Imputed Rights: An Essay in Christian Social Theory - Hardcover

Andelson, Robert V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0856832782 ISBN 13: 9780856832789

Publisher: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

One outcome of the Second World War, Dawsey writes in his foreword, was the proposition that all human beings should enjoy certain fundamental freedoms. These were enshrined by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since the book was first published in 1971 this endorsement has led to greater recognition of human rights in Russia, China, and many other parts of the world. In the West, Andelson argued, human rights have been an issue that are often invoked but seldom intelligently considered. Thus there have been pressure groups pushing for this, that and the other right to be recognised without considering how such a right might impinge on the freedom of others; for example the right to free expression versus the right to privacy, the right to life of the unborn child versus the mother's choice. Seeking to establish the ground for rights, Andelson exposed the inadequacy of the radical-humanist, utilitarian and self-realisation approaches as well as many widely held Christian approaches, and developed an original thesis.

About this title

About the Author

Robert V. Andelson was an ordained Congregationalist minister and professor of philosophy at Auburn University. He was co-author of From Wasteland to Promised Land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World and of Critics of Henry George: An Appraisal of their Strictures on Progress and Poverty.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Imputed Rights

An Essay in Christian Social Theory

By Robert V. Andelson

Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd

Copyright © 2010 The estate of Robert V. Andelson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85683-278-9

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Foreword, 
Foreword to the First Edition, 
Preface, 
Prolegomena, 
Part 1 — The Foundations of Human Rights, 
Chapter 1 - Axiology: Rights and the Ground of Worth, 
Chapter 2 - Teleology: The Vocation of Man, 
Chapter 3 - Anthropology: The Nature of Empirical Man, 
Chapter 4 - Soteriology: The Social Significance of the Atonement, 
Part 2 — The Community of Covenant, 
Chapter 5 - The Primal Right as the Bond of Covenant, 
Chapter 6 - Particularizations of the Primal Right, 
Chapter 7 - Maintaining the Covenant, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Axiology: Rights and the Ground of Worth

Let us begin with that which man reveres but does not choose, that which carries as its sign intense and boundless suffering, that which the untutored consciousness proclaims as holy, that is, separate from itself. It cannot be, as Feuerbach thought, a projection of human desires, however lofty, for it constitutes a challenge and a threat to those desires. Let us begin with absolute value, sternly uncompromising in its unconditional demand, yet gracious in the very fact of its self-disclosure. Let us acknowledge it as that to which we must seek to reconcile our ideas of God. Let us acknowledge it, therefore, as God. Let us recognize that it cannot be stated propositionally, that it cannot be defined analytically, and that it cannot be compassed rationally. But let us recognize that it is.

There are those whose sophistication will be intolerably affronted by such acknowledgment and recognition. Let us leave them with their sophistication and go our way, wishing them a good deliverance. We cannot tarry in a vain attempt to prove that which can only be experienced. It has other and more pressing claims upon our efforts.

The quest for meaning is itself meaningless except as an endeavor pursued in the service of some value structure. Even the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake rests upon an antecedent value judgment about knowledge. Therefore, if we are to get at the meaning of human rights, our ultimate starting point must be a discussion of value. Yet, since all reasoning presupposes some judgment of value, we cannot reason about value without commencing with something "given." Such reasoning, if carried far enough, will point beyond itself to the idea of perfection, which reason cannot circumscribe. In Irwin Edman's words,

Even the most stringent thinking begins with what is precedent to thought; it culminates in what is beyond its operations. At the beginning and the end the thinker knows what he cannot prove; the process of thinking is bounded at both ends by the ineffable.

We need not hesitate to employ the term God to signify the ineffable perfection which bounds the realm of thought. But God cannot be reduced to a logical presupposition or deduction. St. Anselm's famous ontological proof was an attempt to establish God's actual existence as a necessary inference from the idea of perfection. If his critics are correct in their rejection of this method as fallacious, they have merely demonstrated that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, that the human mind cannot autonomously arrive at the ground and fulfillment of its own activity. Although God's existence may be a necessary idea, only personal encounter with the living Word reveals it to be more than an idea. Faith cannot be rationally coerced: it is, in the final analysis, a gift.

