Lamont: We can conclude this discussion of objective and subjective rights by briefly indicating the light it casts on the flaws of the conflicting positions in the debate over Dignitatis humanae at the Second Vatican Council. The progressives believed that religious liberty was a natural subjective right flowing from the nature of the individual human. The conservatives believed that it could not be a right of any kind, because it would be a right to do what was morally wrong, namely, to practice a false religion. They believed such a right to be impossible, because they accepted the identity of justice and morality, an identity that rules out not only a natural subjective right to the practice of religion, but any kind of just claim-any objective right-to any form of practice of any false religion.
We can conclude this discussion of objective and subjective rights by briefly indicating the light it casts on the flaws of the conflicting positions in the debate over Dignitatis humanae at the Second Vatican Council. The progressives believed that religious liberty was a natural subjective right flowing from the nature of the individual human. The conservatives believed that it could not be a right of any kind, because it would be a right to do what was morally wrong, namely, to practice a false religion. They believed such a right to be impossible, because they accepted the identity of justice and morality, an identity that rules out not only a natural subjective right to the practice of religion, but any kind of just claim-any objective right-to any form of practice of any false religion.
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