Catherine Shelley recently gave a seminar at Manchester university on theology human rights. She was a lawyer working on child protection issues for a council in Manchester and is now ordained and doing her PhD part time at Manchester. She became interested in the issue of rights, especially rights for children, when working on cases involving forced marriages and honour killings. Many of her legal colleagues regarded these cases as straightforward human rights abuses but Shelley realised that the idea of human rights simply did not fit the ‘worldview’ of the people involved. She realised that unless people were engaged at on the level of their theology they would never accept human rights, and that their theological views had to be taken seriously if any dialogue between them and believers in rights was to proceed.
Shelley did a good job of responding to the critiques of Hauerwas and MacIntyre. She challenged their construal of rights as individualistic on the grounds that rights since the 50′s have been less about property and more about protecting individual human beings in response to genocide and statist inhumanity. She also raised the point that in order to claim my rights I should logically recognise yours, so that rights are intrinsically mutual rather than individualistic. Hauerwas is well known for advocating communities with strong identities and traditions, and apparently has an essay in which he discusses the Hasidic Jews as a good example of this, especially in the way they teach their children. Some may wonder whether this adds weight to the charge against Hauerwas that he avoids facing fully the challenge of pluralism.
Towards the end Shelley argued against natural rights and any essentialist grounding of rights in any sort of natural law thinking, mostly out of concern for gender race issues, and in favour of a version of rights that would be grounded on human distinctiveness (rather than, say, equality). She defined human distinctiveness as bodily presence as a communicative system, including affective and not just rational capacity. Shelley did this out of a concern to capture children and those without fully mental capacity in her definition, which is certainly commendable but presumably this definition would also include some animals. In which case it is no longer about human distinctiveness. In any case, it was good to see human rights being defended theologically, because, although I think there is a lot to the theological and feminist critique that must be taken on board, human rights have proved enormously powerful and useful, so that writing them off can’t be a good idea.
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