On the 15th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Pope John Paul II prophesied that the principles put forth by its eminent drafters “would be rapidly devalued if the international community did not eventually seek to root them in [its] various national, cultural and religious traditions.” Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs is one such effort, specifically, to chart the Christian and Jewish lineage of rights and to defend this heritage against its detractors, religious and secular alike. His overarching project, though, is not to champion the UDHR but to provide a systematic argument that justice is best conceived as the recognition of inherent individual rights. Absent this foundation, the natural rights enumerated in the UDHR cannot be defended philosophically, grounded theologically, or distinguished clearly from rights that polities or the UDHR socially confer. No serious theoretical discussion of human rights can afford to ignore such a forceful underlying claim about justice as rights.

With this painstaking opus, Wolterstorff joins the ranks of Rawls, MacIntyre, Nussbaum, Sandel, Taylor, Walzer, and other luminaries who have defined and shaped contemporary philosophical discourse on justice for our times. This massive, sometimes mazy, yet altogether magnificent tome is a scholarly achievement many years in the making. It has been, and will continue to be, widely discussed and debated as humanity ponders whether and what kind of ethico-religio foundations best promises to safeguard our commitment to rights. Professor Wolterstorff takes us on an exhaustive journey of ideas, as he crisscrosses theology and philosophy, narrative and theory, biblical exegesis and logic. The reader actually reaches the final destination of Wolterstorff's main thesis — that only God's love for every human being bestows worth that is sufficient to ground a conception of natural rights — in a rather pithy argument near the end of the book, but not before undertaking numerous philosophical side trips, identifying many dead-end arguments, and eliminating some circuitous paths of thought. In lieu of a scenic summary that emulates the book, I will take a more direct route.

Inhering in Western thought is a tension between two competing ways of conceiving justice. On one telling of the story, “justice as right order” dominated most biblical, philosophical, theological, and political traditions until the Enlightenment whereupon liberal theories of “justice as rights” (building upon Ockham's nominalism) supervened. To “right order” thinkers who tell this story such as Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, and Oliver O'Donovan, this turn toward subjective rights signifies a modern turning away from the medieval model of objective, natural, or divine right. These traditionalists contend that individual rights constitute an irremediably alien imposition on the older, organic and collective conception of justice, construed as a matrix of virtues, obligations, traits, and laws aiming to approximate some transcendent standard of a just or rightly ordered society. Wolterstorff devotes Part I — the most fascinating portion — of Justice to clarifying these two approaches and reconstructing this narrative before going on to rend and root out the confusion that right order theorists have sewn. He does so through an archaeological survey of the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament that uncovers rich and fertile soil for grounding justice in rights. This is no esoteric prolegomena: at base, avers Wolterstorff, only rights — and not right order accounts — recognize the dignity of all human beings commensurate with their God-bestowed worth and underwrite the attendant claims and duties that protect such worth.

Part II begins the task of explaining why only this biblical foundation (and the philosophical buttresses and theological joists that reinforce it) provide a sufficiently firm framework for rights. Rival theories — such as Greek and Stoic eudaimonism and Kantian universalism — do not pass muster. Why not? Eudaimonists espouse not the worth of human beings per se but of the life well-lived through the achievement of virtue. Eudaimonism can only defend those life-goods instrumental to happiness. Wolterstoff, however, is concerned to defend the natural rights of all persons regardless of any bearing on virtue or happiness. These are basic rights to goods which, if denied, we justifiably could claim to be wronged. For example, violating one's right to privacy entails wronging someone even when the injustice is unknown to the victim or does not adversely impact her. The eudaimon life of living well, regards justice insufficiently. A life must also go well (one's rights respected) if it is to be a flourishing life. This distinction presupposes that justice — respect for rights — is not simply instrumental to happiness, but constitutive of human flourishing. Thus, another ethical approach is needed: eirenéism (grounded in Hebrew concepts of shalom and buttressed by Augustine) is the term Wolterstorff assigns to such an innovation over classical eudaimonism.

