Who is my neighbor?: personalism and the foundations of human rights

6. The Accusation of Innovation

6. THE ACCUSATION OF INNOVATION A third argument against rights comes from Ernest L. Fortin (– ), a Straussian who for years taught Catholic theology and political theory at Boston College, where he also codirected the Institute for the Study of Politics and Religion. As a theologian and political philosopher, Fortin saw “a number of tensions inherent in the Church’s current position on social matters,” many of which are linked directly with the Church’s endorsement of human rights.1 As a classicist, Fortin was particularly concerned by the innovation of rights theory vis-à-vis traditional ethical theory. In his many essays on the topic, he argues that the Church’s traditional social teaching, which “presented itself as first and foremost a doctrine of duties and hence of virtue or dedication to the common good,” has assimilated ideas issuing from the natural rights doctrine developed by Thomas Hobbes and his successors in which rights, rather than duties, are “paramount”—without, however , discarding the language of virtue and duty. As a result of this ethical hodgepodge, Fortin suggests, the Church’s social teaching combines traditional Christian ideas with “ideas that were once and may still be fundamentally antithetical to it” and consequently “suffers from a latent bifocalism that puts it at odds with itself and thereby weakens it to a considerable extent.”2 Though in the end Fortin does not recommend that the bishops completely abandon their defense of rights, especially since “the pseudomorphic collapse of Neo-Thomism in the wake of Vatican II has left them without any alternative on which to fall back,” he does contend that the                    . Ernest L. Fortin, “The Trouble with Catholic Social Thought,” in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, . . Ibid., .  adoption of rights language has given rise to problems without any clear solution. “[T]he Church is having to pay a price for espousing the principles of the Enlightenment along with their hidden premise, the ideology of progress.”3 Fortin brings into play a number of interconnected critical arguments of greater or lesser importance. I have attempted to select the most relevant among them and have grouped them together loosely under three headings: () the substitution of rights for duty and virtue as the axis of moral theory; () the self-centered mentality inherent in this substitution ; and () the prudential argument against the use of rights language.  Rights Have Replaced Duty and Virtue This first argument comprises two subthemes. In the first place, Fortin asserts, the rise of Liberalism occasioned a shift in the popular understanding of morality. Where morality used to be a question of duty and virtue, under Liberalism it became a question of individual rights. Natural rights likewise replaced natural law. Second, the Liberal theory of natural rights rested on a new understanding of the human person. Rights, which arose as part of a matrix of ideas, embody an atomistic anthropology that is incompatible with the classical “premodern” understanding of man as naturally social and political. After Hobbes and Locke, man is seen as a solitary individual with no clear good to which he tends. Like O’Donovan, Fortin discerns a major shift in emphasis from the classical understanding of justice to a newer understanding of justice that has its origins in the Enlightenment. Rights—understood as inhering in each human being by reason of the fact that he is a human being—represent an innovation in moral thought. “Nowhere in the older tradition,” writes Fortin, “does one run across anything like a theory of natural rights.”4 This is true both of the classical tradition and Christian theology where, until very recently, “rights” were mentioned “only sparingly.” Even the Bible, “which shares to some degree the perspective of classical philosophy on this point, does not .l.l. promulgate a Bill or Rights, of which it                     . Ibid., , . . Ernest L. Fortin, “Human Rights and the Common Good,” in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, . knows nothing; instead, it issues a set of commandments.”5 The Enlightenment theory of rights not only brought new elements into the moral equation, therefore; it fundamentally changed the rules by which human actions are to be evaluated. Moreover, natural rights were not simply integrated into the existing natural law theory, they replaced it. “The passage from natural law to natural rights and later (once ‘nature’ had fallen into disrepute) to ‘human ’ rights represents a major shift, indeed, the paradigm shift in our understanding of justice...