In October, Marianna Orlandi of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture did a podcast with me on “Natural Law – And Why It Is for Everyone.”  The podcast is posted here on the Listen to Talks page of this website, and the article which sparked it is posted here on the Read Articles page.

By the way, the Austin Institute is a wonderful organization.

And by the way, I hope you all have a wonderful, happy Thanksgiving!

Query:

I’m a very-early-career academic.  In my present situation, I don’t perceive any bias against Christian perspectives.  But I do see such bias in the academy at large, and fear that my chances to get hired at a good university will be hampered by having worked in the past at a Christian college, by being a man, and by being white-skinned.  If you have suggestions for how I could mitigate these biases against me in my applications, I would be interested to learn.

Reply:

As you point out, you’ve got three strikes against you.  Worse, the pernicious notion of “intersectionality” will move a lot of academics to hit you with an aggregate bias which is greater than the sum of its three parts.  In general, anyone facing such bias has to be triply good to receive equal treatment.  That’s just a fact of life.  So you will have to work very hard.

But you know that already – and maybe having to work hard isn’t a bad thing.  Let’s see if I can offer some practical suggestions.  First, a small one:

I see from your curriculum vitae that you’ve published a large number of book reviews.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  Reviews may bring your name to the attention of other scholars, especially the authors of the books you review.  They are also much easier to get published than articles in the same journals.  On the other hand, they carry a lot less cachet than articles, and a really good review essay can easily take just as much work to write as an article – sometimes even more.  Consider redirecting some of your energy toward articles and books.  Take this suggestion with a grain of salt, because whether it’s good advice or bad depends partly on your own work patterns.  For instance, I myself find writing book reviews much more onerous than writing articles, and I find getting articles published much more onerous than getting books published.  But you may not.

Now, as to broader strategies:

I see from your CV that you make a lot of presentations at conferences.  In your position, that’s very good, not just because of the exchange of ideas, but also because it gives you an opportunity to discover likeminded scholars at other institutions and make contact with them.  Do that aggressively.  The importance of networking can hardly be exaggerated.  By the way, when you present a paper, don’t depend on the presentation itself to make you known to other scholars.  Step up and introduce yourself personally.   Be frank about your professional goals.  When possible, find out about the background of the person to whom you are speaking ahead of time – after all, you want him to become interested in your work, so you should return the courtesy by being interested in his.

You would also do well to attend not only secular professional association meetings, but also explicitly Christian professional association meetings.  I don’t say that you necessarily list the Christian meetings on your curriculum vitae!  Such fellowship is encouraging in itself.  Moreover, a number of the Christians with whom you will come in contact at such meetings themselves work in secular institutions such as public universities, and may know of opportunities which would interest you.

To make contacts with congenial scholars at universities at which you might like to work, don't depend only on meeting them at conferences.  You can also write to attendees whose work interests you ahead of a conference, saying “I find what you’ve written interesting, and I see that you’re going to be presenting at the So-and-So-Conference.  So am I.  Would you care to have coffee together while we’re there?”  You can also make what salesmen consider “cold calls,” meaning that you write to other scholars without a pretext like an upcoming conference, just because of shared interests.  At a certain stage in correspondence, you can mention (if it would be true), “Say, I’m working on a paper on such and such, and I think you would be an ideal reader.  Would you be willing to glance at it and tell me what you think?”  Be prepared to return the favor.  If you are going to be passing through town, you can even get in touch ahead of time and ask whether it might be possible to get together for a cup of java, or even for lunch.

Your field is English literature.  Such is the corrupted condition of English literature scholarship these days that it may be virtually impossible to get a position in an English department at an institution which you would find interesting.  So what?  You can cast your net more broadly.  At a number of universities, new academic institutes are being organized, not inside of the “line” departments, but alongside them.  Commonly these institutes offer courses and talks about great books, social and political order, philosophy, and all sorts of things universities used to find important but have come to neglect – things which you may be qualified and even pleased to teach.  Occasionally – but this is rarer – it can also happen that a person trained in one discipline is able to capture a niche position in a department of another discipline.  For example, a historian might cross over to a classics department, or an English literature specialist might hybridize a history department.

