Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights by Thomas D. Williams (review)

476 BOOK REVIEWS Who Is My Neighbor? Persona/ism and the Foundations ofHuman Rights. By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Pp. xvi+ 342. $69.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-1391-6. Thomas Williams has produced a very well-written and informative book, successfully bringing ethical personalism to bear upon the issue ofthe legitimacy of rights language. He argues against three formidable theorists-Alasdair Macintyre,Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, andErnestFortin-thatrights language is not only legitimate within traditional philosophical and theological ethics but that it brings to ethical discourse positive emphases not otherwise available. He then seeks to show how what he calls "Thomistic personalism"-Thomism "enriched" by means of "a more nuanced and robust vision of the constitutive elements of personhood: subjectivity, creativity, self-determination, freedom, and interpersonal activity" (128)-provides the best candidate for grounding rights. AlthoughWilliams's version ofpersonalism is much indebted to John Paul II, whom he cites often, he also displays a familiarity with a wide selection of secondary literature, including works in Italian, French, Spanish, and German. Against Maclntyre's position in AfterVirtue that belief in rights is "one with belief in witches and in unicorns," Williams puts forward a simple yet powerful argument, which in fact constitutes the core idea of the book: that if rights do not exist one cannot speak of things due in justice. "Suppose for a moment," he says, "that Macintyre is correct in saying that natural rights do not exist. This is equivalent to saying that no person can naturally claim to deserve anything from anyone else" (61). This is what having a right means: deserving something from someone else or from some group. Perhaps someone will answer that we can analyze a proposition like 'Joshua has the right to life' in the typical analytic fashion: 'there is an x such that xis a right to life and Joshua has x'. Since the first conjunct is false (there is no such thing as a right), the whole proposition can be false without implying anything about whether or not it is just to deprive Joshua of his life. But such an arguer would still have to deal with the common perception that this is all that Joshua's having a right to life means: that it is unjust to deprive him of his life. Saying that rights exist is no more problematic than saying that duties exist--or, for that matter, that there are laws. Although Williams's position in this respect is more than tenable, he fails adequately to address a central aspect of the anti-rights-language argument: the distinction between talk of rights (iura) and talk of right (ius). When Macintyre, for instance, argues that the term 'rights' did not exist before the late Middle Ages (57), he clearly means particular rights (whose existence he denies) as opposed to right (whose importance he affirms). In response (63-64), Williams makes some perfectly valid points about how vocabulary evolves, but he also castigates Macintyre for denying the existence of rights while praising "the classical virtue ofphronifsis, which [in Maclntyre'swords] 'characterizessomeone who knows what is due to him, who takes pride in claiming his due'" (63)-as if speaking of that which is due were already to speak of rights. But this is to BOOK REVIEWS 477 beg--or, at least, to ignore-Madntyre's question: whether rights exist, as opposed to right. It is a shame that Williams has either overlooked or chosen to ignore this issue, for an historical counterargument is and was available to him. Buried in a footnote on Williams's own page 273, for example, is a list of places in Thomas Aquinas (who wrote, of course, weH before the late Middle Ages) where he refers to individual rights. One might also cite Cicero's remark at De re publica 1.32: "Si enim pecunias aequari non placet, si ingenia omnium paria esse non possunt, iura certe paria debent esse eorum inter se qui sunt cives in eadem re publica." Or the counterargument could be more analytical and logical, saying that, ifright or justice demands a particular type of behavior with respect to any person...