The human rights claim asserts that every human being has certain moral rights. There are two ideas here. The first is the universality of the claim: every human being, no matter how weak, detested or criminal, counts morally. The second idea concerns how they count. Unlike a person's vote, which counts but can be disregarded if outnumbered, a human right denotes an area in which the individual is supreme and inviolable: one's right to life ought not be sacrificed simply because a majority, or its interests, so demand. Any theory of human rights, then, must account for both of these aspects. It must give the right sort of answer to the two questions, “who counts morally” and “how do we count them?”

Michael Perry has written a nuanced, insightful, provocative, often sensible, frequently convincing, and ultimately perplexing book. I am not sure what his thesis is. Since he titles the book as a series of “inquiries,” perhaps he doesn't have a unified thesis, or need one. And as an extended set of ponderings over the complexities of defining and defending human rights, this book certainly “works.”

The book's apparent thesis is set out in the introduction and repeated frequently thereafter: that it is not possible to understand talk about human rights, such as that contained in the International Bill of Human Rights, in secular terms. Instead, “the idea of human rights is … ineliminably religious.” This is so because the idea of human rights requires affirming that each person is “sacred” in relation to a holistic view of the world and its meaning, so that there are certain things that should not be done to and that should be done for any person. The only sort of view of the world and of the person within it that can ground the idea of human rights is a religious view, Perry suggests; there is no secular equivalent.

The heart of Michael Perry's argument lies in his claim that “every human being is sacred” and, that being the case, it follows that there are “some things that ought never (for example, under any circumstances or conditions) to be done to any human being or some things that ought always (under all conditions) to be done for every human being?” The “foundational” claim is that every human being, because sacred, is owed a certain regard and that this regard, in our time, has taken shape as, and congealed around, the idea of human rights. The dignity of the person, in other words, is a necessary prior assumption from which rights derive. The ontological claim, or to put it in a similar if not identical way, certain anthropological presuppositions, necessarily ground any sustainable human rights argument. It is possible, certainly, to make human rights claims on purely conventional grounds or, in more “Rortyesque” language, as just the way we do things around here. But that claim is not sustainable over time, argues Perry. It follows that “there is no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious.”

Michael J. Perry's The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries is a major contribution to the clarification of the idea of human rights, which he considers to be, for many, the most difficult of all the influential moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century. He argues that it is, “in one form or another,” an “old idea” and opens his Introduction with a quotation from Leszek Kolakowski dismissing the assertion that “the idea of human rights is of recent origin.” For someone who is as ready to admit being a “secular enthusiast of human rights” as the author of this comment, Perry's denial of the fact that human rights constitute a recent phenomenon certainly “poses a problem.” The problem is really essential with regard to Perry's foundational conviction advanced in Chapter I, where he claims that the idea of human rights is ineliminably, inescapably, religious, and that so is the view that “every human being is sacred.”

Near the beginning of The Idea of Human Rights, Michael Perry states that “One of my principal goals … is to clarify and address the unusually murky subject of ‘moral relativism’—and to do so from the perspective of what can properly be called ‘natural law.”” This he defines, following D.J. O'Connor, as a view according to which “basic principles of morals and legislation are, in some sense or other, objective, accessible to reason and based on human nature.” Subsequently, he explains that the relation between belief in natural law and in human rights is one of presupposition; that is to say, a doctrine of natural rights presupposes the moral realism which in his view is the central core of natural law theories.

As his discussion makes clear, Perry's claim that human rights presuppose a natural law should be understood as a theoretical claim. At the same time, it raises interesting historical issues. That is, when we examine classical accounts of the natural law, are these explicitly linked with doctrines of natural or human rights, or something recognizably similar? (Throughout this paper, I treat the terms “human” and “natural” rights as synonyms.) And more generally, what can we learn from the ways in which our forbears drew connections, or failed to do so, between a natural law and human rights?

On the grounds of an (essentially) Roman Catholic moral theology and political philosophy, Michael J. Perry states and argues for positions that vindicate the accent of recent popes on human rights as both a matter of faith and of reason—positions I believe to be largely valid and that could gain even stronger support from a Reformed Christian philosophical theology. This should not be surprising, for the Catholic tradition was the common tradition for centuries, it deeply stamped the legal structure of the West that gave rise to “rights talk,” and those strands which led to human rights in its modern form were implicitly in it, even if they were strengthened by the struggles of Protestants to establish a right to convert and, later, to advocate the freedom of religion on spiritual, intellectual, and organization grounds. Perry knows, as most Catholic and Protestants believe, that social morality is unavoidably linked to religion, that these matters can be discussed in public discourse, and that it is fateful for politics, law, social well-being and international relationships to do so. These matters are made clear not only in this book, but also in his earlier Love and Power: The Role of Religion and Morality in American Politics, The Constitution and the Courts: Law or Politics and Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives. In the present book, as in the other remarkable products of this decade, we find Perry engaged not only with contemporary political philosophy and jurisprudence, which are largely secular in outlook, but with a number of scholars who are concerned with what David Tracy has called “public theology,” a term which several Protestants as well as Catholics have adopted—although in somewhat different ways.

