Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Moral duties and positive rights
Moral duties and positive rights
Jan 11, 2025 9:42 PM

During a conference I attended last year, I got into some conversation with young libertarians about the nature of moral duties. In at least two instances, I asserted that positive moral duties exist.

In these conversations, initially I was accused of not being a libertarian because I affirmed positive rights. This accusation was apparently meant to give me pause, but I simply shrugged, “So be it. If being a libertarian means denying positive moral duties, then I’m not a libertarian!” I then pointed out that I never said that government must be the agent of respecting or meeting those duties, to which the accusatory tone of my dialog partners subsided.

I gave the biblical example of the case of the Good Samaritan, who recognized the love imperative to stop and assist a victim of violent crime. I think it is an established element of Christian theological ethics that both negative and positive rights exist as a basic reality. That’s why we mit both sins mission and sins of omission, and the Book of Common Prayer includes confession to God that “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”

This, for instance, is in part why the Westminster Larger Catechism, in its exposition of the Decalogue, describes both the positive and negative elements that are obliged in mandment. So in the case of mandment against murder, the Catechism outlines both “duties required” and “sins forbidden,” the former of which include forting and succoring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent,” and the latter of which include avoiding anything that “tends to the destruction of the life of any” (Q&A 134-136).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his classic text, Life Together, that

The other person is a burden to the Christian, in fact for the Christian most of all. The other person never es a burden at all for the pagans. They simply stay clear of every burden the other person may create for them. However, Christians must bear the burden of one another. They must suffer and endure one another. Only as a burden is the other really a brother or sister and not just an object to be controlled. The burden of human beings was even for God so heavy that God had to go to the cross suffering under it.

The confusion of these young libertarian thinkers on the distinction between positive and negative rights as well as the knee-jerk assumption that positive rights entail government action speaks to the important difference between libertarianism as a political philosophy and libertarianism as a full-blown world-and-life view. The former is certainly not without its problematic elements, but is far superior to a Weltanschauung that cannot account for positive moral responsibilities to family, friend, and neighbor.

By the way, I don’t mean to equate the errors of a few representatives with the entire variegated classical liberal tradition. Arnold Kling’s articulation of a “civil societarian” perspective seems pretty well immune to the criticisms noted above.

As I noted above, the parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates the claims upon my time and abilities that are made by other people. Bonhoeffer writes,

We must allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our more important daily tasks, just as the priest–perhaps reading the Bible–pass by the man who had fallen among robbers.

Ironically, Bonhoeffer rightly observed that religious professionals face a particular danger in not respecting the concrete claims of individual moral responsibility.

It is a strange fact that, of all people, Christians and theologians often consider their work so important and urgent that they do not want to let anything interrupt it. They think they are doing God a favor, but actually they are despising God’s “crooked yet straight path” (Gottfried Arnold).

I explore the truth of this observation in my own experience in a previous Acton Commentary, “The Good Samaritan: Model of Effective Compassion.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
That Time Obama Quoted Luther
This is a post about that time that President Obama quoted Luther (Martin, the reformer, not the anger translator). Okay, maybe the President didn’t quote the monk with a mallet, but suspend your disbelief for a few more paragraphs at least. Remember the kerfuffle when President Obama uttered those infamous words, “You didn’t build that”? It was, granted, a long time ago (3 years, in fact). But as I argued at the time, there was some truth in the basic...
Lunchbox Markets: A Moral Tale
Even children intuitively understand that exchange can and often does mutually benefit those who trade, says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. “As it turns out, that mutual benefit is often not only material but, at its base, moral as well.” I am unsure how it is that Rita ended up with a peanut butter and M&M sandwich in the first place. Certainly not under our current First Lady’s watch — that’s for sure. Perhaps Rita’s mother let her...
Chalk Art For The Life of the World
In his review of the Acton Institute’s film series, For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, Andy Crouch noted itsartistic merits, observinghow well it conveyed “deeply Christian themes in widely accessible ways.” “I can only hope that many of us will indeed watch and learn,” he writes, “and that we will then give ourselves away, as skillfully, promptly, and sincerely as these filmmakers have done, for the life of the world.” Now, in response to the series,...
Who Earns Minimum Wage And Why It’s Okay
Do you remember trying to find that first job? You’d be told you needed experience by an would-be employer, but no one would hire you so you could get the experience. Finally, a burger joint or a summer ice cream shop or a retailer would give you a chance, usually beginning at minimum wage. At AEI, Mark J. Perry looks at the world of the minimum wage worker. Here are a few facts: While teens are the ones who typically...
Getting Rich In Libya By Smuggling Humans
It’s not easy to make a living in Libya, one of the world’s poorest nations. However, Libya has one thing going for it: its proximity to Europe. This is making smugglers rich. Quentin Sommerville of the BBC reports his interaction with one of the smugglers. People smugglers don’t take too kindly to enquiries about their business but, after weeks of searching, one agreed to speak to me if he could remain anonymous. He’s grown rich out of the trade. “The...
Income Inequality Isn’t The Problem; Greed Is
Recently, Rev. Robert Sirico spoke in Chicago. He was asked a question regarding e inequality. His answer was that he didn’t care how much money Bill Gates had, nor did it matter to him the difference between Gates’ e and say, Warren Buffet’s. Nor did he care about the difference between how much wealth Gates has and his own personal e. No, Sirico said, what he cared about were the poor: those people so disconnected from the global marketplace that...
François Michelin — The Anti-Gordon Gekko
François Michelin (1926-2015), former leader of the the world’s second-largest tire maker, died early today at the age of 88. Michelin was actively involved in the French pany, Group Michelin, until 2002, driving unprecedented growth for pany. His “passion for innovation” and “his promising attention to quality” no doubt caused the pany to thrive. Automotive News reported a statement from current Group Michelin CEO Jean-Dominique Senard: “On behalf of the Group’s employees, I would like to pay special tribute to...
Immigration To The West: ‘A Moral And Intellectual Embarrassment’
Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review, takes up the immigration issues facing the West. His assessment is that the West suffers from a “schizophrenia” of a sort, where those of us in the West accept “one-way” immigration as a given. Westerners accept that these one-way correspondences are true. Nonetheless, they are incapable of articulating the social, economic, and political causes for the imbalances, namely the singular customs and heritage that make the West attractive: free-market capitalism, property rights, consensual...
The Economic Effects of the Baltimore Riots May Last Decades
Of all the disheartening scenes of ing out of Baltimore this week, few havebeen asdispiriting as the imageof a church project that was set ablaze. For the past eight years the Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore has been working on a project that would provide munity center and e housing in the form of 60 senior-citizen apartments. The construction was expected to pleted in December. And last night it all burned to the ground. Those associated with the project...
Proxy Disclosure Resolutions About Politics, Not Transparency
This past week, The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal offered up a piece of agitprop masquerading as trenchant political analysis. It seems – well, not seems inasmuch as Blumenthal pretty much declares outright – that he isn’t much of a fan of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s antipathy toward shareholder proxy resolutions promoting political spending disclosure policies. Likewise, writes Blumenthal, three other “usual suspects” – the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and The Wall Street Journal – are aligned...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved