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Article Review Justice, Rights and Wrongs ECCLESIOLOGY Ecclesiology 8 (2012) 235–240 brill.nl/ecso Article Review Justice, Rights and Wrongs Nicholas Sagovsky Liverpool Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool, L16 9JD, UK [email protected] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice, Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, UK: Princeton University Press, 2008) xiv + 400 pp. £35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-12967-9 (hbk). Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice, Rights and Wrongs is a major contribution to the contemporary debate about justice. It is, however, more narrowly focused than the broad brush title would suggest. Wolterstorff’s aim is to show the secure grounds on which a belief in natural rights can be the foun- dation for an understanding of justice: ‘I think of a social order as just’, he writes, ‘insofar as its members enjoy the goods to which they have rights.’ What he does not discuss is how to specify those rights, and how ‘natural rights’ can be deployed in a strategy for justice. The argument is in three parts. First, Wolterstorff examines ‘the archeol- ogy of rights’ to defend the claim that a belief in natural rights is not the product of the possessive individualism associated with the Enlightenment, nor is it the lineal descendent of the nominalism of William of Ockham. He follows Brian Tierney in tracing the line of descent of the notion of ius back to canon lawyers who pre-date Ockham. From there, he traces the pre- history of the notion of ‘right’ back to the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament and the early Christian writers. In his second section, Wolterstorff argues that the eudaimonism (belief in the ‘good life’ or ‘human flourishing’), which was central to the thinking of classical philosophers like Aristotle, could never have provided the basis for contemporary belief in universal natural rights. Belief in the rights of the other must be rooted in a compassion that was alien to the world of © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/174553112X630480 236 N. Sagovsky / Ecclesiology 8 (2012) 235–240 the Greeks. A key turning point came when Augustine turned from eudai- monism to belief in a God who loves and can be loved. For Augustine, the other is the one whom God loves, and should be treated as such. This accords with Christ’s troubling command to love our enemies. In his third section, Wolterstorff dismisses theories that ground human rights in our duty towards the other. Kant, in particular, fails the test because, though he stresses our duty not to treat others as instruments of our own good, he locates the importance of right treatment of others in their rational capacities. To be human, for Kant, is to be a rational moral agent – but not all human beings are rational moral agents. What other grounding can the secularist find for a belief in natural rights? Only one that lies in a broader recognition of human dignity. Given the troubled his- tory of the twentieth century, with its massive abuses of human rights and its selectivity in the recognition of human dignity, such a foundation can only be one of sand. Wolterstorff’s bold claim is that not only does the archeology of natural rights show the basis for such a belief in the deep, biblical roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition but that a secure contemporary belief in human rights can only be built on belief in a transcendent God of love. The key to his position is the need to recognise the worth (the dignity) of each human being because each human being is loved by God as only God can love. Because God loves the Creation, nothing within Creation, and especially – since human beings are made in the ‘image and likeness of God’ – no human being is to be treated as though it had less worth than the worth it has for God. Wolterstorff speaks of the ‘Ur-Principle’: ‘one should never treat anything whatsoever as of less worth than it is’. Wolterstorff argues his case with much greater subtlety and depth than I have been able to indicate. Nevertheless, even a brief summary is enough to show why his quest for a foundation for ‘natural rights’ that is inherent – not one that is a social construct – is so significant. What he is arguing against, as powerfully as he can, is the naïve expectation that the ‘social construct’ foundation of natural rights can ever be adequate to defend the rights of the marginalised and oppressed. In this, I think he is totally right. Wolterstorff’s argument raises some fascinating questions. The first, for me, is this: if, according to the Ur-Principle, ‘one should never treat any- thing whatsoever as of less worth than it is’, where does this begin and end? Wolterstorff himself recognises that this takes one into the realm of animal rights. I cannot see why this principle does not take one on to the realm of the ‘rights’ of inanimate objects. Doubtless, we treat the earth (and its .
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