Yet allowing all this, and allowing that a Christian or a Jew or a conservative liberal might increasingly doubt the wisdom of rights-talk as the foundation of political order, we are nonetheless citizens of a country in which rights-talk is basically the only kind of talk there is – and I have a hard time seeing the case for pro-lifers abandoning the idea of a “right to life” in favor of a language of duties and obligations that might be philosophically closer to the truth but would definitely be less politically appealing. In so doing, they would be giving up the one great arrow in the pro-life quiver right now, which is that abortion isn’t consonant with American liberalism as originally conceived, and the original interpretation of American liberalism still has a lot of purchase on our country’s political mind, in a way that arguments based on duties and obligations just don’t. Indeed, by abandoning a “right to life” language, pro-lifers wouldn’t just be giving up on any short-term hope of changing America’s abortion laws, they would be effectively giving up on liberalism altogether. Some people think that time has come (or that liberalism was a mistake from the beginning); I’m not persuaded. ~Ross Douthat

I appreciate Mr. Douthat’s link to my recent post and the generous quote from it. We are in considerable agreement on the problem of conceiving of people as autonomous selves invested with “rights,” so on the substance of the truth of this particular matter I think there is relatively little to argue about. Mr. Douthat should probably also be in substantial agreement with this statement in Dr. Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life:

Believers in the theory of rights take exactly the same point of view. Asked where rights come from, they will either refer to a mythical story (such as the wondrous tale of the social contract), or, following Calvin, they will dismiss all criticism by saying that everybody knows what rights are. If the believer in rights is Catholic, he will quickly proceed to confound the liberal theory of rights with the rather different teachings of St. Thomas on natural law, or he will refer loftily to a divine origin of rights, though there is nothing in scripture and very little in the traditions of the Church to justify such a notion.

A nonbeliever–a libertarian, for example, who cnanot have recourse to any supernatural arguments–will attempt to deduce his theory of “rights” from other unprovable principles he happens to believe in, such as the principle of nonaggression. This tactic resembles that of some neo-Darwinists who, confronted with the apparent impossibility of life spontaneously originating on earth, take refuge in the extraterrestrial theory that life arrived on earth in the form of spores, as in the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If there is convincing proof of the existence or origin of rights, I have never read it in a book or article and never, in discussions with true-believing philosophers, heard anything persuasive, much less convincing. Rights, one has to conclude, are to be taken on faith–but only by those who profess to have no religion. (p. 197)

Where Mr. Douthat’s post goes awry, aside from the curious statement of ambivalence about the language and theory of rights duly noted and criticised by Michael Brendan Dougherty, is in the claim that even if the language and theory of rights are less philosophically true (which is to say, they are false) they are more appealing and useful to advance the practical goal of outlawing and preventing abortion. Advocates of the right to life have hung all of their credibility on the claim that the right to life is a truth of human existence, one of the basic aspects of human dignity, so can we really wink at the use of this sort of argument if rights do not exist and thinking in terms of rights significantly distorts our understanding of the person and ethics? This would be very much like someone who does not really believe in the Resurrection, to use a more significant example, but thinks it will be more acceptable and popular to pretend to believe it. Surely the better, truer argument is the one that ought to be used. Setting aside the truer argument for the allegedly more useful or appealing scheme has been the essence of the failure of Bushism.

To continue to play the game of using the language and theory of rights to define our understanding of what is just and good is to perpetuate something that, as far as I can tell, both Mr. Douthat and I regard as being untrue in large measure. So long as the debate is framed in terms of “I’ve got a right!”, those with the relatively greater power will consistently win every contest. In all likelihood, framing the debate in terms of competing rights will not hasten the day when the brutal savagery of abortion is punished and, one hopes, largely prevented, but will probably ensure that the public continues to view attempts to prevent this crime as an intrusion on some special protected individual space.