Human Rights, Criminal Punishment, and Moral Legislation

Human Rights

• Since World War II, human rights issues have gained significant public attention, initially concerning the Nazis, then equal access for African Americans, women, and other minorities, and more recently in US foreign policy.
• Ongoing concerns include racial and sexual discrimination, and increased awareness of abuses against the poor and repression of political opposition. Debates continue regarding the right to life, privacy, rights of criminals, and property rights.

Doctrine of Human Rights

• The core claim is that all individuals possess an equal right to be treated as persons, irrespective of race, religion, sex, politics, or socioeconomic status.

• Differences are ethically irrelevant and do not affect a person's inherent worth. Discrimination makes these differences count, resulting in unequal treatment based on irrelevant factors like race or gender.

• Examples of discrimination include paying women less than men for equal work, providing inferior education or job opportunities for Black individuals, and preventing the poor from voting.

• Distinction between Human Rights and Special Rights:

  • Human (or natural) rights: Universal rights inherent to all persons.
  • Special rights: Arise from legal contracts, constitutions, or specific relationships (e.g., husband/wife, parent/child) and apply only to those who meet certain conditions.

• Legal and constitutional rights are conditional, applying only to those who fulfill specific conditions (e.g., signing a contract, being a citizen).

• Human rights are universal, inherent, equal, and unconditional. This doesn't mean these rights must always be claimed or exercised.

• Even when rights are not fully exercised (e.g., by a young child under guardianship or a convicted criminal), the individual's human rights must still be respected.

• Rights are unalienable because individuals remain persons and are to be treated as such, even when incarcerated. This is discussed in chapter 10.

• Rights and Duties:

  • Rights bring correlative duties. An individual's right to life and liberty implies others have a duty to respect those rights.
  • Not all duties arise from human rights; some stem from special relationships or from loving and caring for another person.

Significance of Human Rights

• Human rights provide a framework for understanding liberty and justice.

• Rights and liberties intertwine: Rights define the liberties essential for a human quality of existence, similar to how special rights protect elements essential to a special relationship.

• Justice, defined as treating equals equally, means respecting and preserving the rights of all equally.

• Human rights are foundational to more specific rights. A woman's rights as a human person underpin her rights as a wife or employee.

• Promises to a woman must be kept as fully as to anyone else because she is a person with full human rights. Similarly, an employee has the same right to have their contract rights respected as does the company president.

• Rights and Government:

  • The US Declaration of Independence asserts governments exist to secure natural rights.
  • The French Constitution of 1791 states the purpose of political association is the preservation of these rights.
  • Natural rights are not granted by the state but are inherent. Government is a servant of the people in the exercise of their natural rights.

• Human rights avoid ethical egoism: Rights are not simply what we want.

• Jeremy Bentham criticized natural rights as inciting selfish passions and undermining social order.

• The principle of equal rights balances individual rights, preventing egoistic extremes. Individual rights cannot exclude or take precedence over others' rights.

• Human rights imply obligations, morally binding individuals in a mutually supportive society.

• Cultural Relativism:

  • Human rights avoid the pitfalls of cultural relativism because rights are universal and unchanging.
  • The empirical diversity and dependency theses of relativism are irrelevant to human rights theory, which is rooted in the universal nature and worth of persons.

• Utilitarianism:

  • Human rights are not based solely on utility. Bentham could not comprehend equal rights because rights are protected by government.
  • Mill based justice on utility. Rights are granted for society's benefit rather than being inherent in individuals.
  • The utilitarian perspective regards human rights as socially or legally conferred, blurring the line between natural and special rights.
  • If human rights exist merely for utilitarian ends, they could be suspended if greater utility were served, endangering minorities and equal treatment.

• Biblical Basis:

  • The worth and equal rights of all persons is deeply rooted in the biblical view of society and government.
  • Scriptures affirm God's value for each individual. The Old Testament prophets hold rulers accountable for justice that respects the rights of the poor and fatherless.
  • Jesus' interactions (e.g., with the Samaritan woman and children) illustrate that God does not discriminate. God is no respecter of persons.

• Historical Context:

  • The human rights concept was developed in Roman jurisprudence (Cicero) and Stoic philosophy.
  • The Enlightenment in Britain, France, and Germany (notably John Locke) further formulated it.
  • US founding fathers drew on these sources, asserting unalienable rights endowed by the Creator.
  • Affirmed by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

• Theistic and Christian Inspiration: The concept is thoroughly theistic and Christian.

Basis for Human Rights

• Rights are rooted in relationships between persons as moral agents. Because we are all human, we grant to others the same right to pursue their interests that we ask for ourselves.

• AI Melden posits that human relations are rights-granting activities human rights are corollaries of belonging to the human community and are inherent in life together as responsible agents.

• This is a socially imposed view: But what about those who refuse to live within the community or play by the rules they still have rights. It is God who made us responsible to live in a community in the first place.

• Rights are not socially accorded, but God-given (endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights).

• Rights are essential to a human community, but God made us responsible agents to live together in community.

