Human rights, human dignity and the scope of responsibility

Abstract

Who is my neighbour? (St Luke) The recurring theme of this book has been the question of whether liberal democratic societies have or need to have a secure moral foundation and, if they do, the role that Christian social and political reflection could or should contribute to the articulation of this moral base. We have also seen reasons deployed by communitarian thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer for thinking that the search for a universal rational philosophical basis for politics is misconceived. In their view, societies are based upon common self-understandings and a lively sense of their own ethos, not upon some abstract universal principles. At the same time, narrative theologians have argued that, if liberal society is conceived as being based upon some set of general philosophical principles, then theology cannot contribute anything to the formulation and defence of such principles. To do so would be to abstract from the narrative of Christianity and use its insights in a way that detaches them from the story, and to make what is a distinctively Christian moral perspective an exemplar of some more general moral and political position. In this sense, the narrative theologian is opposed to an ‘accommodationist’ strategy: of using Christian moral resources, as it were, at the service of a moral position which can be reached and accepted by others on purely secular or humanist grounds.