A
lot of discussion about economic and social justice brings up such esoteric
concepts as “rights,” “subsidiarity,” and “charity.” The problem is that a lot of people who use
the terms don’t really seem to be using the classic definitions of these
concepts, but appear to be tailoring them to fit their current wants and needs.
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| The "Mortall God" of the State. |
Hence
this posting. We thought we’d run over a
few concepts to see how they fit into a discussion of the Just Third Way. These (as you might have guessed from the
title of this posting) are the source of rights (God or the State), the meaning
of “subsidiarity,” and the role of charity.
Let’s
first look at rights and where they come from.
Given that everything except the uncreated Creator must be
created by something (there is no effect without a cause except the First Cause),
rights must come from somewhere. This
“somewhere” can only be from the creator of that which has rights. If a human being has rights, those rights
came from whatever or whoever created that human being. If a human creation such as the abstraction
of the collective or the State has rights, those rights came from human beings.
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| The Creation Connection: the Ultimate Source of Rights |
(There’s a long, complicated argument about why a Perfect
and Omniscient Being would be less than Perfect and Omniscient if He, She, or
It dealt directly with any kind of abstraction, such as the collective or the
State, but we don’t need to go into it, except to note that “abstraction” or generalizing
from the data is an intellectual crutch that imperfect humanity needs because
we cannot grasp truth the same way or to the same degree as an Omniscient and
Perfect Being. And, since “He, She, or
It” sounds kind of stupid as well as faintly insulting, we’ll just say “God”
and “He” in the rest of this posting for convenience.)
So, what is the source of rights? God or the State? Well . . . God, but not in the way most
people seem to think.
Yes, rights come from God.
Everything does. That does not
mean, however, that whatever has rights got them directly from God. No, God built rights into human nature;
having rights is hard-wired into humanity, it’s why a human being is
automatically a human person — having rights as well as the analogously complete
capacity to acquire and develop virtue are what defines what it means to be
human.
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| Analogy of Being, next week (maybe). Today: rights. |
(Sorry about that.
There’s another long, complicated argument about “the analogously
complete capacity to acquire and develop virtue” that we won’t get into. We’ll just take it for granted today that all
men — meaning every human being — are created equal and are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty,
property, and the capacity to acquire and develop virtue, that is, “pursue
happiness.”)
To clarify, rights are not a gift from God after creation, but a part of the gift of
existence itself — the “blueprint” of humanity. With respect to
both religious and civil society, then, rights are inalienable, inherent in the
human person.
The upshot is that not even God can take rights away. By doing so, He would be contradicting
Himself, thereby becoming a perfect Being who is imperfect, which is utter
nonsense. “Becoming” is a meaningless
word in reference to a Perfect and Omniscient Being, anyway — unchanging
perfection cannot change or it wouldn’t be perfection, now, would it?
Given that the only place the State or any other organized
political entity can get rights is the people who create the State, it is
contradictory to maintain that the State grants rights to people. No, the people grant rights to the State.
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| "We, the People," not, "I, the State." |
Nor is it correct to say that God grants rights to the State
or to the collective. These are human
creations, abstractions, not creations of God, and they have no rights until
and unless actual human beings grant them those rights.
As far as the State is concerned, then, every human being
has rights by nature itself, mere existence, and nothing — absolutely nothing —
can take away rights that are part of human nature (defining the exercise of
rights is a different thing, as we’ve said a few gazillion times on this blog). The State’s job is to protect those rights,
not decide who has them, or (re)define them out of existence.
Tomorrow we’ll look at subsidiarity.