary and almost every human being has it–including people with fairly severe mental deficits that would disqualify them from the usual list of ('equal') rights.  On other interpretations, the property is very complex and comes in degrees.  If it involves rationality, some people are plainly far more rational than others.  If it involves moral judgment (or what Rawls calls 'moral personality') then that too is a matter of degree.  We can probably find lots of pairs such that one human person has this complex property only in some weak rudimentary way while the other one is a person in a much more profound and morally significant sense.  Why the same rights for both?  I realize these arguments aren't decisive, but I think they put the burden of proof on egalitarians.  Why should we think there is any suitable empirical basis for the normative claim that 'all men are equal' or that such normative claims could be true regardless of any empirical facts?

I will grant Jacques that the normative does not "float free" of the non-normative.  The normative needs ontological backing. 'Ought' needs grounding in 'is.'  But I distinguish between the empirically non-normative and the metaphysically non-normative. And so I do not grant to Jacques that the normative can only be grounded in empirical facts, facts accessible to observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions. They can be grounded in metaphysical facts.

A theist can say that the divine will is the non-normative ground of the normative.  God made man in his image and likeness; he did not make chickens in his image and likeness. That is why Joe Biden has rights but his dog doesn't.   

But what explains why rights are the same for all humans? Biden is a lowly specimen of humanity, physically feeble, mentally incompetent, and morally corrupt.  Why does he have the same rights as RFK, Jr. who is Biden's physical, mental, and moral superior? Because from the infinitely lofty point of view of God, the differences between human beings are vanishingly small. All bear within them the 'divine spark.' You heard Nancy Pelosi say it, and on this point at least, she stepped out of her normal role as dingbat and dumbbell.  An MS-13 gangbanger, George Floyd, John Fetterman, Einstein, Mother Teresa — all equal in the eyes of God. All sons and daughters of the same Father. All sinners and all with a supernatural destiny.

But suppose there is no God. Then what? Then I think Jacques' challenge is unanswerable.  Setting aside the chickens and the pencils, we humans are obviously not equal, either as individuals or as groups, in respect of empirically measurable attributes and performances.  So why should we have equal political and other rights?  Why isn't a form of chattel slavery justified that treats slaves humanely? Is the current belief in the equality and universality of rights simply a holdover from a dying Judeo-Christian worldview?  How can you kick away the theological support and continue to hold to the equality and universality of rights? Is there an alternative form of support along Rawlsian lines, say?  Can a metaphysical naturalist who rejects God and the soul have a principled basis for rejecting the Calliclean "Might makes Right"?

 

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Bill Vallicella

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11 responses to ““All Men are Created Equal””

  1. Loquitur Veritatem Avatar
    Loquitur Veritatem

    “How can you kick away the theological support and continue to hold to the equality and universality of rights?” Only by constructing and maintaining a government which serves the sole purpose of defending the citizenry from predators, within and without. When there is such a government, “natural” rights tend to be observed by the operation of the Golden Rule, which is merely a restatement of “what goes around comes around” — an empirical observation, in my view. When government oversteps its proper bounds, the mutual observance of “natural” rights gives way to the natural urge to accumulate wealth and power by any means. (The death of religion leverages the loss of restraint.) The accumulation of wealth and power results — as we are now seeing — an “unholy alliance” between those who seek wealth and power and those who are in a position to help them: government officials. The next step is to seal the deal by suppressing dissent from this arrangement by means fair and foul, including legalistic persecution of political enemies and legislation that offers the cover of “legality” (e.g., RESTRICT).

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  2. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    But suppose there is no God. Then what?
    Then death camps for “irredeemables.”
    Don’t think it can’t happen here.

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  3. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    No God?
    Then no trust in God’s Providence.
    No trust in providence?
    Then fear rules and you get tyranny like this:
    https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/592011-coming-soon-climate-lockdowns/
    And you get this too: The official “A.I.A.” architecture organization, and the state regulators here in California, are already adopting an anti-cement attitude, because to produce portland cement, the binder in concrete, takes energy and emits carbon. So now the use of “too much cement” in a concrete mix is discouraged. But concrete is tricky stuff. Skimp on the binder that holds it all together? Gosh, what could possibly go wrong? It makes me want to scream.

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  4. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    “How can you kick away the theological support and continue to hold to the equality and universality of rights?”
    I’ve been tussling with this question for some time now, especially as it relates to the explicit argument made at the American Founding. My opinion is that if the transcendent grounding of these rights is “kicked away”, then so is the structural soundness of American political theory.
    If you’ll forgive me, I will link to a post of my own from 2019:
    Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?/
    Also: shoutout to Jacques!

