Liberty and Nature

Abstract

IN their return to questions of value during the last twenty years, professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have frequently gone beyond utilitarianism in order to defend human rights, but they have seldom gone so far as to question the utilitarian rejection of nature and natural rights. Therefore the revival of rights talk and deontology, which has found its roots in Kantian philosophy, has in turn been challenged by a more or less conscious revival of Burkean and Hegelian philosophy, which has emphasized the historical and cultural rootedness of human selves, not the transhistorical nature of human beings. Current challenges to the deontological challenge to utilitarianism reject not its Kantian contrast between human morality and nature, but its Kantian universality. When reason rather than nature is the source of principles, principles begin to be too formal, and history comes to be looked upon as a supplier of more substantive principles. The Continental movement in the nineteenth century away from utilitarianism through Kantian deontology to Hegelian historicism seems to be repeating itself in the English-speaking world of the twentieth century. This later movement is more jejune, if not indeed more farcical, but its basic logic appears to be the same. To break out of this cycle, one needs to return to a pre-Kantian and pre-utilitarian view of human rights as natural rights, but neither the deontologists nor their critics want to bear the burden of maintaining that human rights are natural. It seems doubtful that liberalism can relieve itself of that burden or, rather, dispense with that support without collapsing into conservatism or advancing into illiberal historicism. Liberals need to appeal to nature in order to sustain their arguments for human individuality, political equality and constitutionalism, in the face of historicist rejections of this liberal theory and practice. It is important for liberals to be able to see humans as part of the natural world, because leading liberal principles are propositions about the natural human species. Without a natural basis, liberalism can persist only as a relatively weak residue, a kind of conservatism that just happens to conserve liberal traditions, without fully understanding them and without being able fully to defend them. The reliance by conservatives on the inertia of liberal practices inherited from the past (neglecting their foundation in theories that did appeal to nature), however adequate such a strategy was when undertaken by David Hume,