Michael Gottsegen: On Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs

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For those who might assume that Christian philosophy must be hostile to contemporary
subject-centered human rights discourse, and must affirm the primacy of duty relative to right
and the primacy of love relative to justice, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent book, Justice: Rights
and Wrongs, constitutes a profound rejoinder. Wolterstorff’s book also marks an important
contribution to the ongoing efforts of analytic philosophers of law and ethics to arrive at a
perspicuous understanding of the nature of fundamental human rights and of rights more
generally. Had Wolterstorff’s book only made these contributions to the human rights discourse
of analytic philosophy, it would merit the attention of post-foundational analytic philosophers
who might scoff at Wolterstorff’s engagement with foundational questions and his theistic
commitments.

Even philosophers who are uninterested in, or unconvinced by, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s
argument for a theistic/biblical grounding of human rights in his recent book, Justice: Rights
and Wrongs, will find much of interest in his conceptualization of human rights, a
conceptualization which is prior to, and logically independent of, his search for grounding. In
this regard, Wolterstorff offers insights and arguments, including: a profound take on the
relational character of human rights; an innovative analysis of the interplay of claim-rights and
permission-rights in the structuration of the interpersonal field; a contribution to the analytic
conceptualization of the relationship between rights and duties; reflections upon the affective
dimension (or felt sense) of “requiredness” associated with the concept of obligation; and an
analysis of the universe of meanings encompassed by the reciprocal correlation of right and
wrong – in contradistinction to the universe of meanings encompassed by the reciprocal
correlation of rights and duties -- in which he places special emphasis on the sense of “wrong”
that is intended when one speaks of “being wronged” -- which he employs to underscore what
would be lost if the concept of duty were to take precedence over the concept of right, as some
philosophers who regard rights as nothing but the correlative of duties have urged.

These general and significant contributions to an analytic conception of rights having been duly
noted, we turn our attention to Wolterstorff’s main concern which is to offer an argument for
the theistic and biblical grounding of these rights.
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Turning our gaze then to Wolterstorff’s effort to situate the philosophy of human rights, and
contemporary human rights discourse more generally, in relation to the Judeo-Christian
tradition, we observe that Wolterstorff is not content to argue that the modern discourse of
subjective human rights is compatible with the spirit that animates the Jewish and Christian
scriptures. Rather, he makes the far stronger claim that the conception of the human being and
of human worth which underlies our contemporary human rights discourse is of specifically
biblical provenance.

Clearly, this argument is intended to appeal to those philosophical and religious conservatives
who tend to dismiss “modern” rights discourse as a secular Enlightenment project. With an eye
to this same audience, Wolterstorff also seeks to demonstrate that human rights discourse is at
once authentically Christian and philosophically superior to the philosophies of right order and
divine command theories that Christian philosophers tend to espouse.

But Wolterstorff does not develop his genealogical argument for the biblical grounding of our
human rights discourse in order to persuade his fellow theists alone. Arguably of more general
interest, and of broader significance, is his engagement with a second audience which consists
of secular theorists of human rights. In this regard, he goes beyond suggesting the genealogical
priority of the Bible as the contingent source of our human rights culture, to claim that the
modern discourse of human rights, and our deepest intuitions as to what respect for human
worth properly entails, can only be adequately grounded philosophically on the basis of the
biblical testimony that every human being has been created in the divine image and is the
unique recipient of God’s redemptive love. With sights set on refuting the arguments of those
who would provide our human rights discourse with a secular philosophical grounding,
Wolterstorff argues that only such a theistic, and indeed biblical, understanding of human
origins, worth and rights suffices to establish the principle that mandates respect not only for
rational, and prospectively rational, human agents but also for those human beings who, as a
result of disease or injury, are no longer rational agents, and for human beings who, as a result
of prenatal events, shall never possess normal rational capacities. Indeed, with an insistence
that is powerful and poignant, Wolterstorff argues that the proper test for the adequacy of any
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philosophical grounding of human worth, of human rights and thus of duties of respect for all
persons, must not be whether a given theory can establish a basis for respecting those with
normal capacities but whether it warrants equal rights and mandates equal respect for those
persons whose capacities have been “diminished” by innate or acquired deficits. Wolterstorff
argues that, by this criterion, every extant, non-theistic, philosophical derivation of universal
human rights fails, and a substantial portion of the book is dedicated to demonstrating this
failure.

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Though Wolterstorff is manifestly a proponent of a strong universal human rights discourse and,
one can infer, would be a proponent of a strong human rights enforcement regime, the support
for human rights that his philosophical labor would provide, if taken on its own terms, would
ultimately prove quite detrimental to the modern human rights regime inasmuch as it would
uproot the inchoate multiplicity of its present foundations in favor of one singular ground which
is sure and pure. Instead of providing solid and broad support for human rights, however, this
singular ground which Wolterstorff commends is among the most improbable and non-
generalizable imaginable, namely, the biblical claim for the human being’s creation in God's
image and as a recipient of God's redemptive love. Not only is such a claim by itself prima facie
implausible to those who reside (intellectually or geographically) beyond the horizon of literal
belief in the foundational claims of the Abrahamic religious traditions, but if Wolterstorff is
correct that the modern belief in human rights is derived from these Abrahamic roots and
cannot long survive once cut off from these roots, then the prospect for the long preservation
of the culture of human rights is indeed quite grim.

If Wolterstorff had merely sought to demonstrate that the modern discourse of human rights is
genealogically traceable to the Judeo-Christian scriptures and that the biblical idea of human
creation in the image of God could provide this modern human rights conception with a most
solid warrant, then his argument would have provided a path for biblical theists who might want
to follow Wolterstorff in taking up the cross of commitment to the promotion and defense of
human rights. But Wolterstorff does not merely seek to contribute yet one more supportive
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plank to the overlapping consensus which sustains (albeit imperfectly) the global culture of
human rights in our pluralist age, a plank that might mobilize a certain tribe of late modern
theists on behalf of the important cause of defending human rights against the legion of
indifferent human rights agnostics.

Not content with merely showing why theists too ought to be devoted champions of human
rights, Wolterstorff mounts an argument in the negative which asserts the essential inadequacy
of the most cogent non-theistic philosophical arguments that have yet been offered as grounds
for a reasoned (and secular) commitment to human rights. As already noted, Wolterstorff’s
criterion of ethical adequacy requires that any adequate theory of human rights be capable of
providing principled reasons for regarding persons with diminished rational agency, and those
with undiminished rational agency, as possessing equal moral worth. Wolterstorff argues that all
efforts thus far to provide a secular grounding of human rights have failed to satisfy this
criterion. And while, Wolterstorff cannot claim to have canvassed every extant proposal for
secular grounding, he would claim to have engaged the leading contenders in the pages of this
book and to have shown them to be lacking. Whether Wolterstorff has in fact taken on and
refuted the best candidates is a point to which we will return.

Wolterstorff’s argument for the biblical grounding of the idea of universal human rights is
comprised of three moments, the first two of which are directed to demonstrating the
inadequacy of prior philosophical efforts to establish the idea of universal human rights, and a
third which aims to show that the biblical testimony of the Book of Genesis (an extra-
philosophical ground, we might note) serves to ground the idea of universal human rights.

While we have already called attention to Wolterstorff’s ultimate assertion of the biblical
grounding of human rights, he himself only shows his hand in the book’s penultimate chapter,
after demonstrating, at least to his satisfaction, the inadequacy of alternative philosophical
approaches. Having rejected, almost in passing, the claim that modern human rights discourse
is an Enlightenment invention, Wolterstorff turns his attention to refuting the argument that
would trace the beginnings of universal human rights discourse to the philosophies of Greco-
Roman antiquity. Surprisingly, Wolterstorff does not offer his readers an analogue of Hegel’s
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argument that the Greeks only grasped that some – and not all – are free. Rather, he
polemically asserts that eudaimonism constitutes the essence of Greco-Roman philosophy and
that eudaimonism per se is contrary to a universalizable conception of human rights. This rather
unconvincing line of argument – which reduces the great variety of Greco-Roman philosophy to
variations on eudaemonism -- brings to mind in both its character and motivation nothing more
than Augustine’s polemic in the City of God against Cicero’s claim that Rome had once been a
true republic with citizens who were animated by love of the common good. Augustine rejects
this claim as ipso facto inconceivable since Rome’s citizens were selfish sinners who sought only
the gratification of their own lusts, which is manifestly incompatible with the common good. A
more prosaic objection to Wolterstorff’s argument would note that this reduction of the variety
of Greek philosophy to a single common denominator permits him to sidestep with barely a
mention the challenge to his broader argument posed by Stoicism, which generations of
political philosophers, including Kant, have regarded as an important antecedent of the modern
universal conception of human rights.

