This is not to suggest for one mo-
ment that the bishops are pure and
simple Hobbesians; far from it.
Like most contemporary ethicists,
they are vastly more influenced by Kant and
his latter-day disciples, who managed to give
the original rights theory a more exalted
status by grounding it, not in a selfish pas-
sion, but in practical reason or the dignity of
the individual person as an autonomous
moral agent. Yet in the final analysis, Kant's
theory is still only a modification of the Hob-
besian theory, whose nonteleological orienta-
tion it preserves and with which it has more
in common than it does with classical moral
philosophy. Rights remain paramount and
the actualization of the just social order is
made to depend more on institutions than on
moral character. Virtue, although desirable,
is not essential to the scheme, and one need
not acquire it in order to reap its benefits.
Human beings may stay as they are as long
as the laws under which they live are as they
ought to be. The only condition is that these
laws be devised in such a way as to be
equally favorable to everyone, to scoundrels
no less than to saints. Wars will disappear,
not because their atrocities offend one's
moral sense, but because with the progress of
modern science they are rapidly becoming
too costly, if not downright suicidal. Com-
merce will curb the spread of religious
fanaticism and bind people together more
closely than ever before. A strong league of
nations will insure the proper relations
among the peoples of the world, and a day is
coming when no one will have to worry
about sacrificing himself for the good of
others. In Kant's famous phrase, the per-
fectly just society does not require that the
bulk of its citizens be angels or even
minimally decent human beings; it can be
made up entirely of "devils," on condition
that they be intelligent. The key to its proper
functioning is not genuine moral virtue, on
which one can rarely depend, but en-
lightened self-interest.
compassion, for all its attractiveness, is
a passion, only distantly related to what
the Christian tradition calls 'mercy' and
'charity, ' both of which, as virtues,
require the control of reason.
I am well aware that the preceding ac-
count of the relationship between premodern
and modern ethical thought runs counter to
what is still far and away the most
fashionable view among present-day scholars,
the majority of whom look upon the rights
doctrine as nothing more than the perfected
version of the old natural law doctrine. Ac-
cording to that interpretation, there is no real
breach of continuity between premodern and
modern thought. The latter is a child of the
former, whose intention it does not oppose
but rather seeks to fulfill more effectively.
Such was the position taken a short genera-
tion ago by Jacques Maritain and John
Courtney Murray, and such also is the one
taken in our day by John Finnis and Felicien
Rousseau, to name only a few Catholic
thinkers who speak for a host of others in
this regard. It is emphatically not the posi-
tion taken by the early modern thinkers
themselves, all of whom were firmly con-
vinced that, like Columbus, they had
discovered a new continent and stood on
fundamentally different ground. Modernity,
they thought, had its own independent prin-
ciple and was not to be viewed as a mere
prolongation of what had gone on before. At
the deepest level, it owed nothing of impor-
tance to either the classical or Christian tradi-
tion, from which it was separated by an
abyss. The issue was stated with the utmost
clarity, for the last time or just about, by
Jonathan Swift, who pictured the two camps
as solidly entrenched, each on its own sum-
mit, which neither was willing to surrender
to the other. It is only with Hegel and, some
years later, with Nietzsche, that a powerful
attempt was made to bridge the chasm be-
tween them by showing that the modern
world was nothing other than the culmina-
tion of a process that had been unfolding
since the dawn of history or, in Nietzsche's
case, since the dawn of philosophic
BOSTOX COLLEGE MAGAZINE 39
consciousness. And it is from them that the
unitary conception of the development of
Western thought was passed on to assorted
philosophers and historians down to our
time.
We shall gain a clearer understanding
of what is at stake in all of this if,
by way of illustration, we glance
ever so briefly at a few of the
specific issues with which the bishops have
been confronted or to which they have been
forced to address themselves. One of these is
abortion, the case against which, not sur-
prisingly, they now base on the rights of the
unborn. Earlier theologians would have
begun by asking, not what abortion does to
the foetus, but what it does to the person
who performs it or undergoes it. Duties took
precedence over rights and determined the
conduct that was appropriate in a given set
of circumstances. The more complex the
case, the more it called for deliberation in the
light of certain general principles which re-
main the same at all times but whose degree
of applicability varies greatly from one in-
stance to another. Considerable room was
thus left for prudence, through the exercise
of which one could hope to arrive at a sen-
sible decision. The same cannot always be
said of the argument from rights, which
deprives us of the ability to determine in a
principled way which of the two supposedly
unconditional rights, that of the mother or
that of the unborn child, has the green light
when they come into conflict with each
other.
whatever gems of Christian wisdom
may be embedded in the pastorals are
lost in a maze of academic detail and
references that only a specialist or a
born masochist would care to look up.
Nor is this all. On the ground that all
human life is sacred, some bishops have been
invoking the same principle to ban not only
abortion but nuclear warfare and capital
punishment as well. Actions as disparate as
the taking of an innocent life, the execution
of a common criminal, and the defense of
one's country against a foreign invader have
been lumped together and condemned in the
name of a would-be "consistent ethic of life"
or an abstraction derived from modern
science, which in large part is what I take the
rights doctrine to be. Perhaps there are no
ready-made solutions to any of these prob-
lems, but even a morally sensitive person
may find it strange to see them treated as if
they were identical.
