In Defense of Human Rights

I am indebted to the careful and insightful reading that Macon Boczek has given to my book. Writing is a solitary occupation whereby one opens a conversation, without knowing if there will be an answering response.  It is therefore a particular joy, not only when the invitation has been taken up, but when the response demonstrates an understanding and appreciation of what has been attempted.  To have been understood is the highest affirmation.  For that I am deeply grateful, and would ordinarily not go beyond a note of acknowledgment. I am not inclined to substitute my judgment for that of a colleague whose perspective is to be respected rather than challenged.  Only the prompting of a generous editor, who has the equally worthy calling of prompting further conversation, would induce me to depart from my usual practice.  In addition, I am inclined to undertake a response only because the major critical issue raised in the review may be of wider interest.  I refer to the criticism of my identification of human rights as an “epiphany of the person.”

I recognize that this may be a hard saying given the notorious distortions currently imposed on the notion of rights, and I do not wish to minimize the challenges entailed in their application today.  Nor do I appeal simply to their practical utility as our contemporary moral language.  Rather I wish to call attention to the heightened sensitivity to what the person is that is contained within the concept of inalienable rights.  When a human being has lost everything, become so disfigured that he seems no longer human (Isaiah 52:14), then we need a language that evokes the inexhaustibility that cannot be exhausted.  The notions of nature and creation seem not quite adequate to preserving what is on the verge of disappearing.  Only a language that arises from the urgency of the situation can meet the threat that is imminent.  It must be a language derived not from theoretical reflection, not a philosophical anthropology, but from the imperative of an emergency response.  Human rights are the line of first response to dehumanization.  When a person is at the point of annihilation the first responders are the ones who rush to declare the inalienability of what cannot be alienated.  It is for this reason that invocation of human rights is the barrier raised by every dissident in human history.  The limit beyond which oppression may not go is the demarcation of what is at stake in the defense of the person.

As a language of practice, natural or human rights emerge without theoretical garb.  It is first and foremost a language of moral imperative that is prior to reflection upon it.  Indeed, the idea of natural rights arises outside of the philosophical theoretizations in the history of political thought.  Natural rights is primarily a language of self-defense.  It is when the self is put in jeopardy that the loss of what looms comes into focus.  But far from indicating a deficiency, that practical priority grounds its theoretical articulation more adequately.  It demonstrates that theory does not provide its own grounds, but draws them from the authoritative order that precedes it.   This is why politics is the preeminent realm for the disclosure of the person who must engage in the struggle to defend and preserve the core that is discovered only in the struggle itself.  It is no accident that the moral stature of those who place themselves on the line for human rights and dignity is thereby enlarged.  The dissidents of our own and earlier struggles emerge with the moral authority of that to which they have subordinated themselves.  A Mandela or a Havel or an Aung San Suu Kyi becomes a formidable political force because they have bound themselves to the indefeasible imperative of what is right.  It is in them that we see that what is right, the classical “right by nature,” becomes concrete in its unwavering defense of the defenseless, those whose human rights are nearest to deprivation.  In this they open a political space, a realm of truth and a common good, that is far from the individualist tone with which the assertion of rights is often associated.  The heroic defenders of rights are the ones who bring their mutuality and indivisibility into view.

It may be that most readers of John Locke overlook the communitarian quality of his account of the state of nature, preferring to assimilate him to the individualist paradigm with which he is conveniently identified.  But that does not mean that the language of individual rights does not contain a more capacious potential.  We may be required to broaden our reading horizon to include Immanuel Kant’s transcendental perspective, in which he explains that the assertion of my rights already commits me to the defense of an order of right that includes your right, as well as the rights of all others whom we encounter.  From there it is only a short step to the Hegelian admission that rights are an abstraction that gains concrete reality only within the political community that is constituted by their realization.  The mutuality of rights epitomizes the mutuality of persons that is the only viable form of human community.  Even the strangeness of some of Hegel’s formulations by which he refers to “the infinite in the finite” now begins to make sense, when we see that it is intended to capture the inexhaustibility of the person most evocatively expressed in the solicitous language of rights.  What cannot be said, and scarcely conveyed in the conventional accounts of a social contract within a state of nature, has finally been glimpsed.  Within our finite secular world, defined by the limits of instrumentalization, there is an undeniable affirmation of transcendence.  Politically we have said to each one: you matter more than the whole world.  There is no point at which we are prepared to sacrifice you for the greater good of an other or of all others.  It is to preserve you that the whole exists.  That of course does not mean that we will be able to preserve each one, no more than we can prevent the inevitability of death in each case.  We have only said that the catastrophe will not arise from our deliberate preference of another over you.  The rights of all are equal, indivisible and imprescriptible.

That primordial warrant derives from an irrevocability beyond our mere willing it.  We have merely acknowledged its authoritative hold on us and thereby disclosed the mutuality of trust between us.  It is that uncovering that underpins our confidence in the reliability of the principle of rights.  Even when partial invocations lead to the notorious distortions we encounter daily, we still know the apparent irreconcilabilities contain a resolution.  Conflicts that polarize our interactions, whether they arise from disagreements over gender, speech, or life, are not the final word in our engagements with one another.  Intractable disputes are not a form of civil war carried on by other means.  They are not incommensurable and irresolvable merely because they are posed as an antagonism.  Nor are they a new departure in the fractious nature of free societies.  We have only to recall the intensity of the American Civil War to recognize that it arose from the capacity of each side to assert opposing conceptions of rights.  The inviolability of individual liberty was countered by the equal inflexibility of collective self-determination.  The outbreak of hostilities is a powerful reminder that not all such clashes are amenable to a peaceable resolution.  But the longer historical view, voiced by Lincoln, grasped that the division would not ultimately be decided on the battlefield.  Even victory would not vindicate the victorious.  For that the inexorable logic of an order of rights would have to unfold into the full light of day.  No longer invoking the fragmentary absolutes in which the conflict had been couched, all would have to see that their own positions entailed a readiness to uphold that of their opponents.  The clash of rights that the Civil War represented could not be settled, Lincoln understood, until they were settled rightly.

His was a powerful faith in the coherence of an order of rights that remains despite the fractious attitudes that recurrently capture them.  The articulation of an order of mutual rights intended to avoid civic conflict may not always achieve its purpose.  We may have to repeatedly confront the challenge of re-evoking the resolution that has been lost.  But recovery of the consensus through the mutual acknowledgment of rights will not only be more difficult, but may not even be undertaken, in the absence of faith in its possibility.  Only a readiness to deepen the conviction of the indefeasibility of rights will sustain the effort to bring forth a vital reformulation.  This is why the greatest moral and political cleavages are often the occasion of the deepest evocations of the unity that transcends them.  We recall that the wars of religion in early modern Europe were precisely the setting that brought forth the principle of toleration as prior to all confessional allegiances.  Toleration, in the words of John Locke, had become the mark of the true church.  It is therefore no accident that the churches and the world religions have moved incrementally toward the same realization.  An order of liberty, the pledge of non-coercion in matters of faith, had taken precedence over the truth that each of them proclaimed.  Now that may seem like a betrayal of their pledge to carry the word of God into the whole world and, truth be said, it was not a position readily embraced by all.  Yet the logic of liberty working its inexorable way eventually proved irresistible.  What seemed to be a conflict between authority and liberty turned out on closer examination to be rooted in their interdependence.  Even God does not wish to impose his authority, for it is hardly authoritative if it has to be imposed.  God too wishes our free consent.  Submission, “islam,” implies it.

