A number of bloggers have commented on my two posts on these matters yesterday. A lot of the comments are misdirected; some people seem to have taken me to be arguing that without God, everything is permissible. Not only did I not take that view, I pretty much denied it to be true. (My actual position is more along the lines that without God, nothing is possible.) For a contrary view to mine, see Will Wilkinson; I think it’s Wilkinson at his least persuasive or appealing, with more attitude than argument, but decide for yourself.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, asks why we can’t see human rights as “the contingent achievement of a contingent civilization” and defend them as “contingent human achievements that have advanced human dignity and well-being”? The answer is that of course we can see them that way, and we are to an extent right to do so: The legal and cultural recognition and protection of human rights are contingent human achievements, as is the conceptualization of them in the first place. But when we argue that, say, torture violates human rights, we generally mean (and should mean) that a society that practices torture is worse than one that does not; we are appealing to a standard of morality outside a particular time and place to judge it; and we are making at least implicit claims about the nature of human beings that make sense of the phrase “human dignity and well-being.”

Sullivan concludes his post by noting that it should be possible to defend human rights without reference to God. I agree; that’s what I said. And it’s a separate question from whether human rights are “contingent” in the sense Sullivan describes.