By Randall Smith
Something that should be understood more often is that every claim of a right implies a corresponding obligation in others, either to do something or to abstain from doing it. If I have a right to healthcare, then someone has the obligation to provide it to me. If I have a right to freedom of speech, others must not prevent me from speaking.
Now, let’s think about the problems that arise in a society whose moral discourse is dominated by competing claims of rights, a society in which people love to talk about rights, but rarely talk about obligations. If every claim of a right entails an obligation for others, and no one is willing to consider their obligations, only their rights, then we have the perfect recipe for social frustration, or something worse.
I have written before about what is often called “expressive individualism”, something rampant in our current society. Expressive individualists do not recognize unchosen obligations. According to this view, people are bound only by the commitments they have “freely assumed.” Professor Michael Sandel, from Harvard, describes this as the “unencumbered self” (unencumbered self).
Thus, we are all willing to claim that we have abundant rights, but few seem to consider themselves obligated to anything more than what they choose for themselves.
But why would something obligate me if it does not promote my own expressive self-realization? And why commit to something permanent, like a marriage, if there is a possibility that, in the future, it stops favoring my self-realization? And then we wonder why fewer people get married and more get divorced.
Perhaps we need to learn a new language.
Let’s think about what would happen if, instead of talking about “rights”, we talked about obligations. While rights, in our culture, tend to be absolute, obligations are always circumscribed.
I have certain obligations as a father or as a teacher, but they are not unlimited or open-ended. In contrast, if I have a right to own a gun or to consume pornography, that right “overrides” any social analysis of costs and benefits.
Someone might say: “But mass gun ownership causes such and such problems.” But that doesn’t matter if people have a right to own them. A claim of right overrides almost any consequential analysis, and that’s why it is invoked so often. Once someone declares they have a right, the conversation is supposed to be over.
Some people within the Church also like to talk in terms of rights. They say things like: “People have a right to emigrate.” But that is not entirely true. What the Church teaches is that people have a right to emigrate, not to immigrate. They have a right to leave their country if they are victims of tyranny or abuse. Countries must not prevent them from leaving, as communist regimes did during the Cold War (and some still do today).
The problem with this “right” is that there is no correlative right to immigrate to a specific country. If I travel to France and think: “I like Paris; I think I’ll stay here,” the French government is not obligated to let me stay. I have no right to immigrate there. If they discover that I have exceeded my stay, they will probably deport me, that is, repatriate me to my country.
No one would blame the French for doing so, because I have no right to live in France that the government must obey.
Now, in certain circumstances, countries may be morally obligated to welcome people. Indeed, we are called to be generous and to help those fleeing danger. But if we talked in terms of obligations instead of rights, we could establish what obligations we have and what obligations those who are welcomed have. We are a constitutional republic; those who immigrate here have the obligation to respect that form of government.
The French have a language, a culture, and a system of government that they wish to preserve. If I were to live in France, it would be rude to demand that everyone speak to me in English or that everything be done as in the United States.
Likewise, we have a language, a culture, and a form of government in the United States that we consider important to preserve. An essential part of that cultural legacy is our generosity and our willingness to welcome those who wish to live peacefully together, even if in their countries of origin they were adversaries.
Likewise, newcomers are obligated, like everyone else, to commit to the constitutional order and the common good. Guests who do not behave can be sent back home.
People—including clerics—who piously talk about rights without recognizing that they impose obligations on others (and not on themselves), and who refuse to talk about the obligations of guests, fuel social frustration instead of helping to resolve it. They load heavy burdens on others without lifting a finger to alleviate them.
In a society dominated by expressive individualism and “unencumbered selves”, it is naive to think that those who do not feel obligated toward their own spouses, elderly parents, or unborn children will feel obligated to care for strangers from other countries.
Clerics who never preach against the culture of expressive individualism, for fear of being seen as closed-minded “culture warriors,” should not be surprised if few pay attention to their claim that foreigners have an unlimited right to immigrate. It is an obligation that “unencumbered selves” will hardly accept.
Gaining prestige for progressive attitudes may be flattering. But if the hard work of fostering a culture of commitment is not done, the fruits of a culture of commitment will not be obtained.
About the author
Randall B. Smith is a professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas, in Houston, Texas. His most recent book is From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body.