Reasons, Justifications, and Rights
Example One [continuation of the argument here]: Someone asks why I uphold the right of every citizen to participate in political debate, including debate on setting the agenda for debate. I reply: Because only thus can the common good of this political society be identified, let alone achieved. If pressed further, I justify my assertion by showing in what ways the denial of this equal right may prevent the common good from being correctly identified. If pressed still further by being asked why it matters whether or not the common good is correctly identified, I justify my claim by spelling out the connection between the common good and the individual goods of myself and my interrogator. At this point practical justification terminates, although skeptical philosophers may express doubts of a very different kind.
Example Two: You and I, while on a mission of some importance to us—if we succeed in it, it will benefit ourselves and some others considerably—come across some helpless individual or group in urgent need. Unless we act to help them now, they will die from their injuries, starve to death, be kidnapped by slave traders. One of us says: We must act to help them now and begins to act. The other asks: Why? For what reason? The only appropriate response is: If you need a reason for so acting, you have already missed the point. And the same is true of someone who does agree to respond to urgent need, but only after calculating, after weighing the costs and benefits. What is the difference between someone for whom all questions of justification are irrelevant in such situations and someone who in such situations still asks for a justification? The former acts and acts immediately as the virtues of justice, generosity, and compassion require, the latter lacks those virtues in important respects. Is there a rational justification for valuing, inculcating, and exercising those virtues? There is indeed. It is that without those virtues we are unable to achieve either our individual or our common goods. But it is one of the marks of the virtuous to recognize when justification is required and when it is irrelevant.
Consider now a different kind of irrelevance, the irrelevance of the concept of a universal human right to both these examples. Suppose that in the first example someone were to say that every citizen has an equal right to participate in political debate, including debate on setting the agendas for debate, because there is a universal human right to do so. What reason with what kind of weight has been adduced? Will anyone not disposed for other reasons to hold that every citizen should have such a right have been given a reason with something more than rhetorical force? I think not. Suppose now that in the second example someone similarly intervenes by trying to justify aid to those in urgent need by citing some alleged universal human right. Such a one will make the same mistake as the individual who pauses to calculate. In that type of situation no justification is needed and all justification is irrelevant.
From these two examples therefore I draw a general thesis. Whenever an alleged universal human right is cited in justification of some action or policy, either it provides the wrong kind of justification or it attempts to justify what needs no justification. Why then did Maritain think otherwise?
Maritain and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The thirty articles of the Declaration make a number of very different claims that need to be supported by different kinds of argument. In a few cases it is difficult to give any determinate meaning to an article (e.g., Article 30 which states that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”) and nowhere are any key terms defined. Yet in many articles the substitution of “should have a right to” for “has a right to” yields an intelligible and justified claim. I shall not ask here why the delegates to the United Nations would have rejected this substitution, but only why Maritain did. Maritain made his reason quite clear. He took it that the acknowledgment of rights that are prior to and independent of the enactments of positive law was an acknowledgment of law that is prior to and independent of the enactments of positive law, indeed an implicit acknowledgment, first of the authority of the precepts of the natural law, as understood by Aquinas, and then as a corollary of the jus gentium.
Maritain knew that many of the United Nations delegates rejected anything like Aquinas’s account of the natural law, but he saw in their assent to the Declaration an agreement with the content of important Thomistic claims, even by those whose justification of that assent involved an appeal to Enlightenment philosophies, such as those of Rousseau and Kant, which Maritain rejected. What he counterposed to those philosophies was not a set of arguments, but a claim—which he confidently ascribes to Aquinas—that knowledge of the precepts of the natural law “is not rational knowledge, but knowledge through inclination. That kind of knowledge is not clear knowledge through concepts and conceptual judgments; it is obscure, unsystematic, vital knowledge by connaturality or congeniality” in which intellect “consults and listens to” something other than itself. What should we say to this?
Maritain is of course right both in asserting that and in ascribing to Aquinas the view that practical knowledge of the precepts of the natural law is not a matter of first recognizing the truth of the first principle of practical reason and then reasoning from it. The first principle of practical reasoning is presupposed by the reasoning expressed in our activity and much of that reasoning is never made explicit. Indeed the relatively inarticulate may and often do exhibit in their practice a remarkable grasp of what it is to act as practical reason requires in particular situations and yet be unable to spell out those requirements. But what matters is that they can be spelled out. And when they are fully spelled out reference will have to be made to those inclinationes, those directednesses towards different kinds of good, that we discover in ourselves and in other human agents. But nothing in the relevant texts of Aquinas (especially Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae q. 94 a. 2) suggests, let alone says that there is a nonrational apprehension of the precepts of the natural law of the kind described by Maritain. And I find it difficult to understand Maritain’s thesis except as a misunderstanding of the practical rationality of the inarticulate.
