Robert George, “Natural Law and Civil Rights”
Introduction for the Inquiry textbook prepared by Kang Na, associate professor of Religion
Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, where
he is also as the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A
member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he also served as a presidential appointee to the
United States Commission on Civil Rights. He was Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the
United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the author of In Defense
of Natural Law, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and The Clash of
Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, from which this chapter is taken.1
The function of this reading is to pose fundamental questions and propose challenges
regarding what we claim to be true and good. In a nutshell, it provides a critical—i.e.,
analytical—complement to many, if not all, of the other readings in this volume, especially
readings that deal with cultural relativism, e.g., James Rachels’s “The Challenge of Cultural
Relativism,” which itself is a challenging, critical look at our experiences of a multicultural
world. George requires us to examine what it is we believe and why, and to imagine how we
would defend our particular positions on a variety of important matters, especially in the realms
of law, morality, and public life.
The first alternative George explores regarding law and rights is the historicist and
conventionalist view, according to which “moral rights … exist only in the sense that certain
people, or peoples, happen to believe—as a contingent matter of fact, that is, subjectively—that
rights exist and are willing to honor them” (italics added). In contrast is George’s own position
of natural law and natural rights, according to which “law can be designed to embody, or can
validly be criticized for failing to embody, objective or true principles of justice” (italics added).
We are thus led to ask a crucial question that can be critically applied in a variety of disciplines
among the liberal arts, not just in politics or philosophy: do rights exist objectively (or naturally),
i.e., independent of actual laws that embody or disregard them, or do they exist only subjectively
(or artificially), i.e., dependent on the powerful or the majority who posit and enforce them?
Although the concept of natural law may be unfamiliar to many, the words rights, human
rights, and civil rights are familiar to most Americans and Europeans—so much so that one
hardly finds it necessary to reflect on their meaning and their implications for not only law but
also a wide range of other realms of human life. But as the so-called global village continually
shrinks, we come into closer and more frequent contact with people for whom the language and
concept of human rights is relatively new, especially in parts of the world where political
oppression or even tyranny still exists.
Most recently, before and during the 2008 Olympics, China has come under scrutiny for its
continuing disregard for human rights. In the light of such recent events and controversies
surrounding them, it behooves us to ask what it is that enables us, or gives us the right, to charge
nations or organizations of violating human rights. Where does the notion of human rights and
civil rights come from? One of the fundamental questions, which Martin Luther King Jr. asks in
his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (elsewhere in this reader) is whether there are in fact
such things as rights that human beings should strive for. That is to ask, are rights something that
exists as a universal good for all times, places, and people? Or are rights something that some
people have and others do not, in only some places and at some times, but certainly never as a
fixed ideal independent of particular contexts? Depending on how we answer such questions, we
1
Biographical information taken from www.princeton.edu/politics/people/bios/index.xml?netid=rgeorge.
George intro — 2/2
can consider what would make laws just or unjust. Whether or not we agree with George’s
natural law argument, our critical thinking will benefit from reading his argument for natural law
in conjunction with what Martin Luther King Jr. assumed and articulated in his own life and
writings. This chapter from George’s book poses questions that are at the foundations of
American civic life, and indeed of all human life and societies.