A Scandal to the Skeptics

“The assumptions that made the idea of natural rights intellectually defensible have tended to dissolve in recent times.” So reads the most widely-discussed sentence in the most widely-praised of recent American political science treatises. “The logic of natural rights,” the passage goes on to say, “seems to require a transcendental view in which the right is ‘natural’ because God directly or indirectly wills it. God wills it as a right men ought to be (but not necessarily are) permitted by their fellows to exercise in society.” And the author concludes (he is Robert A. Dahl, Chairman of the Political Science Department at Yale University, and the book is A Preface to Democratic Theory): “Such an argument inevitably involves assumptions that at best are difficult and at worst impossible to prove to the satisfaction of anyone of positivist or skeptical predispositions.”

The tacit premise, you will notice, is that what is “intellectually defensible” in “recent times” is what can be proved to the satisfaction of positivists and skeptics: or, conversely, that one is entitled simply to read out of the recent world of the intellect those who countenance the idea of natural right, and of a God who (directly or indirectly, whatever that may mean) wills it.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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“The assumptions that made the idea of natural rights intellectually defensible have tended to dissolve in recent times.” So reads the most widely-discussed sentence in the most widely-praised of recent American political science treatises. “The logic of natural rights,” the passage goes on to say, “seems to require a transcendental view in which the right is ‘natural’ because God directly or indirectly wills it. God wills it as a right men ought to be (but not necessarily are) permitted by their fellows to exercise in society.” And the author concludes (he is Robert A. Dahl, Chairman of the Political Science Department at Yale University, and the book is A Preface to Democratic Theory): “Such an argument inevitably involves assumptions that at best are difficult and at worst impossible to prove to the satisfaction of anyone of positivist or skeptical predispositions.”

The tacit premise, you will notice, is that what is “intellectually defensible” in “recent times” is what can be proved to the satisfaction of positivists and skeptics: or, conversely, that one is entitled simply to read out of the recent world of the intellect those who countenance the idea of natural right, and of a God who (directly or indirectly, whatever that may mean) wills it.