Simone Weil on obligations, rights and the need for roots after 75 years

In my recent book, “Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America,” I argue that Catholics should neither endorse nor use the language of individual rights. Of course, I understand that this assertion is both surprising and foreign to the American ear. We invoke our individual rights, we believe, as protections both against government overreach and intrusion into our private lives.

Indeed, for most Americans, the moral life is inconceivable apart from individual rights as the foundation of morality, upon which both private action and public policy are based. Nor, of course, does the typical Catholic see any tension between his faith and a commitment to individual rights.

My contention, however, is that possessive rights theory is the foundation of the defective moral anthropology of enlightenment liberalism as invented by 17th-century moral philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In my book, I explain that this theory of individual rights is not merely incompatible with the Christian doctrines of solidarity and common good, but contradictory to them.

This is because rights language is the expression of Hobbes’ “state of nature,” which is a “war of every man against every man.” Put another way, rights language is the moral expression that we are all naturally enemies of one another. Thus, when we assert our rights on the one hand, we perpetuate the very disharmony and conflict that we bemoan on the other.

Of course, alert readers will reply that magisterial documents are replete with rights language. Papal and other official writings often invoke a theory of rights as compatible with, and even derived from, Catholic moral theology. Even beloved Popes St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI often referred to rights of various kinds. Read carefully, however, these invocations of rights do not refer to rights as a foundational moral category. Rather, they use rights to describe logical corollaries of fundamental Catholic moral categories of dignity, duty and common good.

For example, the landmark Declaration on Religious Freedom, “Dignitatis Humanae” from the Second Vatican Council “declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom.” But rather than invoke this right as a basic moral category, “Dignitatis” quickly explains that it is itself based on the “dignity of the human person as … revealed [by] the word of God.” Thus, religious freedom must be recognized not as a natural right in a mythical state of nature, but rather as a “civil right” derived from the duty of governments to protect human dignity. Put another way, man has a duty to worship God; governments have an obligation to protect this duty through political and legal measures. The phrase that we use to describe this immunity is “civic rights.”

This understanding of rights as derivative of duties and obligations is far less problematic than liberalism’s theory of rights as the basis of all moral life. Indeed, while the word is the same, the meaning is completely different. Unfortunately, however, we Americans are ill-equipped to see the distinction or to understand rights language as expressing anything other than individual possessive claims against one another in a war of all against all.

A useful antidote to this malady is a careful reading of French philosopher Simone Weil’s profound book, “The Need for Roots,” published in France 75 years ago this year. We can both redeem the time since this publication, as well as redeem our understanding of the nature of the human person, by revisiting this remarkable work.

Weil begins “The Need for Roots” with an express discussion of rights as derivative of obligations as the foundational moral category. “The concept of obligations takes precedence over rights,” she explains. Thus, rights “are subordinate and relative to” obligations. Weil suggests, in fact, that there’s no such thing as a right other than in relation to obligation. Thus, a right is not an individual possession, as in the modern liberal theory, but rather the recognition of our mutual obligations to one another.

A right, she contends, is fulfilled when people “recognize that they have an obligation towards” others. Rights only exist as the subjective recognition of obligations. “A man alone in the world would have not rights,” she concludes, “but he would have obligations.” Obligations are unconditional; rights are conditioned upon obligations.

This short column cannot do justice to the intricacy of Weil’s important book. But that’s not my purpose. Rather, as with all columns in this space, my purpose is to introduce Catholic readers to classic works that may have been neglected or overlooked over the years. Simone Weil died at the age of 34, which makes “The Need for Roots” all the more remarkable in its erudition and insight. As Catholics, we can learn much about our own faith from reading this extraordinary work from one of the great minds of the 20th century.

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