 If the free institutions fostered by the Enlightenment are to be maintained, if the liberal order is to overcome its current malaise, an adequate moral vision is absolutely necessary. Indeed, whatever else may sustain a political order on a day-to-day basis, it is the sense that the order is legitimate that will ultimately determine its fate. The moral vision that most eloquently characterizes my own sense of political legitimacy is the American Declaration of Independence. Its leading concept can be summed up in two words, individual rights. Yet, the doctrine of individual rights suffers from many difficulties and misinterpretations. Chief among these problems is explaining the exact relationship among rights, morality, and law or politics. The problem is primarily a result of a failure to grasp the moral function of individual rights. Indeed, this failure is found almost as often among defenders of individual rights as its opponents. In my book with Professor Douglas DeNile, Liberty and Nature, we offered a theory of rights that was designed both to support individual rights and to be rooted in a solid moral framework. To construct this theory, we needed to do two things simultaneously. One was to explain the purpose or function of rights in such a way that the work they do is not reducible to the work done by some other moral concept. The other was to show how rights are grounded in the moral framework itself. In our case, a self-perfectionist virtue ethics. In today's talk, I will lay out some of the structure of our argument in Liberty and Nature. My purpose is to give a sense of that argument without all the detail that seemed necessary for a more complete account. I will begin by explaining just what kind of ethical concept rights constitute. Next, I will describe some of the central features of our account of virtue ethics necessary for presenting the summary of an argument for rights that follows. Finally, I will consider the relationship between rights and justice. So, the concept of rights. Rights are an ethical concept, but they differ from other ethical concepts. They have a unique function. They do not directly concern themselves with either achieving the moral good or obtaining right conduct. Rather, rights are metanormative principles. That is to say, they are concerned with establishing a political context that protects the self-directedness or autonomy of individuals and thereby secures the liberty under which individuals can achieve their moral well-being. Rights provide guidance in creating, interpreting, and evaluating political legal systems so that individuals might be protected from being used by others for purposes to which they have not consented. Rights are used to determine fundamentally what ought to be a law. They provide the fundamental normative basis for a legal order. But unlike the moral virtues, they do not provide individuals with any guidance regarding what choices to make in the pursuit of their own or anyone else's moral perfection. The fundamental principles of a polity's legal system must have some normative basis if it is to ultimately have authority. And so the attempt to make law entirely independent from morality is a mistake. But it is also a mistake to reduce the moral concepts which underlie a polity's legal system to those moral concepts which provide individuals guidance in the conduct of their daily lives. What then is the fundamental difference between what I've called a normative and a metanormative principle? And how are they connected? A brief examination of the character of human moral well-being as conceived by a certain account of virtue ethics will provide answers to these questions. So now we'll take a brief look at virtue ethics. Human moral well-being, or as many virtue ethicists call it, human flourishing, is concerned with choices that necessarily involve the particular and the contingent. Knowledge of the moral virtues and true human goods may tell all of us what abstractly speaking we ought to do. But in the real world of individual human conduct, where all actions and goods are concrete and where human moral well-being takes a determinate form, what the moral virtues and human goods involve cannot be determined from the philosopher's armchair. A successful moral life is, by its very nature, something which is highly personal. For example, having a career, an education, a home, friends, and medical care are goods that, when considered from an abstract perspective, are good or appropriate for all human beings. They ought to be created or achieved. Yet this claim is not too helpful in providing guidance to the individual in a concrete situation. None of these goods exist in an abstract or generic manner. How are they to be created or achieved? What kind of job, education, home, and medical care does one need? Who will be one's friends? To what extent and in what amount are these to be pursued? How is the achievement of one of these goods to be related to the achievement of the other goods? What is the proper balance or mix? These questions can only be answered by considering the unique needs and circumstances of the individual. And the insight of that same individual is crucial to determining the proper answer. Practical reason, or phronesis, or prudence, as it's sometimes called, is needed in the achievement, maintenance, enjoyment, and coherent integration of these basic goods. What moral virtue and goods call for in terms of concrete actions in specific circumstances can vary from person to person. And certain virtues can have larger roles in the