The assumption behind the "rights-duty-dignity-values" understanding of the modern world...

... is that no human nature exists. Nothing is given. Dignity means that we are free to project on ourselves and the world how we understand ourselves. We make ourselves. Values mean that no ultimate explanation is possible about God, the cosmos, or human life. We give ourselves our own values. Rights mean that we can demand that how we define ourselves be recognized by others. Duty signifies that others have an obligation to "respect" how we define ourselves, whatever it is.

Obviously, this interpretation is relativist and individualist. It can easily, however, by the same logic, become collective. Here ecology and globalization come in handy. Natural disasters, "failed" governments, poverty, and restrictions based on religion or traditional reason are "threats" to the international community. The common good is defined in terms of modern "rights." They give rise to "humanitarian" intervention in all parts of the world, including in this country. Since we are "entitled" to our "rights," we can empower the collectivity to set conditions and enforce corresponding conduct.

The modern regime of "human rights" increasingly portends the soft totalitarianism implicit in our culture since we substituted will for reason as the ground of our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. The warning was already in Aquinas. We just did not notice.

Those sobering thoughts are from Fr. James V. Schall's essay, "The Modern Regime of Rights", published yesterday on The Catholic Thing site. Brian Jones outlined some of the basic features of the modern notion of "rights" in his Ignatius Insight essay, "Acting Reasonable: Democracy, Authority, and Natural Rights in the Thought of Jacques Maritain" (January 2011):

Advocates of the modern philosophic, legal, and social conception of "rights" have taken as their primary guides Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Hobbes. The "rights" philosophy of Rousseau and Kant treated the individual as a god and gave him absolute rights whose limits were boundless:

Rights were to be deduced from the so-called autonomy of the Will. The rights of the human person were to be based on the claim that man is subject to no law other than that of his own will and freedom. 'A person,' Kant wrote, 'is subject to no other laws than those which he (either alone or jointly with others) gives to himself.' In other words, man must obey only himself because every measure or regulation springing from the world of nature would destroy at one and the same time his autonomy and his supreme dignity. [6]

This so-called philosophy of "rights" is often invoked to protect or legitimize particular actions, which are contrary to that very reasonableness of the natural law. This notion of "rights" has to lead to much confusion because:

It leads men to conceive them as rights in themselves divine, hence infinite, escaping every objective measure, denying every limitation imposed on the claims of the ego, and ultimately expressing the absolute independence of the human subject and a so-called absolute right-which supposedly pertains to everything in the human subject by the mere fact that it is in him-to unfold one's cherished possibilities at the expense of all other beings. [7]

In his political philosophy, Maritain seeks to establish rights as a valid expression of the natural law, (ST, I-II, 94,5) and in doing so rejects two fundamental errors that characterize much of modern "rights" theory: 1) "rights" are rooted not in a human nature, but in the human will; 2) centering "rights" on what is owed to the individual human subject. In regards to the former, much jurisprudential theory relies heavily on the self-sufficient human will. If a law is considered right merely because it has become a part of the legal order of society, then the majority will of any society takes precedence. At this point, it would become superfluous to speak of an unjust law, or inquire about the rightness of a given law because there is no standard by which to judge except the force and power of the human will.

Later this week I'll be posting an essay, "The Tragedy of Democracy without Authority: A Reflection on Maritain and Thucydides", by Jose Maria J. Yulo, Ed.D, that will take up some of these same topics, with some instructive insights taken from ancient Greek history.