• A person is more than a statistic or economic unit but is created in God's image. Human persons mirror God, their personhood reflecting God's nature.

• Respecting a person's rights is also respecting God, while abusing a person disrespects God and depreciates His image.

• Imaging God includes responsible stewardship and agency.

• Human rights are the right to fulfill our God-given calling without obstruction.

• The right to be treated as a person is the right to the responsible life purposed for us by God (Theocentric). A Christian understanding of human rights is more than the enlightenment understanding incorporated in democratic heritage.

• Christian human rights are both the ability to freely serve others and a license to develop through service rather than self-exaltation.

• The view that Christians have no rights and have given them up to Christ depreciates the dignity and value of God's image in humankind. Christians are prepared to turn the other cheek and go a second mile out of love.

• Rights are means to manifest God's image. To be viewed like everything else in a theocentric rather than egocentric fashion.

The Extent of Human Rights

• Human rights essentially boil down to the right to be treated as a person. Includes

  • Life: a prerequisite to all else
  • Liberty: respects the self-determination of those with capacity for deliberation and free choice
  • Property: ensures the fruit of one's labor meets basic needs for a human quality of life. God has given us these in making us the human persons we are.

• Each right is limited by the rights of others, as we have a duty to respect other’s life, liberty, and property.

• Additional rights might include the pursuit of happiness (well-being), freedom of information, association, and religion. Objects to abuse of human rights (e.g. in communist China or Latin America.

• Property Rights: Aristotle's Natural vs. Unnatural money getting. Aquinas. In reference to property must be used for the benefit of others. Locke reminded all that God gave the resources of creation to all

  • The concern is to avoid both absolute (unlimited wealth) and unalleviated poverty
  • Biblical examples include gleaning laws and Jubilee.
  • Modern examples include fair wages, fringe benefits, work satisfaction.
  • Ultimately work and property should be a vehicle for serving others.

• Women's Rights:

  • Women and men are equally persons with equal human rights, to be protected legally (equal pay, opportunity, status).
  • It provides the basis for marriages that value equality. But individual fulfillment and career plans can overshadow shared values and goals within marriage.
  • Marriage needs to be viewed as a union with shared goals, values, and common interest, but not a contract between two individuals with separate goals and plans.
  • Individual interest exists in a context of service to others.

• The Abortion Debate:

  • One issue puts the right to privacy against the fetus' right to life.
  • What is the moral status of the Fetus?: Old testament valuing fetal life
  • A human fetus is human life. Not yet in self reflective meaningful relations with others. But a potential person is likely to develop into all those powers. That life should be received and protected as a gift from God.
  • Abortion on demand for personal convenience fails to recognize this. But a fetus does not share the full human rights equally with persons. Possible exceptions can apply for when other moral obligations conflict.
  • If the fetal life threatens the mother's life most people would allow for an abortion. Actual personhood as greater value than potential personhood.
  • Privacy and freedom from your body?: A person can voluntarily wave that right in sexual intercourse. Responsibility and consequence means there has to be some sense of responsibility for the fetus for increasingly personhood.

Criminal Punishment

• Addresses a significant social problem, testing ethical theories, and raising questions about suspended human rights.

• Christian concern is strong, with themes of divine and civil punishment in the Old Testament. Mosaic Law included a penal code, and injustice was exposed. Remember scripture speaks of mercy for sinners and care for prisoners.

• The Utilitarian view:

  • Bentham: proposes control by manipulating pleasure and pain--enough punishment to outweigh pleasure from crime will deter.
  • A certainty and propinquity of pain are necessary. He proposed this as a humanitarian act
  • Later emphasis on deterrence, rehabilitation, protection of society.
  • Better to rehabilitate than simply incarcerate.

• Serious questions have however been raised about effectiveness deterrence or rehabilitation with high recidivism rates.

• Problems:

  • The problem is in part the cost and complexity in designing an ideally utilitarian penal system. And why people are doing what they do
  • Underestimates those factors and assumes that the psychological hedonism account fully accounts for why people do what they do.
  • Bentham assumed that a wrongdoer calculates consequences before acting spontaneously.
  • An ethical standpoint, distributive justice treating people justly and equal can be an even more acute problem.

• Utilitarian approaches can lead to inequitable treatment:

  • Punishing individuals differently for the same crime based on their capacity for pleasure or pain.
  • Experimenting (i.e experimenting the right about of punishment). The Innocent may be used as examples and even if there's an issue of inequitable senetincing. Like Pontius Pilate we might benefit from convicting an innocent person to create a better state but is that moral.
  • Innocent and guilty persons could be used as means to greatest benefit rather than treated as individual.

• Another utilitarian approach: Barbara Wooten erased distinction between penal and medical by substituting therapy.

• Problems:

  • Assumes behavior is determined entirely by factors beyond control of the offender.
  • Depersonalizes the offender by denying moral responsibility.
  • It would have us manipulate people to make them conform willingly in order to create the kinds of citizens and people that are expected.
    • Who is to determine the ends of such therapy? (Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ)
    • Shades of Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 arise that could stifle nonconformity and reform by means of genetic manipulation.
    • Controls are needed to protect to protect human rights and prevent dehumanization.