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  5. Elliott Avatar
    Elliott

    Dear Loquitur,
    Thanks for your post. You make an important comment about the unjust suppression of dissent.
    There is a point worth noting about your claim that the Golden Rule is merely a restatement of “what goes around comes around.” The GR is typically used as a normative (i.e., prescriptive) principle, whereas “what goes around comes around” is usually meant as a descriptive claim. Since normative claims are not restatements of descriptive ones, the GR (in its normative sense) isn’t quite a restatement of the descriptive claim that one will likely reap the consequences (good or bad) of one’s actions.
    Perhaps, however, you intended to say that the GR, or ethics more broadly, isn’t (categorically) normative at all, but rather is merely descriptive, or at best hypothetically normative. If this is your position, I’d be interested in seeing a supporting argument.
    Perhaps you agree with Schopenhauer, who made this sort of claim in The Basis of Morality.
    “The objection will perhaps be raised that Ethics is not concerned with what men actually do, but that it is the science which treats of what their conduct ought to be. Now this is exactly the position which I deny. In the critical part of the present treatise I have sufficiently demonstrated that the conception of ought, in other words, the imperative form of Ethics, is valid only in theological morals, outside of which it loses all sense and meaning. The end which I place before Ethical Science is to point out all the varied moral lines of human conduct; to explain them; and to trace them to their ultimate source. Consequently there remains no way of discovering the basis of Ethics except the empirical.” (See Part III, Ch. II, last paragraph at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44929/44929-h/44929-h.htm#CHAPTER_IIc )
    On Schopenhauer’s view, without God, there is no categorical normativity. Ethics is merely descriptive and hypothetically normative. One can say things such as “Many people are dishonest” and “If you want to be treated well, then treat others well.” But categorically normative principles such as the GR or Kant’s Categorical Imperative “lose all sense and meaning.”

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  6. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Do I understand Loquitur’s point correctly? I take it to mean that when government “oversteps its bounds” – that is, when it arrogates power beyond the administrative, and begins to intrude upon civil society and the horizontal relations of ordinary life – that we begin to feel that we have “offloaded” all moral and normative restraints, and therefore have a residual license to do to one another whatever we can get away with under what Tocqueville called that “immense and tutelary power”?
    If I do understand this rightly, I think it’s a penetrating and important observation.

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  7. VV Avatar
    VV

    Bill, I highly recommend reading this by Zero HP Lovecraft, an eloquent anonymous writer.
    https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/marooned-in-the-deepest-darkness-90b#details
    E.g., this passage:
    “So if people have freedom, freedom to act according to their desires, freedom to act according to their nature, they will immediately get to the business of rising or falling to their natural level. So freedom is antithetical to equality.
    “And the way you resolve this is supposed to be that equality only means equality before the law, equality before God, something like that. But that’s not stable, it doesn’t stick, it makes everyone very cynical about equality.
    “There is no stable equilibrium between the belief that all men are created equal and the inherent and ineradicable inequality of the real world. Any attempt to institute partial equality is unstable, and wants to collapse into total equality.”
    The whole thing is a part of his brilliant podcast series on religion.
    https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/podcasts

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  8. BV Avatar
    BV

    Hi Vlastimil,
    I hope you are well. Why does he say the following: “There is no stable equilibrium between the belief that all men are created equal and the inherent and ineradicable inequality of the real world. Any attempt to institute partial equality is unstable, and wants to collapse into total equality.”
    That is a mere assertion. What’s his argument?

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  9. VV Avatar
    VV

    Agreed. I think his argument might be something like an inductive historical slippery slope: you start with X (St Paul’s equality in Christ, the French Revolution’s egalité, the inalienable 1st generation human rights, or whatever), and little by little you end up in woke hell. Just my guess. And yes, not compelling if not fleshed out in detail. I will ask him there, on his site. But this trope that certain ideas are Trojan horses (memes mutating according to some subliminal logic of development of degen doctrine) is quite common among the prople of alt right, dissident right, Neo-Reaction (NRx), and so called frog Twitter.

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  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    VV,
    But you know and I know that slippery slope arguments are invalid. There is no inevitability that one slide down the slope.
    I try to explain the equity delusion here: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=VALQDT
    Scroll down to sections 16.5 and 16.6.

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  11. VV Avatar
    VV

    Invalid arguments still may be non-deductively (inductively or abductively) strong, given good empirical evidence.
    Thx for the ref!

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