If the first moment of Wolterstorff’s quarrel with philosophy aims to refute those who would
claim classical philosophy as a sourcefor what, in Wolterstorff’s opinion, the Bible alone can
effectively ground, the second moment of his quarrel with philosophy would deny the adequacy
of modern philosophy’s analogous efforts to mount an argument for universal human rights that
keeps strictly “within the limits of reason alone.” In particular, Wolterstorff opposes efforts that
would baseuniversal human rights upon a conception of human worth, which would be
predicated in turn upon the intrinsic dignity of the individual human being’s capacity for rational
agency. Since Kant’s formulation of this argument is in many respects still the most significant,
Wolterstorff addresses Kant’s argument as set out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals. While conceding that Kant does indeed offer a principled basis for thinking the rights of
all rational agents, Wolterstorff insists that the litmus test of its adequacy as a grounding of
human rights is whether this principle would extend the same ethical regard to Alzheimer
patients and to babies born with severe mental retardation as to persons in full possession of
their capacity for rational agency. Wolterstorff infers that the answer is no, and draws the
implication that Kant’s argument, and the arguments of other ethicists which are in this respect
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Kant-like, fail to provide the grounding which a strong and universal philosophy of human rights
requires.

To state the obvious, the ostensible “failure” of secular, non-theistic, or non-biblical grounding
of universal human rights, if it is indeed a “failure” that has been demonstrated, hardly
establishes by itself the cogency of the case for theological or biblical grounding. To gauge the
cogency of Wolterstorff’s positive argument we need to engage it directly.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is that after
400 pages of tarrying with the negative to show that philosophy, on its own, cannot successfully
ground universal human rights, Wolterstorff finally sets about the task of showing that the Bible
provides what philosophy cannot provide. While he has certainly telegraphed for hundreds of
pages that this is to come, and provided ample hints along the way that Scripture alone offers us
what philosophers have been looking for in all the wrong places, when the moment finally
comes for putting his cards on the table, this reader was dumbstruck by the relative brevity and
very paucity of the case which he offers. Basically, he offers little more than his own
philosophical analysis of the English language translation of the creation account in Genesis in
support of a particular interpretation of the ethical significance of the Bible’s reference to God’s
having created man in God’s own image. Wolterstorff’s underlying stance toward the authority
of the text seems to be entirely fideistic and he seems more than comfortable when he
observes that contemporary post-analytic philosophy proceeds contextually, with an eye to local
problems of meaning, and no longer concerns itself with the impossible task of providing a
comprehensive rational account of our presuppositions. But the implication that follows from
this is that Wolterstorff seems to think his work is done, and has been done to his satisfaction,
once he has demonstrated that his conception of universal human rights is sustained by his
interpretation of the words of Genesis, as supplemented by insights into the meaning of the
biblical text that he infers from Jesus’s special solicitude for lepers, the lame and the blind,
which show that God’s love extends even to those persons whom society scorns as being less
than fully human. My quarrel is not with Wolterstorff’s interpretation of the text, nor even with
the fact that he presents his reading as though it were not an interpretation at all but the plain
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sense,which would be apparent if we would only pay close attention to the actual words and
their meaning. Rather, what strikes me as inadequate in his mode of proceeding is two-fold.
First, there is a certain ambiguity in the nature of the claim he wants to make for the
significance of the biblical testimony in support of his conception of human rights. On the one
hand, he would have it that the Bible is the genealogical root of the conception of human rights
that culminates in the modern universal conception that Wolterstorff champions. And yet,
Wolterstorff really doesn’t provide much substantive historical evidence that this is the case,
and leans much more upon the negative evidence of the failure of the Greco-Roman tradition to
provide grounds for the universal human rights tradition. The implication, of course, is that if
the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition could not provide such grounds, then the grounds for
our modern conception of human rights must come from the Judeo-Christian tributary, a point
which is further corroborated by Wolterstorff’s “demonstration” that modern secular philosophy
also fails to provide the grounding that we seek. But, as already noted, at every point the
relation between Wolterstorff’s general claims and his very selective engagement with what
really amounts to an unrepresentative handful of sources has been problematic and indeed
tendentious. We have already noted that this was the case with regard to his engagement with
Greco-Roman sources and with regard to his engagement with modern and contemporary
secular sources as well. But this is just as much the case with regard to his engagement with
patristic and medieval Christian sources, and he barely acknowledges that there is a long
Christian tradition that fails by his own criteria of universal human rights, a long tradition of
denying the equal worth of non-Christian peoples and of peoples with different skin color, for
example. One wonders how it is possible that this hoary tradition was blind to the plain sense of
Scripture to which Wolterstorff’s reading attests? This is not to deny that the tradition of
Christian biblical interpretation also includes readings which are closer in spirit to Wolterstorff’s
own, but I would suggest that the wide variety of interpretations given to the phrase “in the
image of God,” within the pre-modern Christian tradition, should raise serious doubts about the
genealogical claims Wolterstorff makes for regarding Genesis’s references to the human’s
creation ‘in the image of God’ as the authoritative root of the modern universal conception of
human rights.
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But more troubling by far is Woltersrorff’s primary argument which is not genealogical but
fideistic and offered as the complement to his sustained argument to the effect that the
affirmation of universal human rights is essentially irrational, or rationally unfounded and
insupportable, which Wolterstorff’s critique of the failure of all secular, philosophical efforts to
deduce these rights is intended to demonstrate.

