Rights

As currently discussed, rights are a product of the Enlightenment. The Scriptures speak so little about rights that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that “rights” are not a scriptural concept. What the Scriptures speak of are duties and justice: “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Justice, as one of the cardinal virtues, relates to giving and is due to others and to God. Rights, as they are most frequently spoken of today, are things viewed as owed to us. The scriptural uses of rights are generally confined to matters that relate to property and inheritance (Deut. 21:16; 1 Chron. 5:1-2).

Rights in Tradition

It is impossible to say definitely where the first writings on rights come from. The Greek and Roman writers of the fourth and fifth centuries b.c. emphasized the importance of conscience and stated that there was no duty to obey unjust laws. The idea of human rights developed slowly and did not become defined the way we know them now until much later.

In 1215 King John of England signed the Magna Carta. This document set out principles such as the freedom of the church and no imprisonment “except by lawful judgment.” Such matters were later incorporated into international documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948). Now a host of local laws (human rights legislation and constitutional documents such as the American Bill of Rights or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) set out the rights we are familiar with today (rights to security of the person, freedom, of expression, freedom of religion and of the press, equality, etc.). Yet rights must be kept clear over time. While these rights constitute the core of what may be termed “traditional” rights, there are still disagreements about what should be considered rights. The Canadian Charter does not protect the “right to property” that is recognized in many other countries and has deleted references to the “rights of the family” found in the early Canadian Bill of Rights. There have also been a host of international legal documents that deal with human rights. Recent U.N. conferences in Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995) show that the contents of United Nations documents will be hotly contested on the basis of ideological positions that may be in stark variance from earlier conceptions of “rights” and the human person.

As John Hittinger has written (citing Stanley Hauerwas):

The rights discourse carries with it many assumptions about human nature and the moral order that run contrary to the very things to be protected; assumptions involving unbounded freedom or an individualist conception of political order. (Hittenger, p. 247)

A catalog of rights is set out at the end of the Jacques Maritain book and in Paul Marshall’s article. What can be said of modern conceptions of rights is that they focus on liberty without any belief in mastery of the self or moral responsibility. Without a working understanding of virtue (containing both of these missing aspects of the person), it is questionable whether there can be any valid understanding of “rights” at all: we seem to be cast adrift in the featureless sea of “values.”

Rights in Everyday Life

An important set of observations has been made surrounding rights and contemporary society by the English writer Lesslie Newbigin. He notes that there are two main difficulties with the concept of rights. First, when society has accepted no public doctrine about the purpose for which all things and all persons exist, there is no basis for adjudicating between needs and wants. Disputes about wants and needs are inevitable but without consensus as to purpose—unresolvable except by power.

Second, both parties rely on the concept of the rights of the individual. Though set out in legislation, rights are void of meaning unless there are parties who acknowledge the responsibility to meet the claim of right. Since there is no corresponding public doctrine about human responsibility, the multiple and contrary claims to right can only destroy society.

“Rights” can be viewed in a similar way to “values” or “virtues.” The lack of articulated purposes in relation to techniques in contemporary society means that we have the greatest difficulty determining how competing rights claims are to be adjudicated or whether a particular right exists in a certain situation (i.e. whether there is a “right” to homosexual marriages or to euthanasia). It can be seen that without a sense of the substantive principles as well as processes that must be the basis of a civilized order, there can be no convincing way to determine the content and application of rights in a particular case.

Skepticism about the basis of rights has led to frequent debates between those calling themselves communitarians and various types of liberals. Communitarians see liberals as fragmenting the state and furthering alienation. Generally, they wish to affirm that people have obligations in community as well as rights. The theoretical grounding of both communitarian and current liberal positions do not suggest that the debates about the current meaning of rights will (or can) be settled.

» See also: Community

» See also: Freedom

» See also: Individual

» See also: Ownership, Private

» See also: Society

» See also: Values

» See also: Virtues

References and Resources

M. A. Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1993); M. A. Glendon and D. Blankenhorn, eds., Seedbeds of Virtue (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1995); J. P. Lapp and J. P. Hittinger, “Rights,” in In Search of a National Morality, ed. W. B. Ball (Grand Rapids: Baker; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992); A. McIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1984); P. Marshall, “Rights, Human,” in The New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, ed. D. Atkinson, D. Field, A. Holmes, O. Donovan (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995) 747-50; L. Newbigin, Truth to Tell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); C. Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

—Iain T. Benson