The Problem With Humanism

Every time a New Atheist post something about humanism on atheism boards, I scoff. I scoff because this secular philosophy has no evidence to support its most basic assertions, in particular that each human being has some kind of inherent worth or value. More generally speaking, humanism supposedly bases ethical decisions on reason while trusting science when it comes to understanding the world. While the former sentence clearly has no evidence to support it, the latter sentence practically conflicts with itself as a philosophy that uses evidence and science to support certain beliefs abandons evidence and science in order to behave ethically, meaning, the ethics that are practiced are not evidence- or science-based. The ethics often used by New Atheists are supposedly arrived by reason.

 

For example, The Council for Secular Humanism maintains that they adhere to a consequentialist ethical system. Okay, great, but there is really no consensus among philosophers as to whether consequentialism is any better than, say, utilitarianism or deontology. Whether a particular brand of humanist subscribes to any ethical system has more to do with how the individual feels about the ethical system than the ethical system being a matter of reality. (I lean towards consequentialism myself, but this may change according to circumstance. More importantly, I recognize this. I’m a Realist like that.) Meanwhile, groups like the International Humanist and Ethical Union declare about their ethical system that, “Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” I’m not saying that this isn’t a nice sentiment, just that it cannot be arrived at by reason, much less by evidence. If you ask this philosopher – and I’m the only one worth asking - reasons should be based on some kind of evidence. This is to say that if anything, the evidence would indicate that human beings care little beyond the immediate futures of their next of kin. The divergence of ideas surrounding the basic tenets of humanism do not lend itself to credibility.

 

Since New Atheists have hammered theist about having evidence for their beliefs – and rightly so – I believe that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. So it seems rather odd that there should be so much ambiguity between the declarations of various humanist organizations to say nothing of there being various humanist organizations. A quick Google of the question “What is humanism?” yields various answers from many humanist organizations; enough answers to categorize each organization according to the varying beliefs they hold. The Council for Secular Humanism, the American Humanist Association, the British Humanist Association, and the International Humanist and Ethical Union (for starters) all give different answers to the question. To be fair, each organization is similar enough in their answers to fall under a general philosophy we can call ‘humanism.’ Still, a philosophy arrived at by reason should not have as much ambiguity as humanism displays.

 

While I would say many of these brands of humanism are a more positive philosophy than their non-secular counterparts (at least more positive for one’s self-esteem, if nothing else), I do think that New Atheist humanists should be honest about their reasoning for committing to this philosophy. Since New Atheists demand so much honesty in debates, they should be honest here and admit that humanism has little to no evidential support. That, or go find the support for their ‘intuitions’ in biology or evolutionary psychology.

 

If one is going to demand that others ground their beliefs in evidence and science, they should do the same as well. Otherwise, it seems reasonable to say that two people who act alike must be alike. And this is reasonable because the evidence dictates that if it looks like a rat, walks like a rat and smells like a rat, it’s probably a rat. 

Are Human Beings Intelligent?

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” Bertrand Russell     

Human beings arrogantly assume they are intelligent creatures having compared themselves to "lower" life forms that haven't invented wheels, money, or TV. Well, birds don't need wheels, monkeys barter sex for food, and lizards didn't write those awful final seasons of "Friends.” To be sure, humans do have a knack for turning abstract thoughts into inventions and for synthesizing information to predict the future. But if that’s all our definition of intelligence* entails, then I will retract what I’m about to say about human intelligence; um, that is, that humans are not intelligent. Sure, on occasion, humans do display an ability to reason, which is the other common requisite for intelligence and is the link between abstract thought and invention. But if we’re talking about how often we collectively exercise the ability to reason, especially in our day to day lives, then we don’t seem all that intelligent as a species. It seems that a number of other so-called intelligences take precedence as we go about our lives; interpersonal intelligence and bodily kinesthetic intelligence, for example. While using reason to create tools and predict the future is great, rare is the person who takes reasoning seriously as a tool for running their lives, much less the lives of anyone else.  