What then can save the edifice of human rights from sinking into the abyss? Surely only a God
could save us, and thankfully God has already done so, having provided our modern universal
human rights culture with the terra firma and sine qua non, which could come no other way
then by the gift of God’s revelation which we receive anew through our unmediated encounter
with Scripture: sola scriptura, by scripture alone; sola fidei, by faith alone – or rather by faith
that the Scripture is the eternal word of God, and by faith that God’s word resonates truthfully
in our reception and interpretation of the word. Had God not revealed to us that all human
beings are created (by God), in God’s image, and out of God’s abundant love, we should never
have grasped the truth that the principle of respect for the person and rights of each and every
human being is sacrosanct and not to be trumped by the democratic utilitarian principle of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, let alone by some nefarious principle according to
which the interests of some persons are deemed to be of more intrinsic consequence than the
interests of others.

Doubtless this line of argument might speak powerfully to those who already take for granted
that the Bible is the eternal word of God, and to those post-modern neo-Burkeans who,
believing that the search for rational grounds is misguided, feel we must therefore lash
ourselves all the more securely to those accidental and contingent pieces of cultural driftwood
which are the irrational but most precious supports of the rights we hold most dear. But what is
the significance of Wolterstorff’s line of argument for those who are neither post-modern, “neo-
Burkean” liberals nor religious believers? What significance does Wolterstorff think his
argument should have for them? Presumably he does not expect that many will choose to
embrace Christianity or Judaism just because he has convinced them that their de facto religion
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of human rights could only stand firm upon such a foundation. But what, then, would he have
them make of, or do with, his argument?

It seems they are to be left adrift. If Wolterstorff has been at all persuasive, these readers will
have seen that their deepest convictions, unmoored from their biblical supports, are really
ungrounded effluvia, historical debris, drifting downstream and soon to disappear beneath the
waves of time. While it seems unlikely, at least in the short run, that this revelation alone could
serve to speed the erosion of a now manifestly unanchored human rights culture, one might
imagine that Wolterstorff’s commitment to a robust universal human rights regime might have
led him to seek to provide alternative or supplemental supports for those who are as committed
as he is to human rights but who are constitutionally incapable of making the fideistic leap
which might land them on the warm hearth of biblical grounding. After all, if, as Wolterstorff
believes, God revealed the ground-norm of universal human rights in Scripture, then God
presumably did so because God wants all human beings to live in accordance with this truth of
fact, and, to this end, God would presumably want every human being to find some way of
depicting this truth of fact, or the consequent principles of human rights, to themselves so as to
elicit an engaged commitment to a praxis that would secure these rights for all. But, in fact,
Wolterstorff offers very little on this account.