lives of some persons than others. Determining the appropriate response for the situation faced is, therefore, what moral living is all about. Now, this view of human flourishing could correctly be described as entailing a pluralistic realism regarding human values. The human good is something real and it is individualized and diverse. But there is something at the concrete level that is really common to all the various forms of human flourishing. And indeed must be. It is the essential core of practical reason itself. And this essential core has another name, self-direction. The act of exercising reason, of using one's intelligence, is not automatic. I should add here, all you have to do is teach a while and you'll discover that. It is something that the individual human being needs to initiate and maintain. Thus self-direction pertains to the very essence of human flourishing. And thus is common to all forms of flourishing, regardless of how diverse. Self-directedness is, therefore, both a necessary condition for self-perfection and a feature of all self-perfecting acts at whatever level of achievement or specificity. This is another way of saying that the phenomenon of volitional consciousness is both a necessary condition for and an operating condition of the pursuit and achievement of self-perfection. The absence of self-directedness implies the absence of self-perfection. Although the absence of self-perfection does not imply the absence of self-directedness, nor does the presence of self-directedness imply the presence of self-perfection. But none of this is to say that any choice one makes is as good as the next. But simply it's to say that the choice must be one's own and must involve considerations that are unique to the individual. One person's moral well-being cannot be exchanged with another's. The good for me is not and cannot be the good for you. Human moral well-being then is something objective, self-directed, and highly personal. It is not abstract, collective, or impersonal. Now this last point is crucial because it allows us a way to determine the unique moral function of rights. According to our theory, rights are concerned with the protection of the condition under which self-perfection can occur. Obviously, securing the condition for the possibility of self-perfection is logically prior to and distinct from the pursuit of self-perfection. But securing the condition must be essentially negative if we are correct that self-directedness does not imply or guarantee self-perfection and that one's self-perfection is not exchangeable with another's. In other words, we are not trying with our theory of rights directly and positively to secure self-perfection but rather to protect and thus prevent encroachments upon the condition under which self-perfection can exist. Our aim is thus to protect the possibility of self-perfection but only through seeking to protect the possibility of self-directedness. The single most common and threatening encroachment upon self-direction and consequently self-perfection is the initiation of physical force by one person or group against another. We therefore need a principle that will, to borrow a phrase from Robert Nozick, allow moral space to each person, a sphere of freedom whereby self-directed activities can be exercised without being trampled on by others or vice versa. Okay, so the aim of our theory of rights is to secure politically and legally the possibility of self-direction. Now you might ask however, why is self-directedness, your agency, taken as the condition to be protected? Are not there many other conditions that are also necessary for self-perfection or human flourishing? Why should not these conditions be our concern? Our socialist friends tell us all the time that we need to provide more than just protection for self-directedness. Why is self-direction taken as the thing to be protected? Why is liberty the most important? This is where we need to step back even more and consider what I call the need for a metanormative principle of rights. Now the individualized character of human flourishing creates a need for another type of ethical principle. Once we realize that human moral well-being is only achieved with and among others. We are social beings, not in the Hobbesian sense of merely needing others to get what we want to because we are powerless on our own, but in the sense that our very maturation as human beings requires others. Indeed, a significant part of our potentialities is other-oriented. Now if this is true, there is a difficulty. If one person's particular form of well-being is different from another's and may even conflict with it, and if persons can prevent others from being self-directed, then certain interpersonal standards need to be adopted if individuals are to flourish in their diverse ways among others. An ethical principle is needed whose primary function is not guiding a person to well-being or right conduct, but providing a standard for interpersonal conduct that favors no particular form of human flourishing, while at the same time providing a context for diverse forms of human flourishing to be achieved. Such a principle provides such a context by protecting what is necessary to the possibility of each and every person's finding fulfillment, regardless of the determinate form virtues and human goods take in their lives. Thus, it is very important that there be such a thing as a metanormative principle. And people are beginning to realize this today. The diversity of human goods, value pluralism is a reality, and the