Thank you, and a question.

Thanks very much to Michael, and to the others who commented on his post, for the warm welcome to Vox Nova. As I’ve said more than a few times over at Mirror of Justice — my blogging home — I think the conversation at Vox Nova is engaging and enlightening, and the blog a real success. Here’s hoping I am able, from time to time, to come up with worthy contributions.

Here’s a question I’d like to pose — that is, that I’d like to borrow from my MOJ colleague Rob Vischer and then pose — to the VN readers and bloggers alike: “Does the objectivity of religiously grounded human rights matter?” Inspired by Michael Perry’s work, and his argument that there does not appear to be a “non-religious ground for the morality of human rights,” the MOJ crowd has been wondering, for several years now, what the ground for “the morality of human rights” is, and why it might matter. (Here are some background posts by Fr. Robert Araujo, Rob Vischer, Jonathan Watson, Brian Tamanaha, and Michael Scaperlanda.) This same question surfaced often — in different forms and contexts — in the “Law and the Catholic Social Tradition” class that I taught last Spring at the University of Chicago.

Thoughts? What has to be true in order for the content and premises of the “morality of human rights” to be more than sentiments and conventions; that is, what has to be true — really true — in order for the “morality of human rights” to also be, really, true? Does it have to be the case that God exists, sustains the world, loves us, and made us in his image? If it does have to be the case, what then follows?