Political Philosophy and Revelation

18. On the “Right” to Be Born

217 18. On the “Right” to Be Born “Now, then,” she [Diotima] said. “Can we simply say that people love the good?” “Yes,” I said. “But shouldn’t we add that in loving it, they want the good to be theirs?” “We should.” “And not only that,” she said. “They want the good to be theirs forever, don’t they?” “We should add that too.” “That’s very true,” I (Socrates) said. “This, then, always is the object of love,” she said. “In view of that, how do people possess it if they are truly in love? What is the real purpose of love? Can we say?” “If I could,” I said, “I wouldn’t be your student, filled with admiration for your wisdom, and trying to learn those very things.” “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said. “It is giving birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul.” Plato In the act of procreation of a new creature is its indispensable bond with spousal union, by which the husband becomes a father through the conjugal union with his wife, and the wife becomes a mother through the conjugal union with her husband. The Creator’s plan is engraved in the physical and spiritual nature of the man and of the woman, and as such has universal value. The act in which the spouses become parents through the reciprocal and total gift of themselves makes them cooperators with the Creator in bringing into the world a new human being called to eternal life. An act so rich that it transcends even the life of the parents cannot be replaced by a mere technological intervention, depleted of human value and at the mercy of the determinism of technological and instrumental procedures. John Paul II I • As with so many chapters in this book, this chapter too relates to Plato . Benedict XVI, in Caritas in veritatem, addressed the troubled meanAn earlier version of this chapter was published online in Ignatius Insight, September 10, 2009; reprinted in Voices 25, no. 4 (2010): 23–26. Epigraphs are from Plato, Symposium, 206a–b; John Paul II, Address to Pontifical Academy for Life, February 21, 2004. 218   Much That Is Fair ing of the word “right.” Perhaps no word in modern philosophy has caused more trouble to both state and Church than this, at first sight, noble word. Many a philosopher, like Maritain, and pope, like John Paul II, have tried valiantly to save this word from the meaning that it had when it first appeared in modern thought, generally with Hobbes. The popes want the word to mean what is objectively due to the child. But neither in its philosophic origins nor in popular usage does it mean what the popes mean. The result is almost hopeless confusion so that we have a “right” to deny “rights.” The word in modern political thought and popular usage, literally, has no exact meaning. Or perhaps, better, it means whatever we want it to mean. Both sides of a contradictory—right to abortion, no right to abortion—become equally plausible. The modern word contains no inner criterion by which it must mean this or that. In the state of nature, as Hobbes argued, people had an absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted. This freedom was called a “right.” As we see in Hobbes and Locke, the state arose both to protect this empty “right” and to prevent it from justifying people killing each other off by doing whatever they wanted “by right.” The pope, in dealing with this word, points out that the word “right” does not stand by itself. It is always correlated to “duty.” If we maintain that we have a “right” to this or that, it must be someone’s “duty” to observe it or allow it or provide for it. In the pope’s sense, “right” does not stand by itself. A further danger of the word “right” is also that it eliminates notions like generosity and gift, of things beyond the correlation of right and duty. Benedict’s encyclicals have, on the contrary, been designed precisely to show the importance of gift and sacrifice. The highest acts among us, then, are neither rights nor duties, but sacrifices and graces. In a world of modern “rights,” no one can do anything for anyone because everything is already owed. In such a world, the words “Thank you” have no place. No more anti-Christian thought can be found. If I think that I...