Something that should more often be understood is that every assertion of a right involves a concomitant obligation on others either to do or refrain from doing something. If I have a right to health care, then someone has an obligation to provide it for me. If I have a right to freedom of speech, then others must not prevent me from speaking.
Now consider the problems that arise in a society whose moral discourse is dominated by competing claims of rights – one in which people love talking about rights but rarely talk about obligations. If every claim of a right involves an obligation on others, and if no one is willing to consider their obligations, only their rights, this is a recipe for social frustration and worse.
I’ve written before about what is often called “expressive individualism,” which is rampant in our current society. Expressive individualists don’t recognize unchosen obligations. Rather, on this view, people are bound only to those commitments “freely assumed.” Harvard professor Michael Sandel describes this as the “unencumbered self.”
So, we all are willing to assert that we have an abundance of rights, but few of us, it seems, consider ourselves obligated to anything other than the things we choose.
But why would I choose to obligate myself to something other than those things that foster my own expressive self-realization? And why would I obligate myself to something permanent, like a marriage, if the possibility exists that at some point in the future, it might not continue to foster my own expressive self-realization? And people wonder why fewer people are getting married and more people are getting divorced!
Perhaps we need to learn a new language.
Consider what might happen if, instead of “rights,” we talked about obligations. Whereas rights in our culture tend to be absolute, obligations are always circumscribed.
I have certain obligations as a parent or as a teacher, but they are not open-ended and unlimited. But if I have a right to own a gun or view pornography, then this right “trumps” any social “cost-benefit” analysis.
Someone might say, “But widespread ownership of guns causes x, y, z problems.” But that’s immaterial if people have a right to own them. A claim of a right outweighs most cost-benefit analyses; that’s why people claim them so often. Once you say you have a right, the conversation is supposed to be over.
Some people in the Church also like to speak in terms of rights. They say things like: “People have a right to immigrate.” That’s not quite true, however. What the Church actually says is that people have a right to emigrate. They have a right to leave their country if they are subjected to tyranny and abuse. Countries shouldn’t fence them in and prevent them from leaving, as was done by Communist countries during the Cold War, and still happens today.
The problem with this “right,” however, is that there is no concomitant right to immigrate to a particular country. If I travel to France and say to myself, “I quite like it here in Paris; I think I’ll stay,” the French government is not obligated to allow me to stay. I don’t have a right to immigrate there. If they find that I have overstayed my allotted time, they will likely “deport” me – that is to say, they will repatriate me back to my home country.
No one would blame the French for doing this, because I don’t have a right to live in France that the French government must obey.
Now, under certain circumstances, countries might be morally obligated to take people in. Indeed, we are called upon to be generous and to help people fleeing danger. But if we spoke in terms of obligations rather than rights, we might then be able to stipulate what obligations we have and what obligations those we have taken in have. We are a constitutional republic. Those who immigrate here have an obligation to uphold that form of government.
The French have a language, culture, and form of government they wish to preserve. If I go to live in France, it would be rude for me to insist that everyone speak English to me and that everything be done the way we do it in America.
So too, we have a language, culture, and form of government in the United States that we feel it is important to preserve. A significant part of that cultural heritage is our generosity to others and our willingness to take in people who are willing to live together peacefully with people from other cultures, even if in their home countries they were adversaries.
So too, they are obligated, like everyone else in the country, to devote themselves to the constitutional order and to the common good. Guests who don’t behave can be sent home.
People, including clerics, who talk piously about rights without recognizing that they are requiring obligations on others (and not themselves) and who refuse to discuss the obligations incumbent on guests to this country end up feeding social frustration rather than helping resolve it. They are placing heavy burdens on others without lifting a finger to help.
In a society dominated by expressive individualism and “unencumbered selves,” it’s foolish to think that people who won’t consider themselves obligated to their own spouses, elderly parents, or pre-born children will suddenly consider themselves obligated to care for unknown people from other countries.
Clerics who never preach against the culture of expressive individualism because they don’t want to be thought of as close-minded “culture warriors” should not be surprised if few people pay attention to their claim that foreigners have an unlimited right to immigrate. That’s an obligation “unencumbered selves” in a society of expressive individualism are unlikely to accept.
Gaining esteem for your progressive attitudes is flattering. But if you don’t put in the hard work to foster a culture of commitment, you won’t get the benefits of a culture of commitment.