Michael Perry's The Idea of Human Rights raises important and difficult issues. One such issue, reformulated, is whether the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed both the rise of human rights language in international law, and the erosion, if not the collapse, in the intellectual sphere of the theoretical underpinnings of human rights as traditionally understood. This is part of a broader tension, in which the advance of broadly liberal values has coexisted with increasing skepticism about the objectivity of ethics, freedom of the will and genuine moral responsibility, meaningfulness in a natural order, and the irreducibility of mind.

I am deeply grateful for this symposium on The Idea of Human Rights. I am especially grateful to Marie Failinger, co-editor of the Journal of Law and Religion, who conceived the symposium and then brought it to fruition.

I am also greatly honored by this symposium. In particular, I am honored that the contributors to the symposium are thinkers whose own work I esteem.

I have learned from experience that my engagement with critical commentary on my work is much more likely to be genuinely productive on my part if I do not rush to respond. I am especially wary of rushing to respond at the present time, because for the past few years I have been in the grip of two sets of issues very different from those I addressed in The Idea of Human Rights. For now, suffice it to say the contributors to this symposium, each in her or his own way, have both broadened and deepened my understanding of the issues I addressed in The Idea of Human Rights. When I revisit those issues, as I expect to do in the next few years, I will turn to the important, difficult questions and arguments pressed by the symposiasts in the preceding essays. As Jean Bethke Elshtain, for one, has emphasized in her contribution, there is much more work to be done—important work.

The Holocaust remains imprinted on western consciousness as the epitome of a crime “which no human justice can eradicate.” Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, knew this well. The tragedy of the Holocaust is that the cry “never again,” which came in its wake, has failed to control human evil. Stories of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere remind us of the capacity of humankind to commit the kind of heinous crimes that no amount of human justice nor reparation can assuage. This tragic reality motivates Carlos Nino in Radical Evil on Trial to pose the all-important question: “How shall we live with evil? How shall we respond to massive human rights violations committed either by State actors or by others with the consent and tolerance of their governments?”

In order to understand the changes that occurred in the Buddhist Sangha (monastic community) in Sri Lanka during and after colonialization by the British, it is first necessary to understand the situation of Buddhism prior to colonialization as well as the relationship of Buddhism to secular power and the idea of civil law.

Location is crucial to understanding the position of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Buddhism definitively changed the Indian model's relationship of the Sangha to the political order. From the earliest times Sri Lankan Buddhism was connected to kingship and to the geographic space of the island of Sri Lanka, in a way that seems unique in Buddhist history. In Sri Lanka the Buddhist king was not answerable to a ‘god’, but was elected by the Sangha and other high ministers and was required to patronize the Sangha and enforce social stability.

In his critique of Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad claims that religion is not just a symbolic system but a system of power, in many cases, one that is totalizing in character. Asad's argument can be demonstrated in Sri Lanka, where the implantation of a ‘secular government’ during colonial times by the British profoundly altered the relationship between Buddhism and the inhabitants of Sri Lanka. The modern idea of religion as divorced from power succeeded in dislodging the influence that Buddhism had over Sri Lankan politics, but only for a short time.

In the mid-1970s, I attended one of the early conferences on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). It was held in Stanton, Virginia in the heart of Mennonite country. At that point, very few people had heard of ADR, but almost all acknowledged that the civil litigation system was broken. The bar establishment was willing to look almost anywhere for help. There were American Bar Association representatives at the conference, and their attitude was one of curiosity that disputes might be resolved outside the traditional litigation and negotiation processes. At the conference, some of the leading speakers were members of Mennonite dispute resolution groups. They seemed to many lawyers as if they had stepped off of another planet, but they told of a history of dealing with disputes through alternate means. They served as teachers to the ABA and the rest of us. Since then, of course, everything has changed. ADR has swept the country. It would probably be malpractice for a lawyer to not consider alternative means for resolving civil disputes.