Terms like sanctity remind me of animal rights. Who gave a dog a right? This word right gets very dangerous. We have women's rights, children's rights; it goes on forever. And then there's the right of a salamander and a frog's rights. It's carried to the absurd.
I'd like to give up saying rights or sanctity. Instead, say that humans have needs, and we should try, as a social species, to respond to human needs--like food or education or health--and that's the way we should work. To try and give it more meaning than it deserves in some quasi-mystical way is for Steven Spielberg or somebody like that. It's just plain aura, up in the sky--I mean, it's crap.1
James Watson
IF JAMES Watson, Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and one of the towering figures of twentieth-century science, should become a bit impatient with the injection of the word "rights" into the discourse of his particular domain of genetics and molecular biology, we might well excuse him. Watson is famous both for his temper and for his often unguarded and politically incorrect remarks; he is, after all, a hardheaded scientist and not a scribbler on political and social matters. Moreover, he is correct in his central observation about contemporary rights discourse: it is a lot of crap. His remark is reminiscent of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who famously commented that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen's assertion that rights were natural and imprescriptible was "nonsense upon stilts."
