Wolterstorff on Rights Grounded in Respect of Worth 3.2.2

Since accounting for the image of God as a set of capabilities fails to ground the concept of human rights, Wolterstorff next suggests tying the image of God to human nature. He notes that many deny that anything – much less human beings – has a nature, at least they do so formally. But everyone, he suspects (and I agree) practices a belief in human nature. If not, why do we all believe that some human beings malfunction? How would know that the profoundly mentally handicapped, those in a persistent vegetative state, and those suffering late-term dementia are not fully normal if we didn’t believe that they lacked something? To conclude that a person is seriously malformed or profoundly malfunctioning requires a measure and that measure is human nature. “The idea of an organism malfunctioning on account of some malformation requires the idea of that organism having a nature.” (350) Indeed.

Biblical writers were certainly aware that severely malfunctioning human beings existed and could not exercise dominion. Yet they did not conclude that such were not images of God. For this nature-resemblance rejiggering of the image of God to account for human rights, it must be the case that to bear the image of God entails only that one has a nature such that “the mature and properly formed possessors” thereof have the capacity to exercise dominion.

But wait, shout Kant, Dworkin, and Gewirth. Cut us the same slack. Why can’t we be reinterpreted to be claiming only that (i) properly functioning human beings have the capacity for rational agency and (ii) respect (and thus rights) is due to the malfunctioning among us because they too share a human nature that, when properly functioning, can exercise rational agency? In other words, why can’t a secularized version of human nature suffice to ground rights?

In brief, says Wolterstorff, while we can agree that rational agency is surely an admirable capacity for which respect is properly due, why should we respect someone who cannot exercise that capacity just because other members of the species are able to do so? A widespread but not universal capacity to engage in rational conduct doesn’t do those who can’t any good. In short, human nature standing alone is too thin a gruel on which to nourish a culture of human rights.