Now let me elaborate on that idea of casting your net more broadly.  Perhaps I can rattle your thinking a little more.  I’m pirating some the following remarks from a much earlier blog post which most readers probably haven’t read.

When I was in grad school, young people interested in the liberal arts assumed that there was one main way to pursue the life of the mind:  To become an academic – to become a college or university professor.  For four reasons, the assumption is no longer a safe one.  The first two reasons are unhappy ones.  The third is mixed.  The fourth is very happy, so this little disquisition will have a good ending.  But stay with me.

First (an unhappy reason):  University colleges of liberal arts are becoming less and less hospitable to the kinds of scholarship which used to be their hallmark.  Officially, it’s a good thing to study the great literature and thought of the ages and try to extend its insights, and officially, it’s what we all try to do -- but the very phrase “Western civilization” makes many university faculty these days spit like cats.  Officially, the university adheres to no religion -- but the unofficial religion is practical atheism, meaning that you can believe what you want so long as you don’t act as though you believe it matters.  Officially, it enforces no moral code -- but it adheres strongly to what Benedict XVI called the dictatorship of relativism.  In the meantime, fewer and fewer students can read any more at what used to be called a university level.  College is like high school.  Susceptibility to nervousness is considered a reason to be excused from the test.  Academic standards are plummeting.  Teachers who buck the trend are punished with bad reviews, or even disciplinary action.  If you like that sort of thing, you will fit in quite well as a professor.  But if you don’t, you may find it difficult.

Second (another unhappy reason):  The university is hardly a “university” in the original sense any more, because few of its citizens and subjects still believe in the universal truths which tie together all fields of knowledge, and which are the universal calling of all intellects to try to find out.  Having discarded its original mission, the institution tries desperately to justify itself by taking on odd jobs instead.  Some of these odd jobs are worthwhile, but in each case someone else could do it much better or more cheaply.  For instance, granted the merit of football, why do we need a university to field a team?  Granted the merit of job training, why is a university needed to teach recreational administration?  Granted that a certificate of employability might be a good thing, what makes a university the best certifier, or even a good certifier?  Granted the need for military and industrial research, couldn’t it be done by the military and by industry?  And granted the need to prepare young people for adult responsibilities, is assembling them in vast numbers for four years, isolated from those very responsibilities, surrounded with temptations to party, really the best way to do it?  The answer in each case is obvious:  No.

Third (a mixed reason):  As the rest of society begins to catch on that there is no good reason to have a single institution perform all the odd jobs it has accumulated, other parties are peeling those odd jobs off and taking them over, one by one.  For this reason, it seems unlikely that the current state of affairs can long continue, especially because it is highly inefficient and increasingly expensive.  Universities have become like collections of unrelated objects tied together with thread, and the thread is coming loose.  On balance, I suppose this counts as a good thing rather than a bad one, because the thread ought to come loose.  But in the meantime, the unravelling it is going to cause a lot of pain.

Finally comes the unequivocally happy reason for changing how one thinks about a life of scholarship.  In fact, if one takes a long enough view of things, it is very happy indeed.  Just because the universities are abandoning their original mission, persons who do believe in that mission are seeking other ways to take it up.  Intellectual organizations of strange and diverse form are popping up in unexpected places.  Some have resident scholars, others don’t.  Some take students, others don’t.  Some are under the shelter of the Church, others aren’t.  There is no blueprint for this sort of thing.  It is all an experiment and adventure, with lots of disappointments and a few beautiful successes.  Figuring out how to make a living at it isn’t easy, but there are all sorts of ideas – and besides, it doesn’t have to be your day job!  Historically, most scholars haven’t worked in universities.

So although for now, most young people who are genuinely called to scholarship will continue to seek university employment, this will change.  You may consider intellectually serious work in another kind of institution.  Even if you remain within a traditional university, you will have to get sea legs, because you will have to keep your footing on a rolling deck.

Be imaginative.  Be entrepreneurial.  Try things.  Exchange ideas with others.  Have respect for the old gatekeepers, but look for ways to get around them too.  Find new ways to organize communities of serious thought.  After all, that’s how universities began in the first place.  Who knows?  Eventually, universities may even be reinvented, though I don’t expect that to happen in our time.

Head up!  Eyes ahead!  Forward!

Greetings, Underground Thomisticas and friendly drive-by readers.  I had already used this blog to mention the publication of my new Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the One God.  Today’s little update is just to say that the book now has a page of its own in the Underground Thomist, where, if you like, you can read the introduction, the analytical table of contents, and a brief sample.  You can also find the book right up at the top on the books page of this website.

My best to everyone on this sunny Thursday!  It’s sunny in Central Texas, anyway, and I hope your own weather is just as you like it.

Query from a convert:

Let me tell you where I’m at, professor.  I am tired and I’m completely burned out and burdened by being Catholic.  I’m tired of feeling like every Sunday I miss church I am going to hell, I miss the joy I used to have in my relationship with the Lord as a “Protestant.”  I miss the freedom that came with knowing and believing Jesus paid it all for me and that’s enough.  I no longer have joy nor lightness of being in my faith and hope and certainly in Christ.  I feel burdened.

Reply:

I can see that you are suffering.  To make sure your identity is protected, I’ve left out almost everything in your long letter, and I discuss the difficulties you describe without quoting from it in detail.  The same goes for previous letters you’ve written. 

Though I know both joyful and miserable people in both the Protestant and Catholic camps, that doesn’t take away from the fact that you are in distress, so let’s talk about that.  Those who face similar difficulties, whether Catholic or Protestant, will understand very well what we are talking about, and won’t need all the rest of the details.

One problem, I think, is that you worry excessively about miniscule sins.  This is called scrupulosity.  Since the Church teaches that scrupulosity is not a good thing but rather something to be avoided, you should not blame the Church for this fault.  Yes, of course it is quite wrong to miss worship without good reason – and I am not saying that doing so is a small matter.  But as I’m sure your confessor will tell you, there are certainly acceptable reasons for missing Mass, like caring for a sick child, putting out a fire, or orbiting in the International Space Station.  The Church simply does not teach that any time you miss worship for any reason you are going to hell.  Nor does it teach that sin cannot be forgiven, or that every sin is a mortal sin.  If you are “feeling like” it is, then the feeling is coming from somewhere else, not from the teaching of the Church.

From where then is it coming?  From the Accuser, who is always trying to cast us down and make our faith fruitless.  Don’t let him.

But your letter also presents several bigger issues.

The first bigger issue is that there is only one good reason to be Catholic:  Because we believe the Catholic faith is true.  Just as it would be gravely wrong to become Catholic for reasons apart from the truth (and I hope you didn’t do that), so too it would be gravely wrong to stop being Catholic for reasons apart from the truth.  You have been suggesting reasons for deserting the Catholic faith rooted in something else entirely – in your burdensome feelings.  We could compare your feelings against the feelings of a joyful Catholic – I personally have experienced far greater joy since becoming Catholic, not less – but that would miss the point.  A young lady once wrote to me telling how much better she felt since she had given up her childhood Christian faith and become a witch, because she never had to consider sin any more.  But that missed the point too.  Feelings don’t decide the issue.  Truth does.

That doesn’t mean that burdensome feelings are unimportant.  Not at all.  What it means is that you must get to the root of these feelings, and deal with them in ways that harmonize with the truth rather than by fleeing from it.  If you allow it to be, your present trial can be an opportunity to grow in God’s grace.  You might want to re-read the Letter to the Hebrews, which was addressed to an early group of converts who were tempted to fall away because of their own difficulties.

