More on the Foundation of Human Rights

Jonathon Watson responds to our continuing discussion here and here on the foundation of human rights with this:

"[A]ll base desires we have as Created beings are good,and as Christians, we believe that those desires are placed there by a Creator to lead to certain ends. The desire for justice is very powerful - indeed, so much so that Christ warned against allowing this desire to shade into vengeance. But following Christ carries with it even greater demands. Not only must we not exact vengeance, but we must work always to avoid even the desire for vengeance. Thinking about desires rightly ordered, it seems to me, is one of the developments of Christian legal theory - what the law must do is warn not only what act might not be taken externally, but to show that such an act is always and everywhere evil, and that to contemplate such an act shows in and of itself a disordered desire.

    Christianity seeks nothing less than the perfection of the person in Christ. The Christian is aware that he / she cannot achieve such a thing on his or her own volition, but must always resort to Grace, in the end, to attempt such a feat - in other words, to rightly order every desire to it's proper end in God. And this, in the end, is the debate not only of Christian legal theory, but of any Christian discussion - how shall the desire I feel for x or y be rightly ordered - what is the end it serves? Is it God, or mammon? To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, every choice we make to order these desires is in one direction or another - to something which if we saw it now, we would strongly be tempted to worship, or a horror which we would never have seen, even in our darkest nightmare. We do indeed argue about the contents of such rights, but we have before us the examples of Christ's words, and the development of Tradition of the Church (as again noted by Prof. Reid), and almost always agree that there are certain boundaries which may not be crossed. (We have the example of early Christians, and Romans who encountered them, noting that the practice of infanticide was nearly nil among them.)

    And this, then, is the trouble the athiest faces. Not only must the athiest define desires and why we have them, but must also place them in a heirarchy, the framework mentioned, and show the end to which they lead. There must be an end - a reason for the desire - for human rights is a project, a series of laws ever changing, and if the athiest denies that there is an end to human rights - a reason for their existence - he or she must also deny that they have a direction, an idea of how the law ought to change and why, if at all to lead to greater human rights."