Contrary to the view that the Church’s embrace of the language of rights is a merely tactical adjustment to a world it can no longer shape, this marks a deepening of its understanding of the Christian message it is charged with imparting to that world.  Prioritizing the person over all that is said and done is consonant with the counsel of hating the sin and loving the sinner.  The inexhaustibility of divine mercy illuminates the inexhaustibility of the human being who stands in need of it.  Rather than seeing the elevation of rights discourse within the Christian setting as a novelty, we might regard it as reversion to a treasure long held within the Church but now restored to full public view.  The novelty of that endorsement turns out on closer examination to be a return to what is most original in the Good News.  Each person is held within the inviolability of the love of God.  It is only the adoption of an unaccustomed language that developed outside of the guidance of the Church that strikes us as novel.  The underlying truth, that each human being is an inexhaustibility in him- or herself, was already there from the beginning.  In acknowledging the moral advance marked by the modern idea of rights, the Church does not submit itself to the authority of the secular world.  It merely recognizes the secular truth as its own, and thereby provides an immeasurably greater assurance of its truth.  In accepting, like Justin Martyr, that every truth is included within its inheritance, the Church is well placed to bring the concept of inviolable human dignity to its fullest exposition.  By valuing rather than disdaining what the world has to offer, the Church exercises an authoritative leadership in a world ready to receive it.

Even when the fragmentary discourse of rights results in incoherent outcomes, the Church must not despair of pointing out the deeper coherence concealed within it.   This does not imply an ecclesiastic supervision of public authority.  It is simply the idea of a light to the nations.  Without organizing itself as a nation, the Church remains the beacon they so badly need.  In the midst of the confusion in which the deepest aspirations of the secular world are clouded, the conviction that each person is an infinity in him- or herself, the Church confidently affirms what is thereby only glimpsed.  The Church holds the eschatological secret that is the truth of the world and of every single person within it.  The transcendence of the person haltingly expressed in the inexhaustibility of rights is steadily beheld in the eschatological perspective.   Of course the Church too exists within the finitude of a world in which everything and everyone must be measured along an order of limits.  It does not escape the secular reality, although it is never contained by it.  Instead it meets that world in the moment of its deepest self-realization, for in acknowledging the infinitude of each person the secular has already moved beyond itself.  The eschatological index is not the exclusive prerogative of theology.  Politics too is marked by that same trajectory in affirming the inexhaustibility of rights even, and perhaps most of all, when it can no longer provide the reason why.  It is to the “post-secular age,” as Jürgen Habermas calls it, that the Church announces the good news of the beatitudes and thereby discloses the genealogy of human rights.  This is the point of a luminous essay by Hans Urs von Balthasar who establishes a continuity that makes perfect sense once it is laid forth.  Like the kingdom of God, the warrant of inviolability is offered to those most in need of it.

Once we place ourselves on the side of those who have lost all, the bereft, we discover the well-spring of mutual responsibility that is the core of the notion of rights.  The poor, the hungry, the sorrowing, and the despised provide the most convincing imperative for their protection.  It is because the Church puts itself on the side of the forsaken that it can affirm that forsakenness is not the truth about them.  The secular scale of value is overturned when we see that the loss of all value has become unconscionable.  The human being is most richly endowed when he or she stands before us in nothing more than their bare humanity.  To say that humanity is the grounds for reverencing rights and dignity is an abstraction, but the Church sees each of us as God does in our concrete humanity.  Mother Teresa did not care for the destitute and the dying because of a vague humanitarian impulse.  She did it because each person had become in that instant the whole world, making the universal concrete and immediate.  It is in the disfigurement of death that the inner truth of the person shines forth.  Disfigurement is not the final reality for it compels us to see that each one remains beyond it.  In losing all the person in the extremity of need attests the impossibility of reduction to their need.  The imprescriptibility of rights is simply another way of saying that, when all is lost, not all can be lost.  Human rights is ultimately a language of the boundary of experience and marks the horizon of transcendence as what cannot be eliminated.  When all else has been taken away from a human being that intangibility cannot be touched.  It is by our willingness to persevere through the chaotic distortions to which the language of human rights is susceptible, that we can attain the shining truth that underpins and lies beyond it.  In the end, it is by enduring the loss of all that death is, that we each inherit the all that lies beyond loss.  The flash of transcendence that is the reality of each person is affirmed both in the inviolability of human rights and in the Beatitudes.

Our review of the book is available here and Macon Boczek’s reply to this essay. An excerpt of Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being is here; also see Brendan Purcell’s review here and a conversation with David Walsh here.

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