[* - I’m discounting our ability to communicate in a variety of ways as a facet of intelligence as many animals can do as much, though not with the same complexity. But I discount the complexity of human language as well because that complexity also drives misunderstandings.]

We are all aware of the headlines that alert us to common acts of stupidity, such as the man who calls police to report the theft of the marijuana he was illegally growing in his attic; as commonly reported by sources such as News of the Weird and the Darwin Awards. More examples of human stupidity include building huge cities in earthquake prone areas. Stupid. Living in a trailer home in Tornado Alley? Stupid. Giving teachers paychecks that are dwarfed by multi-million dollar high school drop-out athletes and rappers because the human need to be entertained is greater than the human need to be skilled or educated? Stupid. Oh, and have you ever heard Celion Dion cover AC/DC? I’m not even kidding! The average human is about as smart as a box of rocks, and that’s probably giving people too much credit as well as being an insult to rocks.

While these sorts of headlines tackle the everyday stupidity of humans, there are far worse examples of humans not exercising their supposed intelligence. Take for example the eagerness of the agriculture industries (BigAg as it is known in the U.S.) who stealthily implements genetically altered foods into our food chain without studying the long term effects these foods might have on us or the environment. Here, the afore mentioned ability to synthesize information in order to predict the future goes right out the window for the sake of the short term monetary gain by a minute handful of people. In this respect, we might also take for example industries that pour their toxic wastes into rivers and oceans and endanger what is arguably our most important resource, water. Moreover, what of energy companies that intentionally suppress the advancement of clean, renewable energy? And what about cloning? International law notwithstanding, surely humans will soon be cloned with regularity. Who will control this technology and for what purposes? Sadly, our ability to create is forever outpacing our ability to philosophically deal with the ‘intelligent’ Dr. Frankenstein within us. So, are we intelligent?

That’s a good question to ask oneself, especially when one believes in a god. Meta-studies appear to indicate a correlation between intelligence levels and strength of faith, where the more education one has appears to lead to a higher percentage of agnostics and non-practicing theists, if not outright atheists. There's a reason why religion is not taught in public school and colleges; it is not compatible with reason. If a theist is to seriously think about human intelligence, they should find themselves asking exactly why any supposedly intelligent creator would create an intelligent species with such an inceredible capacity for stupidity. Why would God create something so dumb that it would proclaim itself, in the face of an entire universe, as the pinnacle of creation? We’re talking about an entire species dedicated to the Black Swan Syndrome; we don’t know of any life as intelligent as humans, so humans must be the most intelligent in all the universe! We can continue to ask these types of questions: Why would a god create humans with such poor reason, who are constantly making choices that endanger their lives or otherwise make themselves unhappy? And why, in the name of all that is holy, would God like to be worshipped by these idiotic creations? Even the robots humans build do not require that the robots worship their creator.

The reasonable answer to these types of questions is that God, were He to exist, is a moron. But we do have to give credit where credit is due, for in a single stroke of cleverness, God gets off the hook for creating such dumb things as people by the virtue of faith. That’s right, faith, the dumbest psychological position a person can commit to; this is what excuses God from having made humans as unintelligent as they are. Human being are so unintelligent that it takes something like a human to create and define the word ‘intelligence,’ assign the word great moral value, and them proclaim itself to be intelligent. In much the same way that God cannot be moral by proclaiming to be the standard of morality, humans cannot be intelligent by proclaiming to be the standard of intelligence.

Naturally, someone is going to disagree with me and say something like, “Well, other animals cannot ask themselves why they exist,” which goes to show you exactly how stupid humans are as the person making this argument obviously hasn’t first asked if their argument is even logical. Humans aren’t intelligent. For every example one could give in favor of human intelligence, ten examples of human stupidity can be given in response. By contrast, humans are far more arrogant than they are intelligent, which would explain why supposed alien abductees claim aliens use people as lab rats. But this merely shows how dumb the aliens are, too. I don’t think they’re going to learn much from us. If they were smart, they’d already know that.