The irony is that interleaved within this text, Wolterstorff offers a forceful philosophical account
of human rights, and of their inherent priority, which employs the analytic tools of ordinary
language philosophy while self-consciously excusing itself (while invoking the authority of tacitly
post-foundational Reformed epistemology) from the obligation to provide an exhaustively
foundational account. Starting from the assumption of the pragmatic adequacy of the human
rights language game which we native speakers are all already playing, Wolterstorff sets himself
the more modest task of making more perspicuous the tacit pragmatic logic of moral claims
which already informs our human rights discourse. While drawing mainly upon the resources of
ordinary language philosophy, he also engages at close quarters with the insights of 20 th century
Anglo-American legal philosophy in the course of developing his own conception of the logic of
human rights which, he would argue, is already implicit in our human rights discourse.
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Even, or perhaps especially, in our post-foundational age, one can appreciate why Wolterstorff
might desire to find a more secure foundation beneath the contingent givenness of our English
language, a contingent givenness which many other ordinary language philosophers accept as
the insuperable limit to our comprehension. And yet, though he is driven onward by this desire
for an ultimate ground, Wolterstorff readily acknowledges, with the majority of contemporary
philosophers, that it is not possible for us, qua philosophers, to obtain this philosophical
desideratum. If this is reason enough for many philosophers to give up the quest for strong
foundations as incompatible with philosophical maturity, for Wolterstorff the proper implication
is not that we ought to give up the quest but that what we are seeking lies beyond the limit of
philosophy. For Wolterstorff the acknowledgment of the limitations of philosophy only implies
that we must have the courage to seek through faith a ground which lies beyond the limits of
our capacity for perspicuous understanding. For Wolterstorff this ground is the manifest Word
of God as revealed in the Bible.

In his essay “On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power,” Lessing effectively puts Socrates’
question of the Euthyphro to those who would claim absolute authority for the truths
proclaimed in the Bible. Even if it could be established that everything reported in the biblical
books did happen precisely as these books proclaim, and that the Bible itself were miraculously
revealed in the manner affirmed by communities of the faithful, he avers that this would not be
enough to cause him to assent to the propositions or truths which the Bible proclaims as the
teachings of Christ or Moses. “The accidental truths of history,” Lessing insists, “can never
become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” But what does Wolterstorff’s recourse to the
Bible in his search of an absolute and unequivocal foundation for the philosophy of human
rights amount to if not an appeal to “the accidental truths of history,” as though such an appeal
might serve in lieu of the ground which he has already acknowledged reason cannot provide? In
this respect, we might note, Lessing, with his Enlightenment faith in reason, and in the
“necessary truths of reason,” had it far easier than we who share his skepticism with respect to
the normative validity of “accidental truths of history,” but lack his faith in the “necessary truths
of reason.” Wolterstorff’s own answer takes the form of a fideism which he defends on the
basis of his refined version of “Reformed Epistemology,” which in effect enables him to reverse
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Lessing’s dicta and to be sustained in his convictions by what many cannot but regard as being,
at best, “accidental truths of history,” and who cannot but find that Wolterstorff stands on the
far side of an “ugly, broad ditch,” which is uglier and broader for most of us than it was in
Lessing’s day, that we cannot cross, and which Wolterstorff’s appeal to the words of the Bible
does not help us to cross. This is not to say that there is any manifest shortcoming in
Wolterstorff’s interpretation of the relevant verses but to suggest that the Bible cannot serve for
most of us in the West, let alone in other parts of the world, as the kind of ground we are
looking for in support of universal human rights in our religiously pluralist world and in our
religiously skeptical age. Perhaps it can so serve for some, but then it will only count as one
ground among many, as one thread in the globally encompassing overlapping consensus that
still needs to be woven if the universal human rights culture that Wolterstorff would like to see
flourish is to take root and grow in places where the Biblical witness carries little cultural
authority.

At this juncture, I would like to return to Wolterstorff’s argument against the adequacy of any
secular account of the principle of universal human rights, which hinges on two dubious
assumptions, the first of which is that any adequate principle must mandate equal respect for
all persons, even those with severe cognitive defecits, and the second of which is that the
universality of this mandate must follow directly from the secular account’s first principle and
not result from a subordinate principle or ad-hoc stipulation. Both of these assumptions seem
to me to be misplaced, and, as I will argue below, not even Wolterstorff’s biblical account
accords with the second criterion.

