Who is my neighbor? personalism and the foundations of human rights / Thomas D. Williams.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Part one: Rights in the crosshairs -- Defining human rights -- Some needed nuances -- The church and human rights -- Part two: The case against rights -- The accusation of nonexistence -- The accusation of inseparability -- The accusation of innovation -- Part three: A new solution to an old problem : thomistic personalism -- A personalism primer -- The person according to personalism -- Dignity and its due -- The two loves -- From love to human rights -- Christ and human dignity -- Part four: Human rights and classical ethics -- Natural law -- Natural justice -- Natural rights in classical theory -- Part five: Towards an ethics of solidarity -- Who is my neighbor?

Over the past half century the language of human rights has gained such dominance in moral, civic, and ecclesiastical discourse that ethical and social questions are increasingly framed in terms of rights. Yet the vast literature dealing with human and civil rights focuses almost exclusively on the juridical and practical ramifications of rights, rather than the philosophical, moral, and foundational aspects. As a result, the proliferation of rights claims and catalogs has not been accompanied by a reasoned case for the existence of human rights or rational criteria for distinguishing true moral entitlement from spurious claims. Who Is My Neighbor? makes a case for human rights as moral entitlements grounded in the dignity of the human person. Drawing upon insights of Thomistic Personalism, Thomas D. Williams sets forth the anthropological, philosophical, and theological bases for asserting that the human person must always be loved as an end and never used as a mere means. Williams grants ample space to critics of rights theory and systematically answers their arguments by showing how, rightly understood, human rights dovetail with classical ethical theory and traditional formulations of justice and natural law. Williams suggests that rights language not only does no violence to classical ethics but serves to highlight certain fundamental truths about the human person essential to right human relations.

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