The second bigger issue in your letter is the meaning of Gospel freedom.  You write, “I miss the freedom that came with knowing and believing Jesus paid it all for me and that’s enough.”  The Catholic Church does teach that Jesus paid the debt of our sin on the Cross.  That is the very meaning of the Atonement!  Where then does your confusion lie?  Could it lie in the second part of your sentence, where you say “and that’s enough”?

For Jesus did pay the price completely.  But if by “that’s enough” you mean that the freedom of Jesus’ followers is that they don’t have to give any further thought to how they are living – that they have a blank check to live however they wish -- then it’s a false freedom, and a lie of the Adversary.  I know this was an issue in your conversion, since your former denomination taught “once saved, always saved,” and the thought that you might lose your salvation if you ever fell into grave sin and obstinately refused to repent was terrifying to you.  We must never forget that we can be forgiven every truly repented sin.  But Jesus never gave us permission to sin.

How could He?  If to sin is to turn away from the One who paid the debt, then how could that make us free?  Though nothing outside us can ever tear us from the love of Christ, we can certainly desert Him on our own.  I know that all too well, because I deserted Him when I was a young man.  As St. John writes in his first letter, “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth” -- but as he goes on to say, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Like me, you are a convert from Protestantism.  Some non-Catholics, of course, understand the teaching of the Catholic Church quite well, but those who are uninformed about her teaching often make the mistaken claim that the Catholic Church believes in “works righteousness” – in the idea that we are saved by our own efforts apart from the grace of God.  I heard this growing up; so did you, and this mistaken view of the Church caused difficulties for you during your own conversion.  But the expressions of scrupulosity in your letter give the impression that perhaps you have never quite cast off that mistaken claim – that perhaps you believe that now that you are Catholic, you do have to believe in works righteousness!

If so, I can see how this would make you scrupulous.  But in reality, it is a recipe for a failed spiritual life.  We are not saved by our own efforts, but by Christ.  We cannot heal our own brokenness any more than we can forgive our own sins.  Real freedom lies in being free to follow Him, and discovering in Him who we were made to be.  This comes through the grace of the Holy Spirit, which breaks the chains of our sinful desires and makes it possible to accept the Savior’s gift.  Being “free to sin” is merely being free to be in chains.

Think of it like this.  I am rowing across a river which is much stronger than I am, and the current is against me.  I keep losing ground.  But then the wind comes and fills my sails, and although I still need to row and use the rudder, the wind makes my effort easy.  That wind is the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The third main issue is one you do not raise explicitly, but it is written all over your letter, most of which, of course, I haven’t quoted here.  Let me tell you a story.

Some years ago, a young woman visited me during my university office hours.  She was not one of my students, and I had never met her before.  However, she visited because several other students had told her that I was a Christian, and she needed to talk with someone who was.  She was Protestant – as I was too at that time – but Protestant-Catholic differences don’t come into this story.

She told me that she was losing her faith, that she no longer had joy in it, and that she was in misery about the fact.  Although she spoke to me of her loss of faith and joy as though it was just “happening” to her, I came to realize during our conversation that it wasn’t like that at all.  Actually she was seeking out people hostile to Christian faith, and exposing herself to their influence.  Every last one of the teachers she had chosen (and she had lots of other teachers she could have chosen instead) was militantly anti-Christian, and although she didn’t mention it, I had the feeling that most of her circle of friends was also hostile to faith.  No wonder she was having difficulty!

I said to her, “You think of yourself as though you were being bombarded against your will with reasons to lose your faith, but you actually give the impression of someone who is looking for reasons to lose it.  Even more than finding out replies to those reasons, what you really need to do is find out is why you are doing that.”

Forgive me, but since you have written to me in such distress, I have to ask:  Does that sound like you?  Is your circle of friends, dear ones, and influences hostile to or alienated from the Catholic faith?  Your letter mentions the stories of Catholic converts who returned to Protestantism.  They exist.  I could also tell you about Protestant converts who returned to Catholicism.  Have you considered their stories?  The only question is who has the words of truth.

