Wide-ranging and ambitious, Justice combines moral philosophy and
Christian ethics to develop an important theory of rights and of justice
as grounded in rights. Nicholas Wolterstorff discusses what it is to
have a right, and he locates rights in the respect due the worth of the
rights-holder. After contending that socially-conferred rights require
the existence of natural rights, he argues that no secular account of
natural human rights is successful; he offers instead a theistic
account.
Wolterstorff prefaces his systematic account of justice as grounded in
rights with an exploration of the common claim that rights-talk is
inherently individualistic and possessive. He demonstrates that the idea
of natural rights originated neither in the Enlightenment nor in the
individualistic philosophy of the late Middle Ages, but was already
employed by the canon lawyers of the twelfth century. He traces our
intuitions about rights and justice back even further, to Hebrew and
Christian scriptures. After extensively discussing justice in the Old
Testament and the New, he goes on to show why ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy could not serve as a framework for a theory of rights.
Connecting rights and wrongs to God's relationship with humankind,
Justice not only offers a rich and compelling philosophical account of
justice, but also makes an important contribution to overcoming the
present-day divide between religious discourse and human rights.
