James Franklin in his book, The Worth of Persons: The Foundation of Ethics (Encounter Books), discusses, among other things, the question of why people have rights. He attempts to produce a secular humanist account of ethics based upon the idea of the worth of persons. So, why are people of worth or value, while stones, say are not, to use his example? But, that is setting up the debate, and he could have made it more challenging to using an example other than stones, such as ecosystem, which Deep Ecologists see as more valuable than individuals. Thus, in the hypothetical, Franklin as a secular ethicist should have used this example, more relevant to the times. And, from this perspective it is by no means proven that the secular foundation of morality is based upon the worth of people, if non-humans have intrinsic worth. He would have to show, in a non-question-begging way, that non-human entities have only instrumental value, which is not easy, in his terms. Why for example, assume that rationality is the key, when if to use his style of thought experiments, if rationality suddenly magically disappeared, people would still presumably have value?

But, this is an argument against secular morality per se, as I see it. By contrast, Christian morality founds the worth of persons, and anything, including the planet (which when created by God, as “good” Genesis 1:4; 10; 12; 18; 21; 25). God ends the potential infinite regress of justification that s. ecular morality produces, just as the idea of God as a “first cause,” serves as one Christian explanation of th universe.

Franklin dismisses the argument that God is the foundation of morality, arguing that the hypothesis that if god did not exist, people would still be the same, so God makes no difference. But, that clearly begs the question in this debate. It makes all the difference in the world.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/04/why-do-humans-have-rights/

“The Use and Abuse of Rights

What is it about humans that means they have rights? We have a right to life because our lives are valuable, not vice versa. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “The U.N. declarations are all dignity-based documents. All of them affirm or assume that human rights accrue to human beings on account of the dignity that human beings possess, the worth, the excellence, the estimability.” He adds that that must lead to a search for what it is about humans that gives them that worth or dignity. 

The Helsinki Accords themselves say that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” The rights of the Universal Declaration, such as the right to education, refer to the human beings for whom those goods are necessary. Humans have a right to education because they have the rationality to be educated, while animals don’t. That is a fact about humans, necessary and sufficient to support the right to be educated. Simply being human is sufficient and necessary to possess a right to life, because the worth of humans is what places a moral barrier in the way of any attempt to destroy human life. If there were no such thing as the worth or dignity of humans, there would be no purchase for the concept of rights; there would be nothing about humans in virtue of which they would deserve rights.

It is true that the prevalence of rights talk has led to certain justified complaints about the overuse of the notion. The language of rights has been subject to “strong inflationary pressures on the term that have brought about its debasement,” and thus often co-opted for political purposes so as to support a great range of implausible claimed entitlements. Books such as Aaron Rhodes’ The Debasement of Human Rights and Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse detail the extent to which rights talk has been expanded and misused. Those hijackings are a tribute to the inherent political power of the idea of rights. They are not good reasons for doubting the whole idea of rights.

Those misuses of rights talk highlight what is correct about the central notion of rights. What is valuable about rights talk is exactly that it focuses on the “recipient-dimension, the patient-dimension” of action, unlike, for example, obligation talk or guilt talk or virtue talk. “The reason the language of rights has proved so powerful in social protest movements is that it brings the victims and their moral condition into the light of day.” It sees actions or potential actions from the point of view of the person being acted on. Does the worth of that person, their inviolable dignity, place any limit on the proposed action? That is the first question to be asked, before any inquiry as to the place of the action in the moral code, or in the life of virtue or flourishing of the actor.

It is the same with the other general concepts prevalent in ethics, such as duties, rules, obligations, virtue, values, autonomy, liberty and the ethics of care. Just as with rights, a close examination shows that they make no sense without an underlying commitment to the worth of persons.

A Fine Sonata

If humans have an inherent worth or dignity, it should be possible to say what it is about them that gives them that worth. What is the difference between humans and stones that causes what happens to humans to be morally significant and what happens to stones not (or very little)?

It is possible to argue that worth is externally conferred, either by society or by God. That is not a likely theory as the absence of society or God would not seem to make any essential difference to what humans are. Perhaps it is essential to humans that they are social and religious beings, but that itself is what they are inherently like and contributes to their worth, not any external conferring.

It is also possible to argue that worth is not due to any inherent properties at all but is just a “commitment” of ours. There is widespread in the ethics world a “metaphysics-phobia,” shared by thinkers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, that avoids looking at the nature of humans as a source of ethics. But surely, as Wolterstorff puts it, “Worth or excellence or dignity is not something that just settles down here and there willy-nilly. An entity has worth on account of some property it has, or some capacity it can exercise, or some activity it has performed or is performing, or some relationship in which it stands. Its worth supervenes on its properties (capacities, activities etc.) or standing in certain relationships.” As he argues, “If the piano sonata that you composed is a fine sonata, then there’s something about your composition that makes it fine. We may find it difficult if not impossible to put into words what that is; but it makes no sense to say that it’s a fine sonata but that there’s nothing about it that makes it fine. The project of accounting for the worth of something is the project of identifying that about the thing on which its worth supervenes, the project of identifying that feature of the thing by virtue of which it has its particular worth.” There must be some story to tell. If there isn’t, there’s no account of what we recognize, or how we recognize it, or why we should react to what has worth differently from how we react to what doesn’t.

So if humans have worth-conferring properties, what are those properties?

A classic answer to the question “What gives humans worth?” is “rationality.” “Man’s excellence,” says Saint Augustine, “consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul which raises him above the beasts of the field.”