The Case Against Unalianable Human Rights

Pro-life advocates, death penalty opponents, and opponents of euthanasia typically share a moral absolutist position in common; namely, that human beings are endowed with unalienable, intrinsic human rights. However, a critical analysis reveals that the concept of such human rights is flawed and hence, neither unalienable nor intrinsic. In order to demonstrate this, we will first address a definitional issue. Second, we will look at the history of human rights to see whether or not there is any indication that human rights are unalienable or inherent. Then, we will address some counter arguments to the thesis presented herein. Upon this examination, it will be shown that the concept of unalienable human rights has no legitimacy

            First we must ask, what are human rights? The United Nations attempted to answer this question in 1948, declaring, “All human beings are born free and equal” (“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”). Adding to this declaration, the United Nations listed twenty-nine articles in defense of negative rights—liberties not to be interfered with—such as the right to privacy, to associate with whom one chooses, and to change one’s beliefs, without obstruction or retribution by another person or institution. To clarify human rights even further, The Boston Review’s Jeremy Waldron wrote of these rights as unalienable; “It means rights that may not be given away by those who have them, and therefore…reasonable people would [not] have found it prudent, in certain circumstances, to alienate these rights” (Waldron). Thus, it is reasonable to conclude from these definitions that human rights are simultaneously intrinsic; they are not meant to be dependent upon instituted legalities or cultural relativism. Human rights are also typically regarded as applying to individuals and are practiced within the confines of an individual’s right to choose their own actions.

            Semantics are, unsurprisingly, a challenge to any declaration of human rights. What is meant by “human being”? The definition of “human being” is as notoriously missing from the United Nation’s declaration of rights as the definition of “men” was from the Declaration of Independence. [That is to say, non-white Anglo-Saxon men were not regarded as men in 1776.] Is a human being an autonomous being capable of choice? Is it a mass of living human cells? The fact is, many animals are capable of making choices and can operate as independently as any human. Does that make such animals human? Nor can we regard living cells as human beings. If that were the case—as far as being human relates to having rights—stem cell research, organ removal, and male masturbation would all have to be criminalized. Nothing in any definition of “human being” offered here or otherwise, suggests that human rights are unalienable or intrinsic. If the definition of “human being” presumed human rights, then there would be little need for the phrase, “human rights.” It shall be noted, though, that a failure to define what a human being is does not necessarily preclude rights. However, this does send us looking for another way to validate unalienable human rights.

            At this juncture, we might ask where human rights come from. Human rights are generally assumed by its advocates to be inherent in one’s being human and, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, self-evident. As we’ve already seen, any appeal for rights upon the definition of “human being” is superfluous. We might also wonder, if human rights are self-evident, why human rights as a concept didn’t appear in the Western world in writing until the 17^th and 18^th century. While the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declarations of the Rights of Man (1789) served as the basis for many modern human rights documents, one might be reminded that the rights declared in these documents, “When originally translated into policy, excluded women, people of color, and members of certain social, religious, economic, and political groups” (Shiman 6). If human rights are indeed self-evident, why were so many people excluded from exercising them? If human rights are self-evident, why was the French Revolution of 1789-1799 followed by the Reign of Terror in which 20,000 “enemies of the Revolution” were executed via the guillotine? Certainly we risk an oversimplification of each of these situations, but situations like these do nothing to advance the concept of human rights.

            Again, the absence of an idea doesn’t necessarily preclude its existence. In the case of human rights though, it is reasonable to assume (given its timeline in Western philosophy) that human rights as a concept evolved in response to the social, economic, and political inequities that arrived with or were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution. Egalitarian societies have no concept of human rights because such inequities do not exist. Asian cultures that place the welfare of the community before the welfare of individuals likewise have no developed sense of human rights. Jack Donnelly, professor of International Studies at Denver, wrote in response to this observation, “Human rights ultimately rest on a social decision to act as though such ‘things’ existed…Like all social practices, human rights come with justifications” (Donnelly 20-21). There appears a strong indication that human rights are culturally relative. Human rights, it seems, is the advent of cultures that prize individuality and one’s freedom of expression.

