Many today seem very concerned about their own rights but tend to neglect or restrict the rights of others. Rights presuppose duties if they are not to become meter licence.
Every society has a system of justice to guarantee its citizens what is their due for their full natural development in mind and body. This “due” becomes the duty and right of all to each other.
Basic rights can be deduced from the nature of man in society as many great thinkers have shown. They are self-evident and inalienable from conception to natural death (cf Cicero Aristotle UN Charter US Constitution Nuremburg war trials).
Some of these basic rights are to life to nurture and education in a normal family, to reputation, to practice religion, to associate with others, to choose a state in life, to work, to private property, to be told the truth and to share in public affairs. In positive law many basic rights become civil rights and even secondary rights are enacted to detail the application of basic rights, eg basic wage/safety.
All rights must be exercised with due regard to the common good balancing private and public affairs and the ordering of priorities eg right to life precedes right to convenience.
But there is no right or duty or freedom of choice to do a bad thing contrary to the natural good of man in society.
For example, there is no such right or duty to die by suicide or euthanasia, nor a right to kill by abortion, birth-control or embryo experiments, nor a right to use sex only as a pleasure in homosexuality, in sodomy, in same-sex “marriage” or in other perversions, nor a right to claim freedom from offence or discrimination because others exercise their rights to free speech (to preach and teach their beliefs, within reason).
In the paradox of freedom, true rights and freedom are to do what we should/ought to do according to the nature of man in society, not to do what we feel like, for convenience, fashion, greed, lust or power. This is feral and leads to the culture of death as we see today.
The foundations of human rights are not in the deliberations of men in majority rule or consensus, no matter how well-intentioned they may be. These can change and easily become a matter of “might is right” in a rule of tyranny or totalitarianism.
Many secularists are threatening this today, wittingly or not in the spirit of anti-authoritarian behaviour and in the claim for the contrived rights described above as valid choices to be promoted.
Aristotle describes the transcendent natural law well, “He who bid the law rule may be deemed to bid God and reason alone rule, but he who bids man rule adds an element of the beast; for desire is a wild beast and passion perverts the minds of others, even if they are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire” Aristotle (Politics, III).
Fr Bernard McGrath, Bendigo VIC