Finally, Part III, devoted purely to theory, continues the work of burning the brush of prevailing human rights arguments and objections so as to clear a plot where Wolterstorff can construct his central claim. Perhaps the most common secular defense of rights is the Kantian appeal to human dignity, grounded in the universal capacity for rational action. But is reason truly universal, Wolterstoff asks? On what basis, for example, do the comatose or the demented enjoy rights? (A skeptical reader might find confirmation for Wolterstorff's worries by looking to the growing vulnerability of the infirm, the deformed, the unformed, and others whose capacities have degenerated or not fully developed.) Wolterstorff is here casting doubt not simply on human reason but on any capacity-based theory as a basis for human rights since no human capacity is uniformly shared among every person. This move even rules out certain theistic appeals such as to the imago Dei, which, as articulated in Genesis 1:26–28, presupposes the mandate (and ability) to exercise “dominion.” When Wolterstoff finally reaches his own claim — that God's individualized love bestows worth on every human person — it almost feels like a reversed God-in-the-gaps argument: all such other possibilities having failed, what remains is this theistic explanation of rights. Nonetheless, Wolterstorff staked out his convictions early on, and the theistic lights that illumined his path remind us that (his) belief in God precedes (our) understanding of rights. Indeed, he goes so far to say that secularists whose faith in human rights is based on arguments he has refuted have indirectly been given an argument for theism. While I may share Wolterstorff's theistic convictions, I am dubious many secularists will be so moved.

All of this raises an interesting conundrum: Is Wolterstorff's effort to develop a universal (i.e., foundationally true) defense of natural human rights at odds with John Paul II's (and others') efforts to extend the universality of human rights by embedding them within the cultures, religions, and traditions of the world (including, presumably, secular ones)? Perhaps what is most needed is not a tightly-knit blanket defense of rights that covers every bare spot or potential objection but, rather, a lumpy patchwork quilt approach that stitches together the sundry traditions and clashing patterns of thought comprised by the various colors, cultures, and religions of the world.

Interestingly, Wolterstorff is not only concerned with secular arguments, whether Kantian defenses of human rights or Rortyian denials of them. He handily takes on many religious voices as well: Christians too indifferent to victims of injustice or those who contend that agape love supersedes justice; believers who fear that liberal “rights talk” mutes the “alien” or radical message of authentic Christianity; biblical scholars whose critical hermeneutics preclude Wolterstorff's constructive use of scripture; theists tepid about imposing their convictions on others; and, of course, “right order” traditionalists who deny individual human rights altogether.

I found myself sympathetic to Wolterstorff's cause as he engaged these interlocutors. But I struggled with certain infelicities — unintended consequences or costs of his approach, particularly in shearing off a thick account of human relationships. For example, in Part I's zeal to tie biblical justice to rights, a measure of scripture's richness is leached out. The choice to translate the Hebrew term tsedeqa as “going right” or “doing right” — out of apprehension over the traditional translation “righteousness” — leads Wolterstorff away from powerful concepts of holiness, piety, and closeness to God central to both public-communal and personal-spiritual dimensions of biblical justice. One might even say that righteousness is foremost concerned with the proper ordering of human and divine relationships (there may yet be a place for “right order” language here), which goes well beyond Wolterstorff's repeated claim that “rights are normative social relationships.” A commitment to rights no doubt helps to structure, preserve, and protect those relationships, but there are many relational covenants, commands, and attitudes that biblical justice enjoins but rights do not.

I was further taken aback when, in Part II's fascinating chapter on Augustine, Wolterstorff recruits the famous church father to defend justice-as-rights. Noting that Augustine breaks with pagan eudaimonists, Wolterstorff sidelines the early Augustine who in, The Morals of the Catholic Church, clearly offers a Christian account of the happy life in which justice, like other cardinal virtues, is a form of caritas (i.e., rendering to God one's love that is due). But even in accenting the later Augustine, I was struck that Wolterstorff makes no mention of Augustine's looming “right order” tendencies. Augustinian justice is foremost concerned with the ordering of right relationships in accordance with God's ways and Christ's teachings. Augustine's notion of the ordo amoris — the ordering of human loves in ways that honor and sustain these right relations — aptly characterizes even (especially!) the later Augustine. Recent scholarship by Robert Dodaro and Eric Gregory bears this out.

