"right to do wrong"--comments

I think I am agreement with Robert Miller in the discussion Rick mentioned yesterday. This whole question--is there a right to do wrong--is tricky because as Miller mentions "there are many senses of the word right."

Miller mentions Dignitatis Humanae and he seems to say that that document endorses the idea that a person can have a right to do wrong. Here is my understanding. The Catechism (2108-2109), principally citing Dignitatis Humanae, states: "The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities." The limits just referenced "must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with 'legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order.'"

So, there might be a civil immunity to do wrong in certain circumstances. But even this is limited, as the Catechism and Dignitatis Humanae make clear. All "wrongs"--immoral acts--need not be proscribed by the State, but it wouldn't be helpful to say that someone had a moral "right" to do something that the State had decided not to proscribe for prudential reasons. A state might decide not to criminalize suicide (because the state might think that an attempt to commit such an act was more often the product of depression than a "rational" choice). But that doesn't mean that it would be helpful to say that someone had a "right" to suicide.

With regard to abortion, it seems clear that there can be no "right" to such conduct. Even though one may have a civil immunity to do wrong in certain instances this wouldn't extend to abortion because this is the sort of thing that Aquinas mentions when he treats the issue of whether the law ought to prohibit all vices. The law ought to prohibit those vices when the prohibition is necessary to the maintenance of human society (Aquinas mentions murder and theft as examples, and surely this would also extend to abortion.)         

I think it still fair to say that there is no right to do wrong, beyond the limited civil immunity noted above with the limits set forth by the objective moral order.

Richard M.