Let us start then with Wolterstorff’s insistence upon universality. In my opinion, the centrality
that Wolterstorff affords to the relatively marginal cases of severely deficient human agents is
profoundly misguided. As the saying goes, hard cases make bad law. In light of this caution,
would it not be more cogent by far to argue that grounding respect for the equal worth of all
possessors of full agency is, and ought to be, the more central philosophical concern. Moreover,
if it were indeed the case that no single philosophical principle could be discerned that could
found the equal rights of Alzheimers patients and persons in full possession of their faculties, it
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seems to me that this would indicate not the inadequacy of secular grounding but the rational
inadequacy of any ethical rule that would treat the interests of such diminished persons as
worthy of equal consideration with the interests of the mentally competent. Indeed, on its face,
such a rule would seem to be utterly unjust inasmuch as it proposes to treat unequals equally.
From this perspective, it could be argued that certain versions of act utilitarianism, such as that
espoused by Peter Singer, are more rational and more just than the principle of equal and
universal respect espoused by Wolterstorff.

We would also note that Wolterstorff’s insistence that any secular philosophical grounding of
human rights must demonstrate its adequacy by specifying a single philosophical principle that
serves to ground equal universal human rights for all human beings, including those of
diminished rational capacity, imposes an unreasonable and insupportably parsimonious
standard which not even his own biblical derivation of universal human rights can meet. Indeed,
in his interpretation of the biblical account of the human being’s creation in the image of God,
Wolterstorff finds it necessary to treat this single creative act as encompassing two distinct
principles, the first being the principle of human worth that is grounded in the idea of the
human bearing the image of God, and the second being the principle that each individual has
been brought forth by a singular act of divine love which Wolterstorff adduces in support of the
equal worth of even those persons who bear a divine image which is marred or incomplete. But
if two principles are thus required in order to bring all humanity under the shelter of
Wolterstorff’s creation engendered sacred canopy, and to thereby achieve an equality of worth
and regard which cannot be obtained if one had only attended to the implications that follow
from “creation in the image of God,” then Wolterstorff should have been more charitable to
those secular philosophical accounts which are able to achieve with two principles what could
not be achieved with one.

For surely any secular account which began with the principle of respect for fully rational nature
could be supplemented by an ancillary principle of respect for rationally deficient persons. But,
in the spirit of the moral intuition alluded to several paragraphs ago which attested to the
irrationality of equal regard and respect for manifestly unequal persons, I would suggest that
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the proper desideratum is not a principle that mandates equal respect but appropriate,
proportionate and due regard and respect.

But even those who would not dispute Wolterstorff’s principle of extending equal regard and
respect to all human beings may be put off by Wolterstorff’s unjustifiably selective engagement
with only those Kantian-inspired philosophical positions that manifestly fail his litmus test and
thus serve his ultimate intention of validating the singular adequacy of the biblical grounding.
[Only this might explain why he chose not to engage with Rawls, for example, who is arguably
the most significant ethical and political philosopher of the post-war period, who is in some
respects quite Kantian but whose constructivist methodology departs from Kant in ways that
would permit him to extend the circle of equal respect to Wolterstorff’s litmus test cases.]

As already alluded to, Wolterstorff does not engage at close quarters with utilitarianism, as
though this position in moral philosophy were manifestly and necessarily incompatible with a
universal conception of human worth and a high regard for human rights. But manifestly all
utilitarianisms are not the same. And in this regard we would call attention [again] to
Wolterstorff’s conspicuous failure to engage with Rawls’ rule-utilitarian version of Kantian
constructivism which seems eminently capable of passing Wolterstorff’s litmus test. For while
Rawls does indeed presuppose that those who deliberate behind the veil of ignorance are
perfectly and equally rational (which Wolterstorff would surely flag as problematic inasmuch as
no Alzheimer patients could participate in these deliberations), the scheme of justice they are
tasked with elaborating, is intended for a world such as our own, and is thus a world in which
some persons are fated to be born with significant physical or mental defecits while others are
destined to succomb to early onset dementia. Is it not reasonable to expect, then, that Rawlsian
legislators, deliberating from behind the veil of ignorance, with background information enough
regarding the statistical probability of human frailty and vulnerability, but lacking any
information as to what any given individual’s position in this world is destined to be, might bring
forth a theory of justice, or rule utilitarian principles, that would include equal respect and
specific protection for the less than fully rational human beings for whom Wolterstorff is most
solicitous?
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For Wolterstorff, the ultimate goal is to ground the commitment to universal human rights on an
absolute foundation that would ensure that this commitment is enduring and effective. It is also
clear that Wolterstorff believes that it is the word of God alone, as set forth in the Bible -- a
ground that is surer by far, he would insist, than any contrivance of philosophical imagining –
that can provide the doctrine of universal human rights with such an immovable anchor.

