CWR Dispatch: Recovering the historical roots, true meaning of “social justice” by Gerald J. Russello
A review of Thomas Behr’s Social Justice and Subsidiarity, which explores the work of Luigi Taparelli, a Catholic thinker who advocated an approach to politics based in Thomistic natural law argument.
The Catholic understanding of rights is different because it is based in a different understanding of the person. We do have rights from our nature as human beings, but Catholic thought sees rights as ordered to higher goods. Our entitlement to exercise our rights is bound not just by our historical circumstances and those of our particular society, but also by conscience and “the clarity and utility of a chosen action in relation to the pursuit of the highest good. … The more directly related it is to the highest good, the stronger the claim of right. That is why certain rights are ‘inalienable’ – they are ineluctable requirements of order, of the orientation of the intellect to truth, and of the striving of persons within society for the ultimate good.”In other words, we have rights in order to do something, not simply to exercise those rights in whatever way we subjectively may wish and desire.
Related: Historian Explores Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought
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