In Cross-Cultural Paul Charles Cosgrove devotes a chapter to “Paul and American Individualism”. This necessarily includes a consideration of human rights, for he observes,
In the American political tradition, the primary meaning of individualism is personal rights (80).
John Stuart Mill’s 18th century utilitarianism served as one source of the rights tradition. Mill insisted on the equal rights of all over the privileges of the few. According to Mill’s mathematics, Individual = 1 and Social Class = 0. He believed each individual had an equal right to happinesss. But the application of the principle of utility maximisation aims at achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Cosgrove observes that according to a strict utilitarian calculus justification can be found for harvesting the organs of one individual to save the lives of 5 others. Most utilitarians baulk at this point and introduce constraints. Both Kant and Locke lodge rights in the single person against the group and the American Declaration of Independence follows this tradition by asserting that all people are not only created equal but also “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Cosgrove recognises that in practice almost every area of American life involves compromise between a commitment to individual sovereignty and a utilitarian concern for the good of the many. Generally speaking, when it involves shared risk for the sake of the whole the ideology is utilitarian. The inalienable rights of the individual are only championed when there is a direct threat to personal rights. The latter means that an individual must give consent before his or her organs can be harvested. At the same time utilitarian cost-benefits lead to the construction of roads, without individual consent, on which, from time to time, individuals will be injured or die.
The world in which Paul lived had not tradition of equal freedom based on human rights. Each person, relative to their “station” and its attendant duties, might enjoy certain privileges, that might be deemed rights. But any such rights and duties did not pertain to an individual apart from his or her status, but were tied to the social station itself.
In the same way, when Paul uses exousia (normally the term for ”authority”) with a sense approaching our concept of “right”, he does so on the assumption that rights attach to social status or role. Cosgrove identifies the following examples:
- The potter’s right over the clay (Romans 9:22).
- The apostle’s right to support (1 Corinthians 9 and 2 Thessalonians 3:9)
- The freedom of those in Christ to eat meat under certain circumstances (1 Corinthians 8:9).
The question is raised as to whether Paul’s teaching and theology provides a basis for a conception of human rights that attaches to the individual as such, quite apart from social status and role.
To be continued.
Posted December 4, 2008
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