Juridics: Human Rights: Political scientist offers particular Christian objections to 'ideology of human rights'

Robert Kraynak is a professor of political science at Colgate University in 1978 where he began teaching after arriving from Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in government. He teaches courses in the fields of political philosophy and general education, including courses on American political thought, the history of Western political philosophy, natural law, religion and politics, and conservative political thought.

His recently published books are Christian Faith and Modern Democracy (Notre Dame Press, 2001), and In Defense of Human Dignity, edited with Glenn Tinder (Notre Dame Press, 2003). Earlier he had published History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Cornell Press, 1990), that formidible old skeptic and political philosopher.

In his 2001 book Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, Prof Kraynak

lists five reasons why Christianity should be resistant to the ideology of human rights:

--Duties to God and neighbor come before one’s own rights.

--Pronouncements of a hierarchically structured church grounded in divine revelation take precedence over individual conscience. [This item refers us to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, and puts us on alert as to the vagaries of the papal doctrince of subsidiarity a flawed view of society that undermines the relative autonomy of the various soceital spheres (sphere specifity, sovereignty, and universality) - Politicarp]

--Original sin implies distrust of weak and fallible human beings. [All human beings are weak and fallible, according to this view, and only the grace of God makes them otherwise either by individual character formation to do the good, or by divine miracle. A better approach here would start with Creation ["original blessing"] and Common Grace which God sheds abroad thru-out the whole world every tongue, and tribe, and nation, to persons, cultures, and societies of every religion. - P]

--The common good must come before individuals.

--Charity and sacrificial love are higher goods than the potentially selfish assertion of rights. [But can the State enforce them? Can the State even know for sure what they are, in all cases? - P]

Thanks to Celal's blog Icarus Redeemed, Dec31,2k6 entry, for this intriguing summative tidbit (I couldn't find the sources in the pages to which he live-links us).

Kraynak's list raises questions of ultimate value and of philosophical reflection. On the latter matter, the issues surrounding "the common good" trumping or being trumped by rights of one or more individuals is an old one that political thinkers have sawed on in a whole library of books, and politicians declaimed on in vast hours of talk, all now digitally recorded. Not least the present Prime Minister of Canada, who feels 2 men in love have a right to dismantle the 1woman1man standard for marriage, rendering such an intimate union a generic thing only, before the laws of Canada.

However, before we close too quickly on Kraynak's formulation, we should pause to consider that "the common good" is not obvious. Whose concept of the common good? In what context? On what authority? - Politicarp