Some of the things you ask me about – in your letter, for example, you said you’ve told of rich people country “buying prayers,” and you assumed that what you heard was true even though you had no personal experience of such things happening – are pretty bizarre.  However, they sound very much like the anti-Catholic propaganda that filled my ears in my youth.  Since I never hear of such ungodly practices in the Church itself, or among my own circle of Catholic friends, which is pretty broad, I can’t help but wonder who is influencing you.

To put a point on the question:  Do you “just go to church,” or are you actually part of the Catholic community, of the household of faith?  Do you make use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation?  Do you have a circle of Catholic friends who are more experienced and well-instructed in life with Christ, who can encourage you and help you along, and who can explain what you are missing if you do misunderstand something in the Church’s teachings?

Talk to your priest about this.  God made us social beings, and you cannot grow in Christ all by yourself.  It just can’t be done.  Surrounded by friends and influences who are either hostile to the Church or alienated from it, separated from the actual life of the Church, of course your hold on Her faith will become tenuous and burdensome.

That would happen if you were Protestant, too.  I would have given you the same advice if you were finding faith burdensome and we were both Protestants.  In fact, I did give people the same advice in my Protestant days.  It’s easy to fall into despondency if you’re isolated.

As the ancient saying has it, “One Christian is no Christian.”  But you don’t have to be just “one.”

May the Lord of life, whose grace is a fountain, help you to offer your suffering to Him.  May He guide you through it to the glorious end that He desires for you.  Don’t trust your feelings.  Trust Him.

Query:

Because of the general duty to love our neighbors, I think that as a matter of public policy there must be rights to have certain goods -- in one sense of the term, "positive" rights.  What do you think?

Reply:

I think that by a positive right, you don’t mean a right to do something (for example worship or buy property), and you don’t mean a right to be free from having something done to you (for example be beaten or murdered), but a right to get something at the expense of someone else.  You don’t mean a right to receive it because you paid for it (as at the checkout counter of the grocery), but a right to receive it just because you ought to have it.  Presumably, since you consider it not just a good thing, but a real right, you also mean that considerations such as how you will use it are irrelevant:  We shouldn’t consider whether you will use it to feed your family, to get off the street, or to feed your drug habit.  Again, there would be little point in calling it a right if you meant only that other people ought to have compassion so that they voluntarily give it to you.  The language of rights suggests that they have or should have a duty to do so – and since you are thinking of public policy, you must be thinking of a legally enforceable duty to do so.

Surely there are some rights like that.  Our mothers and fathers, for example, have the right to be honored by us.  Thomas Aquinas calls the duty to honor them an “affirmative” obligation, by contrast with, say, the duty not to steal, which is a “negative” obligation.  He points out, though, that negative duties necessarily extend further than affirmative ones, and I think he’s right.  Although I can completely fulfil the duty never to steal, I cannot possibly do everything which would give honor my parents, because there is an infinite number of such things.  If I tried to do so, then I would be forced to neglect my other duties.  My parents couldn’t have a right to be honored in that infinite sense -- even though none of the honor I can give them could ever come even close to repaying what they have done for me.

Just for this reason, what you call positive rights -- rights to receive something -- must be associated with negative duties.  Although I can’t say “I must do everything which honors my mother,” at least I can say “I may never do anything contrary to honoring her.”  But here’s another problem:  Pinning down in rules what these negatives are isn’t easy.  Surely it would dishonor my mother to mock her or let her go hungry.  There could even be legal penalties for that.  But would it dishonor her not to give her a call this afternoon?  This definitional difficulty makes it easier to speak in terms of virtues than in terms of tightly nailed down rules and rights.  Though I can’t spell out ahead of time all the things I must do and not do for my mother, I should surely cultivate the virtue of filial piety.  This is the constant will to do her whatever honor is possible and fitting in the circumstances.

