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Lamont: This notion is not properly explained, and it does not seem to correspond to the understanding of the common good that St. Thomas uses to foundobjective right; Maritain does not grasp St. Thomas's view, simply remarking that in antiquity and the Middle Ages the natural law was focused on obligations rather than rights. 100 In the absence of criteria for determining their scope, the rights postulated by Maritain are in effect no more than a list of desirable objectives to be pursued. Maritain distinguishes between rights that can be limited by the demands of the common good, and those that are inalienable. He does not offer criteria for distinguishing between the two, and the examples of inalienable rights that he gives-those of life and the pursuit of happiness-do not have any evident characteristics that identify them as being inalienable, except for their having been so described in the American Declaration of Independence (no doubt a reflection of Maritain's sojourn in America). One need not labor the point that this account of natural law and natural rights does not stand up to examination. In addition to its influence on Vatican H's Dignitatis humanae, its interest lies in its illustrating the full flowering of the tendency, already noted by Villey in the baroque Scholastics, to substitute a concern with arriving at the right answer for a concern with answering rightly-with the content of the right answer having been provided by the goals, interests, and presuppositions of the time. 101 The above survey of objective and subjective rights puts us in a position to consider Villey's case for the abandonment of subjective rights, and for the acceptance of objective right

 https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/Journals/The%20Thomist%20(1941-2024)/OCR-layer-only-PDFs/2009_Volume73_Number2.pdf 


objective right; Maritain does not grasp St. Thomas's view, simply remarking that in antiquity and the Middle Ages the natural law was focused on obligations rather than rights. 100 In the absence of criteria for determining their scope, the rights postulated by Maritain are in effect no more than a list of desirable objectives to be pursued. Maritain distinguishes between rights that can be limited by the demands of the common good, and those that are inalienable. He does not offer criteria for distinguishing between the two, and the examples of inalienable rights that he gives-those of life and the pursuit of happiness-do not have any evident characteristics that identify them as being inalienable, except for their having been so described in the American Declaration of Independence (no doubt a reflection of Maritain's sojourn in America). One need not labor the point that this account of natural law and natural rights does not stand up to examination. In addition to its influence on Vatican H's Dignitatis humanae, its interest lies in its illustrating the full flowering of the tendency, already noted by Villey in the baroque Scholastics, to substitute a concern with arriving at the right answer for a concern with answering rightly-with the content of the right answer having been provided by the goals, interests, and presuppositions of the time. 101 The above survey of objective and subjective rights puts us in a position to consider Villey's case for the abandonment of subjective rights, and for the acceptance of objective right

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