Who Decides?

The Right That Vanishes

“You have a right to life.” We say it as if it settles something. But consider what happens when a man with a gun decides otherwise. The life is gone, and with it whatever the “right” was supposed to guarantee. If a thing can be taken from you by anyone strong enough to take it, in what sense did you ever possess it?

The honest answer is that you didn’t. A right is not something a person has. It is an idea about what a person ought to have. What actually exists, what can be kept or broken, is a duty: the obligation laid on every other person not to take that life. The murderer does not destroy a right. He violates a duty, and that duty does not disappear when it is broken. It stands as his judgment.

This is not hair-splitting. It decides whether our ethics begin with demand or with obligation, with the self or with the neighbor.

A Right Is an Idea, Not a Fact

You can point to a neighbor. You can point to hunger, a wound, an empty table, and the hand that fills it. You cannot point to a right. No one has ever observed one. A right is not empirical. It is a rational construct, an idea held in the mind and asserted in speech.

That puts the modern rationalist in a bind. He wants rights to be universal, certain and beyond dispute. By his own standards they are none of these. They cannot be measured, and they are plainly not self-evident, since every generation, every court and every movement redraws their boundaries. A concept with no anchor outside the mind is open to interpretation, and an idea open to interpretation belongs to whoever interprets it.

The sharpest critics of rights have not been preachers. Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism and no friend of the church, dismissed natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” Alasdair MacIntyre went further in After Virtue (1981). Every attempt to show that such rights exist has failed, he argued, and belief in them “is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”

Who Decides? The Doctrine of Force

If a right is only an idea, someone must decide what it means and whether it will be honored. In practice, that someone is whoever holds power.

Thomas Hobbes saw this clearly. In Leviathan (1651) he wrote that “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Every man’s natural “right” is worthless until a sovereign’s sword makes it real.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. applied the same logic to law in “The Path of the Law” (1897): “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” A legal right, on this view, is a forecast of what force will do on your behalf.

Long before either man, Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic put it most bluntly: justice “is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.”

This is the doctrine of force, and its conclusion follows directly. A “right” is an entitlement held up by power. When power changes hands, the right changes meaning or vanishes. History is full of people whose “rights” lasted exactly as long as someone stronger chose to honor them.

What Is Real: Dignity and Duty

Christianity does not answer the doctrine of force by inventing a better theory of rights. It starts somewhere else entirely.

It starts with dignity, and dignity is given, not claimed. “So God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). Human worth does not depend on a court, a constitution or a majority, and it cannot be seized. A murderer can take a life. He cannot take the image of God.

From that dignity flows duty. Scripture does not speak the language of entitlement. Asked for the greatest commandment, Christ answered with two obligations: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40). The prophet asks, “What doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8). The word is require, not owe you.

Consider the widow and the orphan, the most vulnerable people in the ancient world. Scripture never tells the widow to assert her rights. It commands everyone else: “Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child” (Exodus 22:22). “Plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Pure religion is “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). Her protection is real because the duty is real, and the duty is real because God commands it.

Some will say a duty to the widow is just her right seen from the other side. But the order matters. Any claim she has exists only because the command came first. Remove the God who commands, and the widow’s “right” is once again whatever the strong decide.

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”, he was looking for the edges of his obligation. Christ answered with the Good Samaritan, a man who asked no such question and simply did what was owed (Luke 10:25–37).

Simone Weil, writing in the last months of her life in 1943, opened The Need for Roots with the same insight. The notion of obligations, she wrote, “comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.” A man alone in the universe, she observed, would have no rights at all, yet he would still have obligations.

Why It Matters

Entitlement ethics asks, “What am I owed?” It turns neighbors into rival claimants, each pressing a demand against the others. Duty ethics asks, “What do I owe, and to whom?” It binds people together.

Duty also protects the weak far better than rights ever could. A right protects only those strong enough to press their claim, or lucky enough to have power on their side. A duty binds the strong whether or not the weak can enforce anything at all. The infant cannot sue. The widow cannot fight. The duty stands anyway.

Paul understood this. He had a legitimate claim to support from the churches he served, and he refused it: “we have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12). His freedom existed for others: “use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13).

The One Who Grasped at Nothing

If anyone ever held a true claim, it was Christ. Though equal with God, Paul writes, he did not cling to that equality but “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). He held every claim and grasped at none. He went to the cross not to defend his rights but to fulfill a duty of love.

So return to the right to life. It can be taken, and it is taken every day. But the duty not to take it was never yours to grant or anyone else’s to revoke. It comes from God, and it stands.

This week, before you ask what you are owed, ask whom you owe.

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Sources

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (1949; English trans. Arthur Wills, 1952), Part One.

Bentham, Jeremy. Anarchical Fallacies (written 1796; published 1843).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651), ch. 17.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. “The Path of the Law.” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897).

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), ch. 6.

Plato. Republic, Book I, trans. Benjamin Jowett.

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