            There are any number of objections a human rights proponent may now make, but for the sake of brevity, we will assess a few of the most commonly raised defenses.

            Proponents of human rights sometimes claim that human needs dictate human rights. The obvious question arises then as to what constitutes a need. Postulated by renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, there exists a hierarchy of needs. Fundamentally, humans need physiological needs met first in order to survive, with safety needs and social needs met in that descending order of importance. With respect to human rights, based upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the best we can say is that human beings may have a right to air, water, food, and shelter. According to Maslow, “If these fundamental needs are not satisfied then one will surely be motivated to satisfy them. Higher needs such as social needs and esteem are not recognized until one satisfies the needs basic to existence” (Maslow). If this view is correct, any rights beyond physiological needs require justification. This is perhaps why The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in several of its articles that rights shall not be arbitrarily suspended. In other words, there may be conditions in which human rights are suspended and if that is so, human rights are not unalienable.

            Another common defense of human rights is for its proponents to claim that those opposed to human rights have other interests at heart. Interestingly, the countries that abstained from voting on the United Nations’ universal declaration in 1948 were among the greatest human rights abusers during that era. [Those countries included the Soviet Union, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.] It would be outlandish to deny that governments would sometimes obstruct the rights of its citizens, whatever those rights may be. But this is not wholeheartedly the case. If we may appeal to cultural relativism again, it may be that certain cultures have no knowledge of human rights because they have no need for such a concept. In order for the idea of unalienable human rights to hold, it must be shown that participants within a culture are incorrect to place their community’s needs ahead of the needs of individuals; it must be shown that the needs of one outweigh the needs of many. The idea that individual rights trump collective rights is hardly unassailable: it arguably leads to selfishness, greed, and crime.

Thus, individual rights can create as many problems as it helps solve. If we quantify how much good proclaiming human rights does, we are consequentialists. If we are consequentialists, the needs of the many can at least sometimes outweigh the needs of the few. Thus, human rights once again cannot be unalienable, not as they apply to individuals. [Of course, we should be wary of any possible tyrannical effect mob rule could have. It seems reasonable that there should be some formulation of human rights in any system of democratic government.]

            Third, even though human rights as they are currently conceived is a secular concept, it is not uncommon to hear the argument that human beings are imbued with rights by a divine creator. Naturally, this begs the question, which god? In order to conclude that some divine authority has imparted rights upon human beings, it would need to be shown that a god or gods existed. If history is any indication, arguing for the existence of God has been fraught with difficulty. Trying to establish God’s relationship to human beings has been even more difficult than that.

            The concept of human rights most of all suffers from the is-ought problem. That human beings have unalienable rights is not the case. Even so, we should think a case can be made for what ought to be regarding human rights if we are all concerned about bringing value to individual lives. However, the definitions of “human beings” and “rights” need to be resolved first, or they’ll forever be contentious. We would also need to formulate human rights that do not interfere with cultural practices if we are at all of the opinion that every culture has inherent worth. [We should venture to say that this is usually the way Westerners think even though such thinking does not coincide with the current concept of human rights.] Circumstances permitting, it seems permissible (sometimes even necessary) to conceptualize human rights. There is no need to postulate that such rights are unalienable, though. The desire for rights alone should be sufficient.

REFERENCES

Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2^nd. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Maslow, Abraham. “Maslow Hierarchy of Needs.” Abraham Maslow: Father of Modern Management. 2005 Abraham-Maslow.com 15 February, 2009

Shiman, David. Teaching Human Rights. 2nd. Denver: University of Denver, 1999.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2008. The United Nations. 10 Feb 2009 .

Waldron , Jeremy. "Inalienable Rights." Boston Review. May 1999. 15 Feb 2009 .

Theory Parker (c) 2009