A similar problem arises in connection
with the church's efforts to deal with
theologians who dissent from its official
teaching. Having endorsed the principle of
freedom of conscience and freedom of ex-
pression, the bishops have been hard pressed
to defend the sanctions imposed by Rome on
some of the dissenters. One cannot publicly
proclaim the rights of the individual con-
science and then take action against the per-
son who exercises them and thus appears to
have justice on his side. It might be replied
that the church, too, has its rights, which
need to be defended when they are infringed.
But, never having been spelled out with the
same degree of precision, these rights remain
somewhat vague or less compelling than the
ones claimed by and guaranteed to the in-
dividual person. The problem becomes even
more acute when one considers that the
dissenter is himself a member of the
organization whose rights are being urged
against him. All of this is to say that the
church is having to pay a price for espousing
the principles of the Enlightenment along
with their hidden premise, the ideology of
progress. Only a stronger notion of the com-
mon good, coupled with a more subtle for-
mulation of the notion of individual rights,
could justify its stance and posture in regard
to this thorny problem.
My last series of comments concerns the
bishops' teaching on the economy and their
so-called "preferential option for the poor,"
one of the pivots of that teaching, where the
argument is again made predominantly in
terms of rights. One can hardly fault the
bishops for wanting to do something about
the scandalous persistence of pauperism in
the midst of a society that is daily becoming
more prosperous. On this score, they are
merely heeding the injunctions of the Bible,
which, as they correctly point out, evinces a
good deal of concern for the poor, the af-
40 BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE
flicted, and the underprivileged. Unlike the
bishops, however, the Bible never goes so far
as to propose that something might be owed
to them simply by reason of their poverty.
Here as elsewhere, it looks at the problem
from the standpoint of the doer of the
righteous or merciful deed rather than that of
its beneficiary. The good Samaritan is the
one who is indebted to the man who had
fallen among thieves for the opportunity to
serve him, and not vice versa. The thrust of
the New Testament message is that the
Christian, who has received everything from
God, must imitate Him by sharing his super-
fluous goods with those who lack the
necessities of life. The poverty about which it
speaks is more often than not spiritual pov-
erty, which sometimes goes hand in hand
with material poverty but which cannot be
equated with it. God wants all people to be
saved, the rich as well as the poor.
It is true, as the bishops likewise remind
us, that Jesus himself lived in a ten-
thousandfold poverty and did not have a
stone on which to rest his head; but it is also
true that he had some fairly rich friends,
whom he does not condemn and of whose
hospitality he was quite willing to avail
himself. And he apparently had no qualms
about allowing his equally improvident
disciples to steal a few ears of corn from
neighboring fields from time to time. Im-
agine what human society would be like if
everybody were to live like that! On balance,
one is almost tempted to say that the Bible is
more concerned with the rich than with the
poor. From its perspective, they are the ones
who need help. Besides, if the poor are really
closer to God, I suppose one should think
twice before robbing them of their poverty.
Even more striking is the fact that the
New Testament has nothing at all to say
about the reform of social structures or the
establishment of institutions geared to the
relief of human misery. What the bishops
and others today call "social justice," as
distinguished from, say, legal justice, is a
nineteenth-century invention usually at-
tributed to the Roman Catholic theologian
Taparelli d'Azeglio, who never bothered to
clarify its meaning and thus created a prob-
lem with which social ethicists have had to
struggle ever since. The pedigree of that ill-
fated notion can easily be traced to
Rousseau, who did call for the reform of
society along egalitarian lines. The change
was a momentous one. Prior to that time,
everybody took it for granted that one was
rewarded by society in the measure of one's
services to it. Widows, orphans, and the vic-
tims of undeserved misfortune were obvi-
ously to be cared for, but they presented a
special case demanding special treatment.
Rousseau went further, stipulating that
rewards were to be meted out on the basis of
need rather than merit. The less one was in
a position to contribute to society, the more
one could expect from it. Compassion rather
than reason became the stamp of human
dignity and would henceforth dictate one's
comportment toward the needy. The battle
cry was taken up by countless authors
I he vast amount of time, energy, and
resources devoted to practical issues risks
being interpreted as a tacit acquiescence
in what has been described as the demise
of transcendental Christianity.
throughout the century that followed. In the
Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo could say
of a horse that steps aside to avoid trampling
a toad: "Wiser than Socrates and greater
than Plato" — Plus sage que Socrate et plus grand
que Platon. But compassion, for all its attrac-
tiveness, is still, as its name indicates, a pas-
sion. It is only distantly related to what the
Christian tradition calls "mercy" and
"charity," both of which, as virtues, require
the control of reason. John Stuart Mill was
not far off the mark when he noted a century
and a half ago that the new mood among
Christians owed more to Rousseau's sen-
timental deism than it did to the spirit of the
gospel, for which neither he nor Rousseau
had much use.
But if social, rather than personal, reform
is the key to the problems of civil society,
training in virtue loses much of its impor-
tance. There is no real need to dwell on it,
and, in fact, the bishops show relatively little
interest in it. Like their modern predecessors,
they appear to have more faith in institu-
tions, or so one gathers, for example, from
the list of concrete proposals to which more
BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 41
than half of their pastoral on the economy is
dedicated, and which includes such specific
items as tax reform, the reform of the inter-
national economic system, the right to
employment, trade unions, farm policy, food
distribution, cooperation with firms and in-
dustries, national and international coopera-
tion, welfare programs, job training and job-
creation programs, and foreign investments.
Part of the danger is that the vast amount
of time, energy, and resources devoted to
practical issues of this sort risks being inter-
preted as a tacit acquiescence in what Robert
Nisbet has described as the demise of trans-
cendental Christianity.
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