It is a good answer, but a partial one. One reason why this answer is prima facie attractive is that it is the most obvious difference between ourselves and animals. The worth of animals, on the face of it, is less than ours, and that appears due to their lack of a full version of rationality since they resemble us closely in so many other respects. Conversely, too, we value especially those animals like cats which are highly cognitive and inquisitive, and so have a trace of some kind of rationality. That is a large part of what makes them attractive as companion animals. If animals really did have the rationality attributed to them in anthropomorphic animal tales, we would not eat them, and we would treat them as real colleagues.

Rationality and the Good Will

Logical, ethical, and aesthetic matters are all realities to be recognized, and the unified cognitive ability, the rationality, to do so is essential to being human. That is central to and distinctive of humanity (but possibly shared by gods). We may conclude that a purely intellectual rationality is an essential part of what gives humans worth, even if not the whole story.

But the human person restricted to its rationality is autistic and not sufficient in itself to be the whole basis of the worth of persons. The first prominent thing it leaves out is the core of truth in Kant’s dictum that the only thing good unqualifiedly is the good will. A good will is not “rationality.” It is a commitment. And as literary and psychiatric people have said at length, an exclusive focus on rationality omits the crucial emotional aspects of humanity. Understanding reasons and motivations for action and choosing to act on them are central to “the distinctive endowment of a human being” that John Stuart Mill sought.

One extra thing needed is a unity of the self, where a person sees itself as a coherent unity that is “going somewhere” in life and makes rational decisions to get there. The mental contents of a person (at a time) have a unity that the mental contents of ten people in a room do not have. That unity is necessary for agency; for example, a person’s conflicting motives or reasons for a course of action are not separate thoughts that are balanced like weights, but are brought together and compared in some unified faculty. Agency also needs memory and imagination of the future—of my past and my future. It only makes sense for me to consider an action if its effect in the future bears somehow on my larger plans. There must be some point to the action and its effects in the light of my wish for survival, or eating, or tenure, or love for some others, or some other project; those projects themselves only making sense in a life narrative that is to some degree coherent. I must indeed perceive myself as having some degree of worth; otherwise action in pursuit of my plans is pointless (unless I have to an extreme degree a defect of self-perception such as self-loathing or servility). 

A solid sense of “personal identity” is needed for moral concerns, such as a feeling for the boundary of the “I” to whom I hope to prevent harm, concern for how I will get through tomorrow, or shame for or pride in what I did earlier. It is because that person will be or was me, and I know that, that I can have such moral concern.

As literary people (more than philosophers) have emphasized, emotions are also crucial to being human. it is impossible to be human without an adequate development of the emotions. Even to devote oneself to an activity that is wholly reason, like pure mathematics, one needs a passion for doing the hard work.

Love Thy Neighbor

One emotion (if that is the right word) is crucial: love. An obvious single serious lack in humanity is an inability to (or lack of wish to) love. If extreme, that is something that truly goes to the heart of what it means to be human. Some defect in that area is no doubt near-universal, but a serious defect means something missing from the core of humanity.

One indication of its importance is the credibility of Jesus’ “Euclidean” claim, that all the requirements of the law follow (logically) from just two axioms: Love God, and Love thy neighbor. Loving one’s neighbor implies both wanting his good and taking action to achieve it, which rules out causing harm and commands benevolence. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is a favorite of both believers and non-believers because it goes directly to the point of moral action—the traveler injured on the road has no claims on the passers-by except being a human in need. Moral obligation arises from the worth of the person in need, combined (not with any social or legal ties) but solely on the Samaritan’s ability to do something about the need.

The human person is very complex, and that is essential to his worth. His rationality, his mental unity (and diversity), his ability to act freely for reasons, his individuality, and possibly his being embodied, are all part of what sets humanity off from the rest of creation. It is what makes a human death a tragedy, and would make the extinction of the human race a universal catastrophe. The view found in some “deep ecology” circles that the human race is a pest and its extinction would be a net benefit to the universe is profoundly disturbing.

The point of view taken in The Worth of Persons is to look at the worth of humans (and other parts of the universe), in abstraction from questions of right and wrong action. It prioritizes axiology (the theory of what is inherently valuable) over casuistry (the theory of which actions are right and wrong). But of course the fact that humans have worth (which itself has nothing to do with action) does have consequences for action. The worth of persons is the foundation of ethics in the sense that it is possible to derive truths about what ought to be done from the worth of persons.

In the simplest case, the fact that persons have worth means that their destruction is a bad thing in itself (as it removes something good from the universe). Hence it is wrong. “Thou shalt not kill.”

It is possible that killing might in some circumstance prevent more killing, as in the classic case of self-defense. In that case, a forced choice between killing an assailant and allowing oneself to be killed pits worth against worth. Calling on the worth of persons does not resolve the dilemma. It explains why there is a dilemma in the first place. That is what foundations of ethics are for. Their purpose is not to lay down exceptionless moral rules or to resolve ethical dilemmas. Their purpose is to explain the purpose of rules in general and to explain the moral weight on both sides of dilemmas.

The leading ideas of the theory of ethics developed in The Worth of Persons are:

• Ethics in the sense of what to do follows from something much more basic, the worth of persons.
• The foundations of ethics should not be approached with a phobia about metaphysics; beings that matter ethically, like humans, are inherently different from ones that don’t, like stones. It is possible to say what the difference lies in.
• The point of ethical foundations is not to produce principles to decide difficult questions of what to do, but to explain why difficulties arise.
• Essential to ethics is the Aristotelian notion of a human perfection or excellence.
• Humans are in contact with and subject to an ethical realm in the same way they are in contact with and subject to a realm of logic and evidence. The evidence in a court of law is strong or not and the jury’s role is to evaluate which. Ethics is objective in the same sense.
• The worth of persons is doubtfully compatible with a purely materialist view of the universe, but what alternative cosmology is sufficient is not easy to say.

Each of these is a minority position in contemporary ethical theory. The combination is unique.”