Consider an example: Cathy loves fried eggs for breakfast, and her husband, Heathcliff, knows this; but though Heathcliff makes scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs. and omelettes, he never makes fried eggs for breakfast. Heathcliff and Cathy are married, there are duties on both sides, and marriage is, we say, a matter of mutual accommodation: yet, though he knows Cathy's desires and preferences perfectly, Heathcliff never makes fried eggs for breakfast.

Now I can imagine a third party saying that it is wrong of Heathcliff not to make fried eggs occasionally or that he ought to or even that, given that he is married, knows Cathy's desires, and finds making fried eggs no more trouble than making any other sort of eggs, he has a duty to make fried eggs occasionally; but does anyone really think we can move from saying these things to the view that Cathy has a moral right to fried eggs for breakfast? And if you think we can make this move, then how are you going to prevent the complete trivialization of the notion of a moral right. since there appears no end to the possible development of similar

What is wrong with torturing and killing someone is not the violation of some right of his, but the sheer agony and suffering he undergoes, the snuffing out of his hopes, desires, and wishes, and so on. What is wrong with depriving someone of a decent wage is not that it infringes some alleged right of his to this or that income but that it ruins his life and the lives of those who depend upon him. What is wrong with depriving someone of his liberty is that it thwarts his hopes and plans, circumscribes his future and what he can make of it, and so impoverishes his life, in short, there is no need to postulate moral rights as intermediaries between pain and agony, or thwarted hopes, desires, and plans, or ruined lives and the wrongness of what was done)

In order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed. This intelligence would have to be wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it through and through: its happiness would have to he independent of us, and yet ready to occupy itself with ours: and lastly, it would have, in the march of time, to look forward to a distant glory, and, working in one century, to be able to enjoy in the next. It would take gods to give men laws.

Even Will and Ariel Durant, who were avowed humanists, and who received the humanist pioneer award in 1976, said in The Story of Civilization: "Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes and fears." History, experience, and logic prove that is [sic] is not only difficult, as the Durants suggest, but impossible.

A similar pattern has prevailed for centuries in Hindu societies of India, Cambodia, Nepal, and in Pakistan: the social and political order reflect the divine order which the ruler embodies. The caste system, endorsed as the reflection of that order, fixed the ranks of society into the three upper classes, defined by their privileges, the fourth class, consisting of people who maintained minimal rights, and, below these, the "untouchables," who remained outside of society, and outside any system of rights. Buddhist society, which for centuries prevailed in China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Burma and Ceylon, similarly, revered the ruler as the embodiment of divine order. The laws of Buddhist society, which in its Indian form included the caste system, were religious laws which allowed no recourse for what we call "the individual."

One of the distinctions of the Judeo-Christian God is that not all things are the same to Him. That at first may sound rather trivial, but in reality it is one of the most profound things one can say about the Judeo-Christian God. He exists; He has a character; and not all things are the same to Him. Some things conform to His character, and some are opposed to His character. This is in clear distinction, for example, from the Hindu or the Buddhist concept of God. To these gods, everything is the same, so that there is no distinction between good and evil, cruelty and noncruelty, between tyranny and nontyranny. In such a setting, speaking of inalienable rights or human rights would be meaningless, because to the Hindu or Buddhist the final reality - their concept of God as the all, the everything - would give no voice, no word, as to why anything is bad; why anything is humanness or anything is lack of humanness. In such a setting, human rights are meaningless. The proof of this is very easy to ascertain. All one has to do is to look at the Hindu situation in India itself with its caste systems. There are no intrinsic human rights. I would say in passing one only has to walk the streets of Bombay to feel the implications of this in practice.'"

One year after he imposed a stem Islamic Code on punishments on this 70 per cent Muslim nation, President Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan says he remains convinced that surgically amputating hands and feet of habitual thieves is a good thing.

"Cutting off hands and feet is justifiable, because it has been prescribed by God in the Koran," said Mr. Fuad El-Amin, the Cornell University-trained chief judge of Khartum Emergency Court Two.

