For most participants in modern political discourse, human rights are real and natural law is not.
More than that, the limits of natural law—not just particular natural law arguments made about human nature and its institutions—are seen as oppressive and mere constructs. Human rights, by contrast, are real freedoms that must be respected and benefits that must be granted to all human beings.
The French political philosopher Pierre Manent's most recent book, Natural Law and the Rights of Man, is developed from his 2017 lectures for the Etienne Gilson Chair at the Institut Catholique in Paris and will be published in English later this year. (The final lecture is already available in translation.) In it, Manent offers a diagnosis of the way in which human rights have come to eclipse the natural law. He also advances an argument about the nature of political action and command in light of that law's rationality and outlines the consequences of obscuring action. This shift from natural law to human rights was supposed to free us, Manent concludes, but has left us paralyzed.
The Double Standard that Relativism Creates
The perfect example arose last month. On February 19, the Trump administration announced a new campaign to fight laws in 72 countries that criminalize same-sex sexual acts. Why did Out magazine condemn it as racist and colonialist, instead of supporting it as a way to keep gays from being killed and imprisoned? Because rights claims are the moral trump card in our public debates, but not when it comes to cultures other than our own. As Manent notes, in our own countries, the bien pensant constantly make judgments about right and wrong in order to reform society. It is inexcusable to maintain the status quo, they claim, since nothing is more urgent or just than for men and women like us to recognize, declare, and vindicate our fundamental rights. But regarding other countries, they are more likely to suspend judgment: We would not want to suggest that our way of life is superior to those of other cultures, especially in a post-colonial era. As a result, we regard the “other” with cultured non-judgment, while furiously judging ourselves.
In effect, Manent argues, we posit that human rights are a rigorously universal principle, which have value for all cultures without exception. At the same time, we posit that all cultures and forms of life are equal, and that all appraisal that would presume to judge them is discriminatory. On the one hand, all human beings are equal, and we must fight vigorously for the equality of men and women in our society; on the other hand all cultures have the right to an equal respect, even those that violate the equality of human beings, and we should refrain from condemning cultures that, for example, keep women in a subordinate state.
This contradiction captures the paralysis Manent sees in our contemporary framework of rights. If we want to condemn barbarism without using scare quotes, he writes, there must be a human nature with which our actions can accord or that we are capable of violating. That nature operates according to a logic that we did not create ourselves. As he put it in a recent interview with the conservative French weekly Valeurs Actuelles, the natural law is the group of rules that necessarily order human life, and that human beings have not made. These laws fix the limits of our liberty, but also give it its orientation.
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