The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights

4. The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights

4 The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights “As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.” Martin Luther King Jr.1 “The culture of selfishness and individualism that often prevails in our society is not what builds up and leads to a more habitable world: it is the culture of solidarity that does so, seeing others not as rivals or statistics, but brothers and sisters.” Pope Francis, Address to the Community of Varginha2 Grounding Both Human Rights and Solidarity in the Human Person Human dignity, as an ontological characteristic of the human person, includes relationality. Not only are human persons social by nature, but human dignity itself also includes relationality and participation. Through the previous chapters, examining in detail communal philosophical and theological 1. Martin Luther King Jr., Measure of a Man (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 45–46. 2. Francis, “Address of Pope Francis,” visit to the community of Varginha (Manguinhos), Brazil, July 25, 2013, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/speeches/2013/july/documents/papafrancesco_20130725_gmg -comunita-varginha_en.html. 101 anthropologies, I have argued for human rights and solidarity as mutually necessary for any authentic human existence. Human dignity is characterized by equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. The goal of this section is to pull together the anthropological conclusions as the foundation for the assertion that human dignity mandates both human rights and solidarity. In particular, through the social matrix underpinning freedom, rationality, and the modern moral order, human dignity emerges as the value of equal human persons, but it cannot be grounded in a formal definition of freedom alone. Theologically, the imago dei understood as imago trinitatis offers a “unity across difference” and emphasizes the centrality of equality, mutuality, and reciprocity as the criteria by which to evaluate human relationships. Through the theological reflection on Trinity and covenant, Christian ethics offers a conception of human dignity that firmly binds together the individual and community, human rights, and solidarity. Finally, Amartya Sen’s social analysis of development provides analytical support for the necessity of social and economic conditions for the realization of human rights. All of this provides, then, the ground for the relationship between the virtue of solidarity and the praxis of human rights within Catholic social teaching. PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES As the human rights tradition developed, Immanuel Kant appears as a major reference point concerning freedom and human dignity. Both Pope John Paul II and Sen are influenced by Kant, and he represents a major figure in the narrative of modernity addressed by Charles Taylor. Dignity for Kant is grounded in the human capacity for self-legislation; the capacity for rational agency is the foundation of the kingdom of ends and human dignity.3 As Taylor points out, this makes freedom purely formal or procedural, based on our ability to be a law unto ourselves and the universalizability thereof. John Paul II attempts to synthesize the categorical imperative with the gospel, finding the more contemporary language and universality appealing. In particular, the insight that all human persons are ends in themselves and can never be used as merely a means to an end resonates well with the arguments of Catholic social teaching. In this formal focus on the act, John Paul II uses Kant to highlight that we must recognize that other human persons, as agents, have their own ends—that human persons are capable of being both subject and object simultaneously. In his philosophical use of Kant, John Paul II adapts 3. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993). 102 | The Vision of Catholic Social Thought Kant in connection with his Thomistic personalism, phenomenology, and theological commitment to the Scripture. Still, for reasons highlighted earlier, Kant presents a number of philosophical problems for understanding the relationality of the person. While the insight of the categorical imperative is crucial for the development of...