THE MORAL FOUNDATION OF AMERICA

The idea that everyone has intrinsic rights to life and liberty was a radical break with millennia of human history. It's worth preserving.

- By ELAINE PAGELS

For thousands of years, the view that only rulers conferred rights or privileges on everyone else was taken for granted in traditional societies around the world. In Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, only those whom rulers regarded as their peers had value, or what the Romans called dignitas. Hindu societies enshrined the ruler as one who embodies the divine order of the gods, and established a hierarchical rank for everyone else. The caste system even defined some people as “outcaste,” with no right to move freely and little recourse from lifelong servitude.

The anonymous Babylonian scribes who wrote the legal code of Hammurabi some 4,000 years ago seem to have regarded human value as a quality that the king could grant to certain people and deny to others. This code assigned privileges, and what we call “rights,” according to a strictly hierarchical view of social power.

The archaeologists who discovered Hammurabi’s code must have been surprised, at first, to see that it offered certain protections from mutilation, torture, and execution. But it became clear that these were dependent on one’s social rank. The king—who authorized the code—assigned punishments based on the social status of the offender and the victim.

Ancient kings and emperors enforced their power through terror and violence. They claimed to derive their own prerogatives from the gods—from Marduk, in Babylonia; Ra, in Egypt; Jupiter, in Rome. Ancient philosophers held similar views. More than 2,000 years ago, when Plato wrote his famous treatise on “The Laws,” he declared that human laws merely articulate the will of the gods, and extend privileges to people like himself, members of the aristocratic class in Athens.