Of course, people who propose what you call positive rights are usually thinking not of things like the honor due to parents, but of things like food – things which we need.  Right away we face the difficulty of defining these needs.

I don’t doubt the need to eat, but what about, say, higher education?  Can everyone benefit from higher education?  Would a right to higher education mean that no one should have to pay, or at least that no one who could benefit from it should have to pay?  But someone would pay – the cost would presumably be borne by everyone else, through taxation.  Here’s the rub:  Although everyone would pay these taxes, not everyone does go to college.  Thus, working class parents would end up covering part of the costs of education for the children of professional and upper-class parents.  In other words, making education free would amount to a transfer of wealth from the more needy to the less needy.  Would that be fair?  In fact, couldn’t it even be viewed as an egregious violation of the rights of the hard-working folk at the bottom of the scale whose wealth is taken away?  Another point which is not discussed as often as it should be is that the provision of a governmental tuition subsidy also enables colleges to raise tuition by the average amount of the subsidy.  If you want to know why college is so expensive, there’s a big fat reason.  College would be much cheaper today if government hadn’t “helped.”

And what else counts as a need?  Of course not, say, recreation.  But wait!  Are we sure of that?  Doesn’t everyone need to relax?   So why shouldn’t we call recreation a need?  By the way, colleges and universities, which we already subsidize, provide a lot of recreation:  Music, sports, movies, art galleries, gymnasiums, swimming pools, exercise equipment, and all sorts of other things.  Student life is a little like socialism, and a little like Club Med, but with exams.  I know my students won’t like my saying that, but it’s true.

To simplify, suppose we limit positive rights to just a few – say the big four, food, clothing, housing, and health care.  We need to have food when we are hungry, clothing when we are naked, shelter when we are homeless, and medicine when we are sick.  One might think that by reducing what we call needs to just these four, the affirmative duty of compassion would be easy to translate into enforceable negative duties.  “At least we must never omit to provide just these four things,” we might say.  But no:  Translation is just as difficult in the case of these obvious needs.

For example, we should certainly look for ways to ameliorate homelessness, and there are lots of concrete things we can do.  If anyone thinks I don’t think so, they are sorely mistaken.  But suppose we say there is an enforceable positive right to shelter.  How then would we enforce it?  Dorothy Day wrote that the problem of poverty would be solved if each family took in a homeless person, but I don’t think even Dorothy Day would have said that each family has a legally enforceable duty to take in a homeless person.  In fact, Day was deeply skeptical of the state.  What she actually did was more sensible:  She set up Houses of Hospitality, as different as possible from state shelters and as much like family homes as possible.  And yet needless to say, even apart from the fact that there weren’t enough of them, the Houses of Hospitality couldn’t help everyone.  They couldn’t help people who were too dangerous to be taken in.  Nor could they help people who refused to be taken in just because they didn’t like having rules.  Were the rights of such people therefore violated?  I don’t see how we can say such a thing.

For another example, we shouldn’t want people to starve, and I am all for giving that fellow on the street in front of the church something to eat.  But suppose we say that everyone has an enforceable positive right to, say, bread.  One of my old economics professors used to ask what would happen if bread were priced at zero.  It’s easy to see that the demand for bread would skyrocket.  People would take more than they needed, and even people who weren’t hungry would grab some, just because they didn’t have to pay for it.  Wasted bread would litter the streets.  Just to produce more and more bread, resources would have to be diverted from the production of other things people need.  A socialist at the time, I was profoundly disturbed not to have an answer to this problem.