The apprehension of value in a formal sense is, as Kant discerned, a universal innate fact of consciousness, which he identified with duty. Starting with duty, Kant postulated God's existence as an external means of reconciling the dutiful disposition with happiness, the latter being ruled out as a motive for the former, but asserted as requisite to the underlying harmony of the rational and moral universe. In these passages, at least, God appears to be brought in as a sort of after-thought, a logical agent for rendering the good will ultimately productive of felicity. Yet since Kant insisted unequivocally that "nothing in the world, indeed nothing even beyond the world, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will," and since he would not have been willing to concede that God can be anything less than absolutely good, his own premises give rise to the inference that God should be identified with the good will itself. There are, as a matter of fact, passages in the Opus Postumum which suggest that at the end of his life he may have consciously moved toward such an identification, although scholars are in disagreement on this point. In any case, the concept of God as essentially the good will is eminently fruitful regardless of whether or not it was explicitly set forth by Kant, and need not be equated, if the good will be interpreted in a more comprehensive sense than his, with a fundamentally immanentist view of deity. It is also profoundly faithful to the Biblical teaching that the nature of God is best described as love.

The idea of duty implies something more ultimate than itself, in terms of which it exists. If duty is to have any moral significance at all, one must define it as that which value commands. The good will may thus be understood as transcendently self-contained on the divine level, and as reflected on the human level as obedience to the duty of conforming to it for its own sake. Here the obedience of Jesus becomes intelligible as the good will revealing itself dialectically in a movement of unconditional demand and response which fulfills and validates the life of man by raising it above itself. Man transcends creaturehood only as he accepts it in obedience to the demand which absolute value makes upon him, and in his acknowledgement that this very acceptance represents absolute value working in him, that it is truly God who speaks when man sincerely prays: "Not my will but Thine be done." Kant was correct in his assertion that duty predicates freedom; he was also correct in identifying absolute value with the dutiful response, at least for man. If the good will consists in obedience to the claim of value yet is itself identified with value, its human exercise in freedom is a paradox unless value be regarded as basically immanent in man. Thus Kant characteristically speaks of the good will as the disposition of finite rational beings to act in accordance with laws which they prescribe to themselves as expressions of their own rational nature. But faith is not afraid of paradox. And it is only proximately that value can be equated with the dutiful disposition, for it involves a focus which is liberal rather than dutiful, magnanimous rather than punctilious. To define God as ineffable perfection would be sterile were it not for the recognition that perfection, while self-contained, is nonetheless dynamic, revealing itself in a gracious self-disclosure which constitutes at the same time an unlimited claim. It reveals itself in a good will which is both creative and constitutive of value.

Henry Nelson Wieman, whose value theory culminates in an empirical theology, considers it imprecise to attribute personality to absolute value or God, because he mistakenly conceives personality to be something creaturely and relative. Hence, he speaks of God as the impersonal "creative event." Still, he understands that "the mythical symbol of person or personality may be indispensable for the practice of worship and personal devotion to the creative power ..." Surely, absolute value cannot be less than conscious, yet how can consciousness be assigned to an event? And why should personality be seen as necessarily creaturely and relative? For our part we do not scruple to say that God is personal, for we affirm Him as creative will, and will is the very core of personality. To say that God is personal is to say that absolute value is dynamically integral, that it transcends the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, universality and particularity, freedom and necessity.

The affirmation that absolute value is dynamically integral indicates that it possesses, together with profound diversity, a simplicity and ultimacy which renders it impervious to analytical definition. Centuries before G. E. Moore decided that good, being a simple and ultimate term, is analytically indefinable, many a mystic had reached essentially the same conclusion. The Council of Nicaea wrestled with the problem of how to retain this insight without abandoning the equally important one that absolute value is inexhaustibly rich and multiform, and that our apprehension of it, although ineffable, impels symbolic description and communication. Thence arose the orthodox symbol of the Trinity, which holds in unexpugnably mysterious tension the simplicity and diversity of God.

Natural reason, through our innate consciousness of duty, tells us that value is worthy of our unconditional loyalty, regardless of prudential considerations. It tells us that the good will requires and incorporates the will to justice. But it does not tell us what the good will is in its quintessence. For the innate consciousness sees absolute value only as refracted by its own self-centeredness as a rival to its own absolute pretensions, and cannot conceive it save under the aspect of judgment and therefore condemnation. Only a supernatural initiative could disclose its heart, could breach the barrier erected by the human ego, and reveal that God is love.

It is only on the human plane that the good will manifests itself as a response elicited by value, although faith will testify that this response does not originate with man. But the initial movement of the dialectic is not one of response to value but of condescension, of self-giving wholly gratuitous and never bestowed as a matter of right upon its object. This is why the good will is so imperfectly represented by the Kantian idea of rational virtue as that which wills evenhanded justice. Kant himself must have been aware of this inadequacy, inasmuch as he allowed a place in his theory for divine forgiveness, despite its inconsistency with the rest of his position. The idea of rigorous and evenhanded justice as asserted by the good will is not in itself imperfect. As we shall later see, it does indeed describe a vital aspect of the good will in its upward and horizontal movements. But it cannot without perversion be equated with the good will in any comprehensive sense.

