Conservatives today aren’t sure what to do with rights. On the one hand, “rights” have been increasingly deployed in the culture wars as the tip of the spear to drive us from moral and legal terrain that was uncontroversial until yesterday. Such is the newly discovered “right” to alter one’s gender and compel society to obsequiously honor this choice. Under the tutelage of the left, rights have proliferated into an insatiable list of wishes for an ever-growing government to attempt to grant (such as a “right” to free childcare) and have been wielded as bludgeons with which to beat a benighted right into shameful submission (such as in the recent furor over voting rights).
On the other hand, surely conservatives have a strong interest in the idea that our laws should reflect a bedrock foundation of unchanging moral norms—an intuition that underlies our language of a “right to life” in response to abortion and euthanasia. Additionally, in the face of recent attempts to stifle dissent, conservatives have doubled down on free-speech rights, and for centuries, conservatives have been known for a fierce defense of “sacred” private property rights. Moreover, as Americans, the language of rights is deep in our bones; how could we ever question the ringing assertions of the preamble to the Declaration, or the foundational commitments of the Bill of Rights?
Clearly, conservatives stand in urgent need of a guide through this confusing terrain, someone to help us understand why rights language has led us so far astray from our moral roots, and how to find our way back. Enter Nigel Biggar, one of the leading Christian ethicists of our generation and a worthy heir to the venerable tradition of British empiricism inspired by Edmund Burke.
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