In short, the basis of human rights and their content rest, for Judaism, on the divine order of things. Because man, like the rest of nature, has also been created by God, this order has its counterpart in man's makeup, in his conscience and reason. Laws governing relations between man and man, if they accord with the divine law, stand to reason and satisfy our native sense of justice. "Reason." says Saadya Gaon, "prescribes that human beings should be forbidden to trespass upon one another's rights by any sort of aggression"- any sort. even that which claims to be justified by its noble goals. Commentators have explained that the Law proclaims "Justice, justice shall you follow!" (Deut. 16:20), repeating the word "justice" to convey that we must pursue justice in the means we employ as well as in the ends to which we aspire.

God is the Author of human rights, and of man's capacity to discern and defend them. In this discernment, we come to know the divine. We know God by exercising justice and righteousness, says the Mishnah (Avot 1), echoing such prophets as Jeremiah (22:16). When this knowledge is the guide to action, we are in the service of the divine. The sage joins the prophet in insisting that to do justice is more acceptable to God than to perform the sacrifices (Prov. 21:3). Above all, economic needs must be acknowledged and fulfilled. When a poor man stands at the door, says the Talmud. God stands at his right hand. If the poor are invited to share our own food, the dining table takes the place of the altar (Berachot 55a).

Human rights, like other moral ideals, make apparent the emptiness and even hypocrisy of what is often only a lip service. Action has a fundamental role in Jewish doctrine, to the point, indeed, that Judaism must he defined by characteristic actions rather than by a set of beliefs. It is a faith, not a creed, a faith which can find expression only in commitment to appropriate action. ''Both the palm tree and the cedar stand tall," said the Baal Shem Tov, "but only the palm bears fruit - be like the palm!" Theories and symbols also have their contribution to make. "Between the mind and the heart," said another Hassidic master, Simchah Bunam, "the distance is as great as that between heaven and earth." Then he added, "Yet the earth is nourished by rain from heaven."

Social benefits, unlike mere wishful thinking, are a sound reason for propounding religious doctrine. Whether they are a sufficient reason, I hesitate to say; but they afford no evidence of truth.

Even if research revealed the existence of such rules, their ubiquitousness would not by itself justify calling them Natural Law. They might, although wide-spread, be very bad rules. Surveys carried out at various points before the eighteenth century might well have revealed, for slavery, or an inferior legal status for women, were well-nigh universal institutions. Alternatively the widespread rule might be a very trivial or arbitrary one: conceivably one day all the world may have to drive on the right of the road, or obtain two witnesses for a valid will, but we would probably not call such rules Natural Law.

I find that it has been the opinion of the wisest men that Law is not a product of human thought, nor is it any enactment of peoples, but something eternal which rules the whole universe by its wisdom in command and prohibition. Thus they have been accustomed to say that Law is the primal and ultimate mind of God.

The true philosophy of the rights of the human person is . . . based upon the idea of natural law. The same natural law which lays down our most fundamental duties, and by virtue of which every law is binding, is the very law which assigns to us our fundamental rights. It is because we are enmeshed in the universal order, in the laws and regulations of the cosmos and of the immense family of created natures (and finally in the order of creative wisdom), and it is because we have at the same time the privilege of sharing in spiritual nature, that we possess rights vis-à-vis other men and all the assemblage of creatures.

It is enough to believe in the value of man and in a written law which is valid for all mankind at all times, that is, in the law which ancient thinkers called the natural law. This is not what the natural sciences understand by natural law, since the law they refer to raises us above nature. The law in question here is concerned with man and corresponds to man's nature. For human co-existence, it is enough to believe that such a natural law exists and that we can all more or less clearly discern it.

Historically, the natural order is always, or almost always, self-justifying, basing itself on situations of inequality, and therefore of injustice. It is not difficult to discern at the very foundation of naturalism a pattern of rich-poor, powerful-weak, even indeed, oppressor-oppressed. But the existence of this pattern serves precisely to prove that what is "natural" for the one who is rich and powerful is not at all natural for the one who is poor and weak, although the latter does not and cannot act except in the hope of reversing the situation - the hope of an opposite inequality.