At the same time, we might want to press Wolterstorff to acknowledge that in appealing
beyond philosophy to a text, to the Bible, as the ground, he is effectively appealing not merely
to The Book and its Author, but to the norms inscribed in the Book and thus to a community
whose collective life and communal praxis is imbued by these norms and values which it regards
as normative, as authoritative. Perhaps, then, we might read Wolterstorff’s appeal to the Book
as reflecting a tacit insight into the fact that the vitality of the human rights culture to which he
is manifestly committed depends upon the existence of a flesh and blood community that is
committed to securing these rights for all its members. From the fact of Wolterstorff’s appeal to
the Bible as the ur-source for a culture of universal human rights, and from his own work on
behalf of the Palestinians, we can infer that he wants very much to enlist his fellow Christians,
and perhaps other “peoples of the Book,” on behalf of the project of securing human rights not
only within these particular religious communities but more generally across the globe.

But in the multicultural global village of the present, it should be apparent that an argument for
universal human rights that would ground these rights exclusively upon a certain interpretation
of the biblical witness, while arguing against alternative or supplementary secular grounding, is
unlikely to persuade anyone who does not share Wolterstorff’s religious presuppositions of
belief in God and belief in the authoritative standing of the Bible itself. Of course this
observation by itself does not bear one way or the other upon the cogency of Wolterstorff’s
argument that the principle of universal human rights comes to us by way of Sinai and Nazareth
rather than by way of Athens and Rome, nor upon the cogency of his more ominous suggestion
that this principle shall remain vital among us only so long as our religious loyalty to Sinai and
Nazareth does not dissipate completely into postmodern relativism. What we have shown,
however, is that his argument that the Bible is the singular and incomparable source of the
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15
principle of universal human rights and must remain the touchstone for any philosophical
grounding of this principle is unconvincing. Moreover, I have argued that if Wolterstorff’s
argument were indeed correct then we should despair of the possibility that the culture of
universal human rights should ever attain universal sway amidst the cultural and religious
pluralism of our increasingly interconnected world.

On the other hand, finally, if Wolterstorff’s appeal to the Bible can be read as entailing, at least
by implication, a tacit appeal to the community (of Israel, or of the Church) without which even
the Bible’s word would be a dead letter, then we might take hope from the acknowledgment
that the living praxis of Israel was born from an amalgam of values, norms and law. Moreover, in
the memory of Israel, the law came first, the law given by God to Moses in the wilderness, while
the folkways came afterward as the medium of the law’s concrete instantiation and
exemplification. The Torah is at once law and lore with each serving to reinforce the other.

