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

9. Dignity and Its Due

9. DIGNITY AND ITS DUE W    of one’s action is a person, an ethical structure enters into play that is absent when the object of one’s action is a thing. Thus without ignoring the immanence of human action and its effects on the character of the moral agent, personalists lay special emphasis on the transitive nature of human acts and the dignity of the one being acted upon, i.e., the reason why this ethical dimension emerges. The fundamental question personalists ask in this regard is: How is the human person to be treated? The question of human rights is, in the final analysis, a question of what is due to the human person. In other words, it is a question of justice . Grounding human rights requires coming to an understanding of how the person is to be treated and, above all, why he must be treated in that way and not in another. Though he deals extensively with the topic of justice, Thomas fails to single out what the person has a right to by the mere fact of being a person. He establishes that each should be rendered his due and that a certain equilibrium must be maintained, but he does not identify the content of this moral due. Thomistic personalism, and in a particularly apt and succinct way the personalism principle as formulated by Karol Wojtyla, does provide this content, both on a general level and in its concrete instantiations. As opposed to the Humean idea that an “ought” can never proceed from an “is,” Thomistic personalism asserts that it is precisely the metaphysical “is” that furnishes the only possible foundation for an ethical “ought.” Any other “ought” can only be a conventional obligation, extrinsic to the person and therefore not in and of itself ethical. The person, by the very fact of being a person, is owed certain things, which are his                     right. This is personalism’s primordial claim. Examining its inner dynamics will uncover the true foundation of human rights.    Pope John XXIII asserted that because “every human being is a person , that is, his nature is endowed with intelligence and free will .l.l. he has rights and obligations flowing directly and simultaneously from his very nature. And as these rights and obligations are universal and inviolable so they cannot in any way be surrendered.”1 How does this progression from personhood to rights come about? By linking two key personalistic arguments. First, the key mediating concept between personhood and rights, the notion of personal dignity, must be shown to be a bridge between anthropology and ethics. Only if human dignity is able to span the abyss between what is and what should be will it succeed as a mediating concept . Second, Karol Wojtyla has claimed that all our dealings with reality can be broken into two types, depending on whether the object of those dealings has personal dignity or not: using as a means and loving as an end. Wojtyla further claims that the only proper way to deal with a person is to love the person as an end. These claims, and the ethical consequences that flow from them, must be carefully weighed and evaluated. If they are true, then love will present itself as a sort of original human right from which all other rights derive, and the New Testament commandment of love will be seen as a requirement not just of positive revealed law but of the natural moral law itself.  “Dignity” in the Papal Magisterium Emphasis on the dignity of the human person in papal magisterial teaching, with the moral consequences it engenders, has been growing steadily since before the Second Vatican Council.2 The Council itself                 . PT, . . During the course of the council itself, Karol Wojtyla wrote that the council and the Church “regard the call concerning the dignity of the human person as the most important voice of our age” (Wojtyla, “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” ). stressed human dignity especially in the Decree on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). Particularly during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, one notes a marked emphasis on the centrality of human dignity in the Church’s social doctrine, an emphasis that John Paul openly encourages.3 John Paul goes so far as to place the promotion of the dignity...