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5. The Accusation of Inseparability
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5. THE ACCUSATION OF INSEPARABI LITY A second representative of the reaction against rights language is Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (–), political philosopher from Oxford, England. While MacIntyre attempts to show the philosophical nonexistence of rights, O’Donovan adopts a different approach. She argues that the concept of rights is inseparable from its origins in an Enlightenment, Liberal philosophy that is simply incompatible with Christian theology. In March , O’Donovan presented a provocative paper entitled “The Concept of Rights in Christian Moral Discourse” at a two-day colloquium on Christian approaches to natural law sponsored by the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center as part of its Evangelical Studies Project. In her paper O’Donovan revisits some of MacIntyre ’s arguments but also offers a unique historical analysis of the genesis and development of rights discourse in ethics and politics. She adopts this analysis as a basis for asserting the incompatibility of such language with Christian ethics—a common accusation among rights-theory critics . Making a case for the historical alliance of rights with classical Liberalism , O’Donovan asserts that since the two cannot be separated, Christian ethicists and theologians should refrain from using rights language. O’Donovan contends that Christian thinkers absorb rights talk uncritically , incorporating its language into Christian ethics without weighing its negative effects. Noting the “entrenchment of rights language in contemporary political and legal discourse,” O’Donovan laments the less obvious “indications that the concept of rights is itself passing beyond dispute, and possibly even beyond discussion.” She registers her impression that “theologians often engage in a naïve and facile appropriation of the language of rights,” simply tacking on theological arguments like man’s creation in God’s image and the unique dignity of persons to the Enlightenment construct of human rights. O’Donovan attempts to awaken discontent with this undiscriminating assimilation of rights language by offering a critical analysis of the dubious origins of rights and the latent philosophical presuppositions underlying them. She challenges “the adequacy of ‘rights’ as an element of theological-moral discourse .l.l. in the light of the pre-modern traditions of Christian natural law, particularly the Augustinian tradition with its evangelical and Christological approach to natural law.”1 The Ties of Rights to Liberal Contractarianism The core of O’Donovan’s case against rights talk consists in its ties to Liberalism, specifically to what she sees as Liberalism’s indissoluble union with contractarianism. She notes that the concept of subjective rights entered contemporary legal and political currency “primarily through the liberal contractarian tradition bequeathed by Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Kant, and the theoretical exponents of the American and French Revolutions” and therefore the meaning ascribed to rights in contemporary popular and academic use “cannot be properly ascertained in detachment from this theoretical context.” Moreover, these meanings carry with them a whole train of political, legal, philosophical, and theological concepts: “concepts of divine, natural, and positive law, of justice, freedom, and equality, of reason and will, of sovereignty and property, of covenant and contract.”2 O’Donovan distinguishes two antagonistic views of political right. One, the older patristic and medieval tradition of political right, held that God’s right established a matrix of divine, natural, and human laws that constituted the ordering justice of the political community. The central political-moral obligation of ruled and ruler alike was to abide by the demands of this objective justice, manifested in communal obligations . Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, “The Concept of Rights in Christian Moral Discourse,” in A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Ethics and Public Policy Center/William B. Eerdmans, ), , . . Ibid., . [44.205.5.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:07 GMT) according to divine intention, and rationally conceived as laws. The newer tradition of political right, whose beginnings O’Donovan places in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, carried a voluntarist, individualist, and subjectivist orientation, whereby God’s right “established discrete rights, possessed by individuals originally and by communities derivatively , that determined civil order and justice.”3 As society shifted from the older tradition of objective right to the newer tradition of subjective rights, the individual occupied an ever more prominent position, both for ruler and ruled, in interactions among citizens . Nevertheless, not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writes O’Donovan, did “the subjective rights of individuals supercede the objective right of divinely revealed and natural laws as the primary or exclusive basis of political authority...