01-05-2008 - Traces, n. 5

Benedict XVI in the USA

Human rights, “the fruit
of unchanging justice”

In his address to the UN, the Pope returned to an issue which is widely discussed. And he went to the heart of it, continuing the journey begun at Regensburg  

by Stefano Alberto

Mary Ann Glendon is an outstanding law professor at Harvard and currently United States Ambassador to the Holy See. In a recent publication edited by Luca Antonini on the delicate situation of human rights (see Il traffico dei diritti insaziabili, Rubbettino 2007), she declared, “The progress of the conception of the rights of man has been accompanied by a widespread erosion of the conviction that these rights can be objectively defined, universally applied, or philosophically motivated” (p. 59).
So it was not just because of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948) that Benedict XVI chose this as the theme of the central and most significant section of his historic address to the United Nations on April 18th.
Speaking with clarity, the Pope evoked a tendency, widespread since the ’90s, “to reinterpret the foundations of the Declaration and to compromise its inner unity so as to facilitate a move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests.” This new interpretation is based on a relativistic conception which denies the universality of human rights in the name of different cultural, political, social, and religious contexts. It ends up reducing their protection to “merely applying the correct procedures” or “achieving a balance between competing rights.” If they are presented in terms of pure legality, rights “risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal.”
In this respect, Paolo Carozza, Assistant Law Professor at the University of Notre Dame, in the work cited above, spoke evocatively of the disturbing “traffic” in human rights, treated as a “trade in empty containers” (see pp. 81-94). This evolution radically contradicts the unified approach embodied in the Declaration, which “was adopted,” as the Pope recalled, “‘as a common standard of achievement’ (Preamble) and cannot be applied piecemeal, according to trends or selective choices that merely run the risk of contradicting the unity of the human person and thus the indivisibility of human rights.”
On a more positive note, Benedict XVI recalled the foundation of human rights, recognized by the Declaration in human dignity, in the explicit desire to place “the human person at the heart of institutions, laws, and the workings of society.” He confirmed that the rights recognized and described in the Declaration, including the right to religious freedom, “apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Not only [are] rights… universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.”

Lobbies, vested interests, and desires
 The most significant innovation in   Benedict XVI’s address was his reminder not only of the risk that legality could prevail over justice (human rights as “the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power”) but also of a fact all too often neglected: that “respect for human rights is principally rooted in unchanging justice, on which the binding force of international proclamations is also based.”
Two fundamental dimensions are embodied in Benedict XVI’s argument: a) Law does not stem principally from the will of the legislator or the decisions of the “various agencies of those in power,” but from actual human interaction between people in every culture and in every social and cultural context–“rights and the resulting duties follow naturally from human interaction.” b) The root of rights and duties therefore is in the elementary experience of the person, because they are the “fruit of a commonly held sense of justice built primarily upon solidarity among the members of society, and hence valid at all times and for all peoples.”
In response to the attempt to interpret legality as the expression of the will to power of states and above all of powerful trans-national lobbies, which keep seeking to shape new rights on the basis of individualistic desires or vested interests, the Pope insisted on the fact that “human rights must be respected as an expression of justice, and not merely because they are enforceable through the will of the legislators.”

In dialogue with Rawls
and Habermas
For Benedict XVI, therefore, rights are embedded in human dignity and the recognition of the transcendent value of each person, “firmly anchored in the religious dimension.” This is the vital starting point for discernment (“the capacity to distinguish good from evil”), coping with new situations, and the demand for new rights.
This point is related to another major theme, already developed in the Pope’s canceled speech at La Sapienza University in Rome. In dialogue with Rawls and Habermas, it urged the public role of religions, freely practiced in secular society, which “can autonomously conduct a dialogue of thought and life” (religious freedom) and so contribute to building “consensus around the truth concerning particular values or goals” in the distinction between the religious sphere and political action.
Ultimately, at the UN the Pope took a challenging new step on the journey begun at Regensburg to “enlarge the reason” of modern man.   Benedict XVI gave us a classic and yet original revisitation of “natural right” as a realistic method for recognizing and affirming “the ethical and rational dimension” of human rights, starting from the original experience of all people, led by an irrepressible demand for “unchanging justice.”