In 1948 a new law or principle was proclaimed to, and by, a humanity which found itself in a
different wilderness, between a dark past and an uncertain future, surprised that even a
remnant had survived humanity’s descent into the abyss of barbarism and radical evil. In the
words of Hannah Arendt, the evils visited upon countless millions during the Second World War,
and in the period leading up to it, had “demonstrated that human dignity needs a new
guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose
validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity…” (Origins of Totalitarianism, ix).
What Wolterstorff seeks and finds in the words of Genesis, and what Arendt sought in “a new
law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity,” the nations of
the world gave unto themselves and unto us all when they gathered together in the General
Assembly of the United Nations to adopt and promulgate the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in December 1948. Majestic, but lacking the full force of law, reliant upon unreliable men
and inconstant nations for its enforcement, the concrete significance of this declaration is still
pending, awaiting the decision of the member nations of the U.N. and the peoples of the globe
which will ultimately determine whether its lofty principles will ever come to shape and inform
social and political practices on a global scale.
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16
As Israel bound itself to the law when the people together proclaimed at Sinai “we shall do and
we shall hear,” so too have the nations bound themselves, albeit in a manner that still seems
more nominal than real, to the series of declarations that have issued forth from the United
Nations General Assembly since 1948. Of course there is a great difference between hearing
and doing, and, as the Torah attests, Israel’s own adherence to the law given at Sinai was far
from perfect, with the people backsliding almost at once and continuously tempting God to
repudiate the covenant as null and void. And yet, in the course of time, the laws, the principles,
the norms, revealed that day at Sinai, were ingrafted into the folkways and reflexes of the
people, never perfectly of course but more and more despite egregious slip-ups and
regressions. So too the nations, since 1948, have been engaged – imperfectly, slowly, sometimes
almost imperceptibly and inconsistently -- in the slow and halting business of internalizing the
norms spelled out in the Univesal Declaration. From one perspective, the practical and
normative validity of these norms or principles surely depends upon future developments in the
area of international law, but perhaps it ultimately depends even more upon the social and
pedagogical micro-practices that shall determine whether or not the principles underlying the
UDHR and its offspring come to live in the hearts and minds of humanity.

While one cannot know of course whether the principles of ’48 will ultimately serve to reshape
the collective consciousness and social practices of humanity, it is clear that the chances that
this will indeed come to pass will be the greater to the extent that glocalized cultural
expressions proliferate that are effective at binding together into locally distinctive and
affectively compelling mash-ups the lofty universal principles of the UDHR and the age-old
wisdom traditions that have shaped the world’s distinctive civilizations for millenia. Should this
come about in each of the world’s states in a manner that is organically expressive of the
internal and external diversity of the world’s cultures and, at the same time, expressive of a
commitment to universal human rights both at home and abroad, one can forsee the
emergence over time of the global equivalent of what Rawls identified as an “overlapping
consensus,” or of what Michael Walzer once referred to as a “low-flying universalism” that is
able to sustain universal human rights without imposing a hegemonic monoculture or
bureaucratic Esperanto as its ground. In conjunction with the further development of an
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17
international legal order that is dedicated to the punishment of gross violations of the UNDHR,
the legal and socio-cultural elements might come together like the warp and the woof to form a
garment of rights with strength enough to protect the human worth of all of humanity’s
members.

And finally, with regard to the West, there is no doubt that, as a product and reflection of our
own distinctive history, the emergent human rights culture will necessarily be as multiple and
diverse in its composition as is the cacophony that is our contemporary reality. And thus we
should foster and welcome the emergence of a global human rights discourse that is woven
from and invokes multiple grounds, some secular and some religious, some political and some
legal, some cultural and some philosophical, without overmuch insistence upon a consistency
which is not a strength in living and vibrant civilizations.

From this perspective, it remains for other philosophers with different cross-cultural
competencies to ascertain whether the foundational principles of “universal human rights,” or
the seeds from which such principles might be developed, are to be found in the beginnings of
the other religious traditions which emerged in the Axial Age. While Wolterstorff does not
engage at all with any non-Western traditions in this book, and was under no obligation to do
so, he certainly conveys the impression that the universal conception of human rights is sui
generis and of uniquely biblical provenance. For the sake of the future of human rights in our
one world, we should all hope that this is not the case. And we might expect that Wolterstorff
himself would share this hope since he is an engaged human rights activist and not just an
armchair academic.

Presumably, Wolterstorff’s argument for the Bible’s (and thus God’s) manifest commitment to
equal human rights for all persons will prove persuasive to at least some of those who share his
religious presuppositions, who might be thus encouraged to take rights as seriously as duties,
and justice as seriously as love, in their reflections upon the divinely intended right order of
human society. Wolterstorff also has much to teach the rest of us, mainly through the example
of his supple and powerful elaboration of the normative logic that is reflected in the intuitions
that inform our human rights discourse when we are most careful and most reflective about the
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18
implications of this normative discourse. The pity is that in his quest for a grounding that is
immovable and absolute, Wolterstorff pushes past this fine elaboration. Most of his readers will
not be able to accompany him, however, on this last leg of the journey that he makes in this
book, though many will be sufficiently intrigued by the overarching contours of his project to
look forward to the coming publication of the “second half” of this work which will focus on
love as the complement to justice.