• Retribution:

  • A person is morally accountable for actions, and guilt merits punishment. This view of justice (but not revenge) is supported by scripture (Law abiding conducts, and maintain pease and justice).
  • The legal concept of Men's rea: To be accountable, must be of right mind and aware of his actions.
  • The right to be treated as a person is also the right to be punished.

• Society has a duty to punish those who are criminal offenders (the Old Testament had restitution, negative wages).

• The Old Testament has the mandate of the sword entrusted by God for government to maintain peace and justice. The majority of this concern is to care for both the offender and the victim.

• Aristotle calls it Restorative justice. Retributions justice upholded distributive justice

• Lex talionis (eye for an eye): NOT REVENGE, but to protect an excessiveness within its punishment. Meant to uphold justice for victims and offenders (that both have human rights).

• This served as a limiting principle to prevent excessive punishment, and now punishment is to occur along being porportional to the crime.

• Combined view: Not Just Justice but Love--Concern for Criminal Justice.

• A combined view of retributivist and utilitarian:

  • Retributivism: Retributivism strength is emphasis on both punishing justly and limited and proportionate means.
  • Utilitarians can justify punishment in general, but with what it might achieve.
  • Combined: justifies punishment on a redistributive basis, but then go a second mile in providing rehabilitated experiences to the offender (job training and educational opportunity).

• First offender (retributivist insists that the case must be brough to trial). The utiliarian would try and nipit in the bud but counselling and social service.

• Punishment cannot preclude rehabilitation. Offenders need to be separated for Hardened criminals, accountability of offender or the seriousness of such offense.

• Difficulties when it comes to implementing this ideal with existing penal institutions.

• One important area of attention is capital punishment: Not against capital punishment, but rather what extreme circumstance demand the option (violence, sex, lawlessness).

  • There is no biblical position as it currently stands with the standards of our mosaic law (adultery).
  • Biblical historical exhibition of how treatment and authority and justice works within a society gradually.
  • Preaching the gospel may move a people to the underlying law of justice (law, prophet, gospel all work to restrain evil).
  • In extreme cases, it is morally permissible, but never morally acceptable.
  • The Lex talionis permits is to exist but in other ways it may be removed, and love is always an altnernative here.
  • In our system with practical inequities for minorities access eludes many, and so we must work to create a justice that is always treated and mixed with love.

Can We Legislate Morality?

• This has to due with the relation of law morality. This is about a continued issue. The OT spoke to the matters of moral law, and so sexual deviancy would be criminal with murder (covert could not be touched because proof of sin). Crimes and sinful acts were not distringused at all

• This was the law of Calvin's Geneva and Hawthorne's Puritan New England (theocratic). A similar was spirit inspired social reform crusades.

• A problem is if such enforcement occurs what moral standard do all people work for.

• In practical terms, how we we legally enforce private moral behavior. A case arose in the 1950 over the Walfinden Report in England. A review of criminal sanctions against homosxulaity porstitution, commission recommend decriminalization of homsexual behavior in private life.

• By dawning the line between private behevior and matters of public decency it drew on Stuart Bills view of that when an individual harms no, no legal consequence is made or required. . Indeed, intrusions on privacy privacy. Privacy would cause more and offense more than what allowing you to go on.

• The legal moralist wants laws for forbidding because it is immoral and paternalist does not think things need to go that far but thinks we harm ourselves.

• Positions of law based on view for harm and protection to the individuals themselves come back to Aristotles view, and and a different Aristotelian.

• Attitudes on gun legislation pornographic magasines drugs and gambling very among libertarians and paternalists

• Where might Christian ethic place us

• Preliminaries:

  • 2 morals require respect for equal rights of all and a desire for their good (Christian justice wants to respect human rights, even if they are wrong)
  • Duty is not autonomous not heteronomous. However it is a theonomous god given and a moral consensus in Israel.

• Questions regarding the Law:

  • What basis does the authority of life res. Bill adopts a utilitarian laws in pose by society. They do not limit except for consequences
  • From thomas aswunias human law is application to a eternal moral law to the social order and what is intended society.
  • On a New Testament basis a less legal basis and a not total emphasis should exist within the legal community.
  • Social justice for a government: the divine law: eernal; Natural law: earthly; Human: common to society.

• One Jurist argues, more than individual liberties is is at stake for some private morals can harm society. Moral basis must therefore be upheld: PRIVATE

• Private does not always mean its out of sight.

• And what is to mean harm and offence.

• Also the extreme amount of Caution if it is also to be legally limited.

• Proposal: There has to be justice for everything. Harm for morality must have rules protecting liberties.

With these there should be equitable moral supports and also should be able to avoid harmful law effects. Also must be able to make adjustments to prevent abuse.

We must all ask and make sure these concerns work to prevent a bad effect of laws. Legistlation however does not mean a all to all moral aspects so it not the most exgtreme.
These effects that support persuation or morals: Influence, expose, influence with solid chracter.
Kigdom of God now. And the law will apply to land.