Thus the "individual" as understood in rationalist social-contract theories is, for the Christian, already a reduction, even an abstraction. To be, as Pope Benedict has said, is revealed to us as to be from, to be with, and to be for: it is the Trinitarian mystery of existence. We must not think of people as, primarily, individuals, to which are superadded contingent relationships. Every person is born into a world of relationships: is the child of a mother and a father. In a certain sense, it is correct to remember that Jesus would have died on the cross to save even one of us: he loves all, in such a way as to love each, as if each were the only being in the world. But each of us is not the only being in the world, and could never be, so that when Jesus saves me he saves the fellow who is the son of Anthony and Jane, the husband of Debra; and it is also those relationships of love that he has come to heal and redeem. That is but what it means to save the individual.
I grant that this is a great mystery. But I think it helps us to avoid the unnecessary dichotomy between rights, which are supposed to inhere only in individuals, and responsibilities, which are supposed to be owed only to others. In point of fact, my rights and responsibilities are incoherent if considered as separate from one another, since I am fundamentally from, with, and for others. A family is more than an agglomeration of human isotopes; to deny that it too possesses rights is to mistake what a human being is. If no man is an island, and if every man's death diminisheth me, then every man's evil harms me, and every man's virtue builds me up. All these things we need to consider when we ask, "What does a just society look like?", and, what is not the same thing, "What form of government best serves the end of justice?" We will conclude that it is not true that the "freest" society is the most just, if by freedom we mean the license to behave as if we were alone in the world, pursuing individual ends, but that a just society will be the most free -- because it will be a society of genuine liberty wherein human beings can best flourish. I'm not original here, far from it. More on this soon.
Some conservatives would contend that there can be a functional ethics that talks about responsibilities but not rights. Subjective passive rights -- being owed certain actions out of justice, these correlate to responsibilities. But subjective active rights, the moral faculties to do certain actions -- these are properly developed within the science of politics, if anywhere. One can talk about subjective active rights within ethics, but it seems to me that they are not necessary for that science to be adequate, even if it is not complete.
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