Wolterstorff on the Goods to Which We Have Rights 2.4.1

Are rights grounded in duties? Or vice versa? More broadly, what accounts for rights and duties anyway? Wolterstorff takes on and refutes some leading contenders before laying out his own accounting. First, Wolterstorff addresses the divine command theory that posits that duties (the results of God’s commands) are fundamental and thus rights are derived from obligations. Two objections follow. Why should we consider that divine commands are fundamental to divine rights? In other words, why should we presume the divine command justifies the divine right and not the other way around? Moreover, of what value is the divine command theory in explaining the ability of human beings to create obligations in others?

What the divine command theory lacks is an explanation of why commands—even divine commands— create moral duties (or rights, for that matter). Any persuasive theory of rights must presuppose something by virtue of which commands create obligations rather than mere illocutionary acts. (Wolterstorff uses the same failing to critique the social contract theory of obligation: a social contract cannot create an obligation (and thus account for a right) unless there is a preexisting duty to keep one’s contract, social or otherwise.)

What is this presupposition? What is the ground of moral obligation? Wolterstorff posits the existence of general “standing rights” and correlative obligations that undergird the ability of specific commands (or promises) to create specific moral obligations. The standing relationship creates the normative context which turns properly issued commands and promises into moral obligations. Wolterstorff calls this moral context (matrix) office or position. (Although I’m sure he never read it, Wolterstorff could have cited my article, Consideration in the Common Law of Contracts: A Biblical-Theological Critique, 18 Regent Univ. L. Rev. 1 (2005-2006) at this point. Actually, I’m grateful that something I argued finds support from such a credible source.)

Wolterstorff’s claim about standing rights and obligations entails something that he asserts many within the Christian tradition would find unacceptable: that the human-divine relationship includes not only a normative context within which humans have a standing obligation to obey God (which forms the foundation for specific divine commands that create specific moral obligations) but that the same standing relationship forms the matrix within which human beings can have rights against God. If this were not the case, Wolterstorff argues, then God’s promises (or set of promises, commonly called a covenant) would not create a moral obligation on the part of God. And if God had no moral obligation to keep his promises, human would have no moral right to God’s performance of his promises.

Why have so many members of the Christian tradition found it abhorrent to think of God as having standing moral obligations toward us and of us as having standing moral rights against God? . . . My guess is that it is because of the tendency, lodged deep in the tradition, to think of morality as consisting ultimately of principles of obligation to which moral agents are then subject. How could God be “subject” to such principles? (284)

The nominalist-essentialist debate rejoined! (Here one might consider my piece, God’s Bridle: John Calvin’s Application of Natural Law, 22 J. Law & Relig. 225 (2006-2007).) But this is enough for now.