challenge to liberalism is to try to find a way of accommodating that. Now given what we have already said about our conception of human flourishing and the central necessary role that self-direction plays in this conception, self-direction is that unique feature of human flourishing that everyone must first have protected in the concrete situation. Yet since this point is crucial to our theory of rights, the relationship between self-direction and practical reason bears repeating. Practical reason, which is the crucial thing for the ethical life, cannot be practical reason without self-direction. And no constituent virtue or good of human flourishing can be such a good or virtue without practical reason. Thus self-directedness is both necessary and central to the very nature of human flourishing. It is the only feature of human flourishing common to all acts of self-perfection and peculiar to each. Thus self-direction is the only feature of human flourishing upon which to base a metanormative principle because it is the only feature to which each and every person in a concrete situation has a necessary stake. Also, self-directedness is the only feature of human flourishing whose protection is consistent with the diverse forms of human flourishing. We cannot have a metanormative principle that will structurally prejudice society more toward some forms of self-perfection than others. To do this would in effect act against the requirement that our theory supports self-perfection. So the principles we arrive at must be universal in a sense of being equally applicable to all individuals. In addition, the universality requirement necessitates that we center our principle around that characteristic present in all forms of self-perfection. Otherwise we will again prejudice the situation in favor of some forms of self-perfection. Now so-called generic goods, for example, food, clothing, shelter, knowledge, friendship, artistic appreciation, and love, or even central virtues like integrity, courage, and justice will not suffice as our standard here. Even though they are universal in the sense of helping to define the meaning of self-perfection for all individuals, their particular form or application is given by the individual. This means that while, for example, artistic appreciation may be necessary for anyone's self-perfection, the particular form it takes will differ widely. Our principle must apply both to the particular and the general in the same way and in the same respect, or we will be back to an slanting of the situation in favor of some forms of self-perfection over others. Now, of course, it becomes much more difficult to find a candidate for our principle of rights, one that is retained across individuals and throughout the developmental process of achieving and maintaining individualized self-perfection. Nevertheless, a principle that provides for protection of self-directedness will not favor any particular form of flourishing, and yet will still allow the possibility that everyone can flourish. Such a principle is our metanormative conception of rights. On the basis of what we have said so far, it is clear that the only type of rights we possess that are consistent with protecting the condition necessary for the pursuit of any form of self-perfection are rights of equal liberty, where no one is allowed to take action toward another that threatens or destroys the other's self-directedness. The basic rights we possess are thus principles of mutual non-interference. This translates socially into a principle of maximum, compossible, and equal freedom for all. The freedom must be equal in the sense that it must allow for the possibility of diverse modes of flourishing, and therefore must not be structurally biased in favor of some forms of human flourishing over others. The freedom must be compossible, coherent, consistent, in the sense that the exercise of self-directed activity by one person must not encroach upon that of another. Because we are not directly concerned with the promotion of self-perfection itself, but only the condition for it, it is not consequences per se that will determine encroachment. What is decisive is whether the action taken by one person towards another secures the other's consent, or as otherwise in accord with the other's choices. One may violate another's rights and produce a chain of events that lead to consequences that could be said to be in the other person's apparent or real benefit. And one may not violate another's rights and produce a chain of events that leads to one's apparent or real detriment. Yet, since the purpose here is to structure a political principle that protects the condition for self-perfection, rather than leading to self-perfection itself, the consequences of actions are of little importance. Our concern here is not with how acts will turn out, but rather with setting the appropriate foundation for taking of any action in the first place. Now, that's the basic idea behind our approach to rights. But since this conference deals with the notion of justice, and since the notion of justice is a primary political principle to many people's minds, I should say something also about the relationship between rights and justice. And here I think I have something to offer that is not usually found in liberal thought. Now, the question we should consider is, why should the right to equal negative liberty be the only metanormative principle? Rights are concerned with the conditions for interpersonal living, but are there not other ethical concepts that also have this