Another difficulty is that my enforceable right to P is unspecified unless we say who has the enforceable duty to give me P – and the right isn’t fully specified even then.  Do we say that each person has an individual duty to do certain things for his neighbor?  Then which things?  Or do we say that the state has the duty – for instance, that there should be something like universal health insurance, or socialized medicine?  Economists suggest that the cost of having a good or service provided by the government is generally about twice what it would be to have it provided by private means.  As Thomas Borcherding put it in his book Budgets and Bureaucrats: The Sources of Government Growth, “removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit costs of production.”  If this “Bureaucratic Rule of Two” is correct, then although collectivizing the duty might make it possible to help more people, none would be helped as well.

The quality of care would be further reduced by the fact that providers would no longer have to compete.  Moreover, just as with free bread, free medical care would cause demand to become infinite, so not only would there be long waits, but there would inevitably have to be strict rationing.  Note well:  In a culture of death, like ours, rationing takes the form of pressure to kill the very young, the very old, and the very weak.  We see this to some degree even with private insurance.

Or do we say that P should be provided neither by each individual, nor by the state, but by churches, synagogues, and voluntary organizations?  Perhaps we should provide food and health care the way Day’s Houses of Hospitality provided shelter.  Marvin Olasky points out in his fascinating book The Tragedy of American Compassion that in the past, almost all aid to poor persons in the United State was given by communities of worship.  Their first act was to reconnect them with their families and integrate them with the community, and they not only gave them material help, but also expected things of them.

Even now, many churches run such things as charity clinics and soup kitchens, and I am sure these are good things.  But then we have to ask whether, in running all these operations, churches and other voluntary organizations should rely on private contributions alone, or receive state assistance.  If they don’t receive state assistance, then they won’t be able to help as many people -- should we then say that the rights of those whom they couldn’t help had been violated?  But if they do receive state assistance, then immediately the state attaches strings to it -- strings which may be unacceptable.  “Sorry, no prayers over the food!”

Don’t laugh.  Often the state has tried to impose onerous rules on religious schools receiving tuition vouchers through school choice programs.  Moreover, once tied to the apron of the state, churches will begin to adopt the state’s own model of how to help needy people:  Not as embodied immortal souls, but as soulless bodies:  As though people were nothing but stuff, and people needed nothing but stuff.  We might say that this doesn’t have to happen, and I suppose it doesn’t.  But it has happened, and the reasons aren’t obscure.

Finally, the form of the right needs to be specified.  Would having an enforceable positive right to food, for example, mean a right to have food given to me?  Or would it mean a right to the chance to work for my food if I am able?  Getting what I need for free, even if I can work for it, saps responsibility, breeds dependency, and undermines marital and family structure.  This is why some government antipoverty programs seem to hurt the poor at least as much as they help them.

Perhaps a right to work for my bread would be more in the spirit of St. Paul’s command and exhortation to the Thessalonians.  “For even when we were with you,” he wrote, “we gave you this command: If anyone will not work, let him not eat.  For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.  Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living.”  But what if I say I can’t find a job, even though there are lots of jobs to be had?

And do we take my word for it?  A volunteer in a Christian charity once told me that a number of the genuinely needy women whom she had assisted were supporting able-bodied adult sons who could have worked, but chose not to.  When she suggested that their sons should be supporting them, rather than they, their sons, they were quick to make excuses for them, saying that jobs are scarce.  And yes, jobs are scarce for those who won’t work.

Further, what if I can find a job, but can’t hold one?  To make the right to a job meaningful, do I have a right to job training?  To make the right to job training meaningful, do I have a right to be educated in good work habits?  Since disordered families make the acquisition of good work habits less likely, do I have a right to a good family?  How on earth will that right be satisfied?  Do I have a right that my family be policed by the government?  Imagine a bureaucrat giving you rules about the kids’ chores.

For all such reasons, although acting with compassion is certainly a general duty -- in the sense that neglecting our neighbors is a grave sin -- I don’t think this general duty can be translated entirely into specific, enforceable positive rights.  Rights talk is of no help here.  It seems better to view compassion as a virtue, as a habit of the heart, which keeps us in perpetual readiness to give what help is possible and appropriate.

Related:

Free Stuff and Aspirational Rights