Perhaps my greatest hesitation arises in Part III when Wolterstorff disqualifies the notion that human nature — even a theological anthropology in which humanity is created in God's image — might sustain a defense of rights. Recall that Wolterstorff already has shown that “capacities-resemblance” cannot undergird rights for those who lack such capacities or do not resemble the excellences that impart worth to human beings (this includes Alzheimer's patients who do not possess the imago Dei since they lack the ability to exercise “dominion”). Wolterstorff then asks whether “nature-resemblance” can account for such “sufficient worth.” But this turns out to be a distinction without much difference, for he says a “human being in whom human nature is functioning properly is of great work, truly admirable. But why would one think that a being in whom human nature is seriously malfunctioning is still of great worth just because it has that nature?” (351). Wolterstorff only means to restate the pagan view that human nature is reducible to capacities and excellence, but in so doing he contends that human nature adds nothing to the argument.

One might have thought that Wolterstorff would have proposed a different distinction: between what gives human nature its worth (including certain capacities) and what gives each human being his or her individual worth (membership in the species of homo sapiens that possesses this nature). Such a distinction helps to ground rights in human relationality — shared membership in the human family — rather than in the possession or perfection of certain capacities. This distinction similarly resembles the potentially differing bases for God's general love of humanity and God's particular love of each person, which Wolterstorff accepts.

To push a little further, Wolterstorff overlooks that it is not the category of human nature that is unable to ground rights, but rather what matters are the features of a particular moral anthropology. One might consider a different anthropology altogether. For there is something artificial, even unsettling about Wolterstorff's stark capacity claims, which obscure the spectrum of human life. The Alzheimer's patient does not abruptly lose her ability to reason or exercise dominion. Nor do embryos or children develop theirs overnight. I know a few artists and academics that seem to possess no capacity for “dominion” (if one means activities such as government, administration, farming, or environmental protection). But in none of these cases ought we to second-guess certain basic rights simply because human capacities are varied or wanting. Why? Because all of these people belong to the same praiseworthy yet diverse species whose members intrinsically possess different capacities, in varying levels of abundance, even at different stages within their own lives. Capacity differentials help form the stuff of human relationships, bringing people together and forging a shared idea of what it means to be human. Those who lack certain capacities (such as the ability to exercise dominion) offer up their dependency, respect, and gratitude to those who possess them. Those who possess other capacities have special obligations to protect weak and vulnerable members who do not. Along the way, we learn the value of other capacities — compassion, care, gratefulness, love — and their corresponding excellences.

The wide spectrum of capacities invites us to see that human nature itself is not reducible to any essential ability or perfection. So, rather than grounding rights in human worth, as defined by Greek or Roman accounts of excellence, we might consider whether a different moral anthropology provides a firmer footing for rights: a view of humanity which emphasizes that worth attends creation (we do not self-create it); that we possess a certain natural “given-ness,” which we do not control; and that we are dependent upon others for significant periods of our lives. This view invites us to see that it is no more definitive of human nature — we are no more or less human beings — when we are young than when we are old; or when we have certain capacities than when we do not. Thus, might a particular account of human nature provide a more suitable defense for those whose rights, Wolterstorff rightly contends, are most vulnerable. Indeed, none of us would be able to recognize, experience, and sustain the spectrum of human nature — or what it means to be human, humane, worthy of the name humanity—without such rights. Finally, even if one maintains that the worth of human nature is tied to various capacities and excellences, there is nothing that requires an individual's worth to be so grounded. His or her rights might still be rooted in human relationality, dependence, and created-ness. I take this to be an area on which some secularists and theists might agree.

Of course, none of these quibbles or qualms detracts from the tremendous contribution Wolterstorff has made to our philosophical acuity and theological discernment on these matters. Nor should we fail to render him his due for an erudite and sophisticated account of why rights are not wrong.