Contemporary discussions of rights tend to be about where to place a caesura between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of rights. This caesura is primarily a matter of valuation, but it can also be one of historical narration: at a certain point in past time, a barrier between the acceptable and the unacceptable was crossed. For…
The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands, from Portugal to Germany, without border…
We are shocked. Morally outraged. How could a U.S. president, touting “law and order,” incite a blatant attack on “American democracy” and “the rule of law”? Commentators decry such hypocrisy, stating the obvious contradiction between U.S. constitutional law and violent coups. My contention in this essay is that no such contradiction exists. Rather, “the rule…
“Onward, Christian soldiers!Marching as to war,With the cross of Jesus Going on before.” Though this began as a song for a children’s processional, it also provides an apt description of the events that took place at the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6th. While it is important to note that not all the insurrectionists were White…
Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems to imply that mere amateurs, myself included, function with a less well-developed moral compass, or perhaps without one at all. His new book What’s Wrong With…
What’s Wrong with Rights is a superb book. If there is one subject that lends itself to interdisciplinary research, it is that of human rights. To the extent that lawyers have ever been able to claim a monopoly, those days are now well behind us. In this book, Nigel Biggar makes a fundamental contribution from…
Nigel Biggar is essentially right about rights. They are indeed paradigmatically legal. They are indeed conditional and limited. And it is indeed the case that they can neither be justly defined nor respected without attention to circumstances or without the virtues that enable agents properly to attend to the relevant circumstances. Biggar’s book What’s Wrong…
In a deeply divided nation, and especially after the events of January 6, 2021, no one is in a particularly forgiving mood. But times like these are precisely when we should make forgiveness part of our conversation. Luke 23:34 offers a simple admonition: “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they…
A mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Perhaps its most visible leader was a man wearing a bearskin headdress, Viking horns, and red, white, and blue face paint. And wielding a spear. Arrested in Arizona on January 9, Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. “Jake Angeli,” also goes by the title “QAnon Shaman.” This is no…
In his book What’s Wrong with Rights?, Nigel Biggar argues that “the task is actually not to jettison talk about subjective rights, but rather to save it by re-setting it in a larger framework of objective right” (142). In Biggar’s view, advocates, activists, scholars, and, most problematically, judges claim that rights are natural, meaning they…