Wolterstorff on the Goods to Which We Have Rights 2.2

If neither utilitarianism (the experientially satisfying life) nor eudemonism (the well-lived life) is a sufficient account to support rights, what is? One the one hand, an account of the good life that finds it in satisfaction of desires cannot account for an unknown wrong done to my reputation. On the other, if one’s life can be as equally well-lived through virtuous suffering on the rack as it can through virtuous satisfaction in one’s home, something is seriously out of kilter. But what?

Here Wolterstorff turns to the biblical account of the life of Job. Job’s life was virtuous, he said so and, although his friends didn’t believe him, God did. So what made Job’s life worthy of lament? Why did he cry out for an audience before God? Not because his loss of family and fortune deprived him of the objects of self-satisfying desires or an opportunity to further his virtue (although both are certainly true) but because his life, to put it mildly, was not going well. Job had suffered the loss of real, honest-to-goodness “life goods” without justification. Job had been wronged. And we can account Job’s losses as wrongs only if we presuppose that he had correlative rights to the goods of which he had been deprived. The only conception of the good life that can account for rights is what Wolterstorff calls the flourishing life, one in which there are normative relationships between one’s life and certain goods, that normative relationship being a right. The flourishing life thus has three parts: the natural goods necessary to a flourishing life; the right to them; and the enjoyment of that right.

Coining a neologism, Wolterstorff calls this tri-level moral vision eirenéism (taken from the Greek translation of the Hebrew word shalom).