Strictly speaking, God cannot be positively just to man but only gracious. Justice consists in giving value its due, and there is nothing so valuable in man as to command a debt from God. The relative owes even its existence to the absolute; the absolute owes nothing to the relative. To say that God is just is not to say that He is just to men except in terms of negative retribution, for otherwise He would not be God. To say that God is just is to say that He demands justice of men, horizontally as among themselves, and vertically as toward Himself. His holiness is, in fact, nothing other than His demand for justice toward Himself; it is the refusal of absolute value to share its claim to absolute allegiance with inferior values.

There is another way in which the unlimited association of the good will with the just motive is inadequate. The good will in its gracious and creative dynamism wills not merely justice but also truth and beauty, even as it is itself their apex. Kant, in his characterization of the good will as the rational will, paid tribute to the fundamental unity of truth and justice on the horizontal level, but only indirectly and by implication did he acknowledge that truth, since it transcends the horizontal level, transcends also the principle of universal consistency. The divine self-giving is not bound by universal law: it is its author not its creature. Rules of distributive justice are not germane to it, for it is totally gratuitous and supererogatory.

Since beauty is the direct sensory expression of absolute value in its downward thrust, it is a mode of grace and therefore above law. It prescribes the rules of taste but is not subsumed under them. The aesthetic confrontation is an unconceptualized demand which is not experienced as duty because it carries no horizontal imperative, evoking a spontaneous appreciative response which is complete within itself. Yet at the same time it kindles an impulse to open the self further to its penetration by cultivating disciplined awareness, and this impulse is a manifestation of the voice of duty even if it be not often so conceived. Moreover, the response to beauty has a creative as well as a contemplative side. The sensory expression of transcendence demands imaginative recapitulation, concrete objectification by the hand of man. Art is in this respect an immediate celebration of the divine: the artist knows his work to be a calling, a privilege which is yet an awesome and unsparing obligation. This obligation has no horizontal stratum: the communication of beauty to others is a by-product not the end of the artist's fundamental task. Like the good will, which in it discloses itself to sensibility, beauty is to be venerated solely for its own sake, through creative effort as through contemplation.

The good will, multiform in its revealedness, alone possesses intrinsic worth. In it the potential and the actual are merged in hypostatic union, and it has no end beyond its own existence. Everything else has but contingent worth, depending upon its inherent potential capacity to fulfill its end — complete conformity to its role in the Kingdom of God, the functional hierarchy in which the particularization of the good will finds expression. On this level, then, value may be understood as entelechia, the germinal competence of an entity to realize its proper destiny.

We are now ready to attempt a definition of a right. A right is a relationship between value and obligation. It is the claim that value be respected. This claim has an objective pole and a subjective pole. The former is the demand that value be respected in things external to us. The latter is the demand made upon our total being by the potentialities that lie within us. The internal potentiality for the fulfillment of a destined end rightly demands nurture, and renders doubly grave the obligation for positive response toward the realization of that end. This is the teleological meaning of noblesse oblige.

Since rights are dependent upon value, and value is functional, it follows that rights too are functional. Just as value is the inner potentiality of an entity to perform its proper function, so is a right its corresponding claim to external freedom to perform that function. This freedom is the relationship in which respect for value finds expression. If value — the inner potentiality — is lacking, there can be no rights, inasmuch as without it no addition of external freedom can create the necessary capacity.

There is but one exception to the foregoing functional definition of a right. That exception is the absolute right of God. God's value is absolute not relative, intrinsic not instrumental, infinite not finite. Therefore His right is not limited, like that of man, to functional freedom, but incorporates the title to make infinite positive demands. If God had not created or redeemed man, or done anything at all for him, He would still have an absolute claim upon him simply by virtue of what He is in Himself.

Turning from the supra-human to the sub-human level, there is a certain sense in which even inanimate objects may be said to possess rights insofar as they possess value. Something like the rights of inanimate objects is implied in the scriptural mandate to "use the world, as not abusing it."

Inanimate objects have a literal right to protection against wanton spoliation. David G. Ritchie scoffs at the idea of ascribing rights to "pictures or stones ... because a work of art or some ancient monument is protected by law from injury," but he gives no reasons for the alleged absurdity of such ascription. The shelling of the Parthenon, the bombardment of Monte Cassino — these were crimes not alone against humanity but against the things themselves, against priceless concretions of objective worth. It is true that inanimate things derive their value from a relationship which they bear to man, but it is not a value which man confers subjectively upon them. It is man, rather, who participates in the realm of values as he takes his place in the objective structure of relationships which all things have to one another ideally in terms of the cosmic hierarchy of ends.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Imputed Rights by Robert V. Andelson. Copyright © 2010 The estate of Robert V. Andelson. Excerpted by permission of Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0856832782
• ISBN 13: 9780856832789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 192