It is of course true that the text of article 2 of question 94 has been interpreted in a number of importantly different and incompatible ways. My own account of the rationality of willing conformity to the precepts of the natural law is to be found in “Intractable Moral Disagreements” (in L.S. Cunningham, ed. Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009, where there are essays by critics who take a different view, notably Jean Porter. Still other views have been defended by Germaine Grisez and John Finnis and by Ralph McInerny. None provide support for Maritain’s thesis). My conclusion is therefore that Maritain’s defense of the conception of human rights in the Declaration is inadequately argued, even if the difficulties that I have with that conception could be overcome. And it may be that this inadequacy is rooted in a more fundamental mistake, one concerning Maritain’s view of the common good and the human person. That Maritain made such a mistake seems to have been the view of Charles De Koninck.
De Koninck on the Priority of the Common Good
The word “seems” is important. Maritain had delivered his Deneke Lecture at Oxford on “The Human Person and Society” in 1939. In 1943 De Koninck published The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists. In it Maritain is never mentioned, but it was widely assumed by readers and reviewers that its sharp polemics were directed against Maritain. Maritain in The Person and the Common Good thanks one of those reviewers, the Dominican Father Theodore Eschmann, but nowhere refers to De Koninck, although readers of The Person and the Common Good took it that in certain passages Maritain was replying to De Koninck and accusing him of making palpably false accusations against Maritain. All that matters about these unfortunate quarrels is that they distracted attention from what mattered most in what De Koninck had to say, something for which he had only himself to blame. Maritain had argued that the concepts of the person and of the common good were correlative and equally fundamental. Against this De Koninck asserts the primacy of the concept of the common good. Who was right?
It is a fundamental thesis of De Koninck that different kinds of agent—nonhuman animals, human beings, angels—are to be distinguished by the differences in the goods towards the achievement of which they are directed by their specific natures. Human beings do have distinctive worth. In Aquinas’s terms, human agents have dignity and to have dignity is to be valued for one’s own sake. But they have the dignity that they have by reason of their ultimate end and their freedom to attain that end. Human beings are parts of a number of wholes, most notably of the family, political society, and the universe. We are not to think of them as having each an individual end, an individual good and also a set of shared ends, of common goods. They achieve their own good in achieving the common goods that are theirs, for it is in achieving those common goods that they perfect themselves as human beings and so achieve their own individual good. De Koninck presents this as Aquinas’s plain view, citing a variety of texts. If he is right, both in his exegesis and in his substantive reasoning, then Maritain errs in supposing that we can give any account, let alone a Thomistic account, of the nature and worth of human individuals prior to and independently of a characterization of their relationships to common goods.
On this, although not on very much else in his polemics, I am in agreement with De Koninck. And, as I have argued earlier, I also take it that we do not have a defensible concept of human rights prior to and independently of our account of common goods. It is because and only because we are directed towards the achievement of common goods as our own goods that we need positive laws which mandate relationships with others partially defined by a mutual regard to their and our rights. So the concept of a right is secondary to and derivable from an adequate account of common goods. And once again I am at variance with Maritain. But we cannot simply move on and leave Maritain behind. For the criticism of his views leaves us with questions rather than answers.
The politics of the common good, as I have reiterated to the point of tedium, can only be a politics of local community. But we, all of us, whatever the political condition of our local communities, inhabit modern states and cannot dispense with a politics that deals with them on their terms. So that, even if we reject Maritain’s view of the possibilities of the modern state, we need a politics of the modern state that is consonant with a politics of the common good. And this we do not as yet have. Moreover, the rhetorical politics of universal human rights, the partial definition of conflicts by referring to such rights, is an established fact. So that a skeptical critique of the very idea of a universal human right has to be a prologue to an account of how protagonists of the politics of common goods should position themselves with regard to such conflicts. And this we do not as yet know how to do.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, ed. Kelvin Knight and Peter Wicks (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