concern? Particularly, does not the concept of justice have to do with how human beings should treat each other? Is this not a notion one needs to consider when talking about interpersonal principles? In fact, is not justice the ethical concept that covers both normative and metanormative issues? And might it not be that justice requires ultimate principles of politics to be concerned with more than just protecting self-directedness? Now, these questions are very important, for they allow us to discuss more precisely in what sense human beings are social in nature, and in what sense metanormative principles are concerned with the interpersonal. Further, these questions afford us the opportunity to distinguish two different senses of justice, and thereby to address a confusion in political philosophy that is nearly as old as philosophy itself. Human beings cannot achieve moral maturation in isolation. Their fulfillment demands life with others. This need to live with others must be expressed in some form, but abstractly considered, it can be expressed in any. The specific form in which human sociality is expressed can be termed an exclusive relationship. Exclusive relationships cover a continuum of relations. Everything from close friends and confidants to business and work relations to mere acquaintances. But they all involve a principle of selectivity on the part of the participants in the relationship. Some people are included and others are excluded from the relationship. On the basis of some values the participants share. It is through exclusive relationships that various types of groups, communities, and even cultures are formed. Since human flourishing is individualized, however, the way or manner in which the need for sociality is expressed is not limited to some select pool or group of humans. Though nearly everyone starts life within a family, within a community, a society, and a culture. This does not mean that one must be confined to only those relationships that constitute one's family, community, society, or culture. The forms of human sociality are not necessarily limited or closed to any human being. Human sociality can involve the exploration of relationships with new and different people and varied ways of living, working, and thinking. This open-ended character of human sociality leads us to describe the relationships that might develop as being non-exclusive. No principle of selectivity is involved, for we are noting that human sociality, prior to a person's choice and selection, imposes no limitation regarding with whom or under what conditions one may have a relationship. Further, non-exclusive relationships often provide a wider context in which exclusive relationships are formed because many, if not most, exclusive relationships come about only because there was first a non-exclusive one. Thus, human beings are social animals in the sense that though there must be some set of exclusive relations through which one expresses one's sociality, there is no a priori exclusion of anyone from participation in those relations. Now, not acknowledging that human sociality allows for an openness to strangers or to human beings in general is sometimes thought to be one of the central failings of a type of ethics that I've been advancing. It is claimed that even though a self-perfection involves other concern, the concern is always involved some principle of selectivity based upon some values of one's own, and indeed I think this is true. But there is nothing about a self-perfectionist ethics that requires denying that human sociality is open to relationships with strangers, foreigners, or people with whom no common values are as yet shared. In fact, it would seem that acknowledging the non-exclusive feature of human sociality is what it means to say that we are social and political animals. Yet, the non-exclusive side of human sociality does require that two senses of justice be distinguished. Justice can be understood as a metanormative principle and as a normative principle. As a metanormative principle, justice is concerned with relationships with people with whom no values are as yet shared. The context for a metanormative notion of justice is as universal as possible. The right to liberty that I've talked about is what I could call a metanormative sense of justice. Yet, justice can also be concerned with what I've called an exclusive relationship. And here justice involves more than negative obligations. The virtue of justice when we're dealing with exclusive relationships involves considering people and their circumstances and giving them their due. This is the truth that you find in classical and communitarian ethics. Justice when we're talking about the virtue requires more than just negative obligations. Yet, what has happened in political philosophy is that the metanormative sense of justice and the normative sense of justice has been confused. This confusion is due to the failure to see the difference between justice that is concerned with exclusive relationships and justice that is concerned with non-exclusive relationships. It is correct to say that the virtue of justice requires more than negative obligations. But that does not mean that when we're developing political principles, when we're dealing with non-exclusive open-ended relationships, that we need to have more than negative obligations. This is the truth of the classical liberal position. So there's not a necessary conflict. I will close my comments with a quotation from a work that I think a lot of and I recommend it to you all. It is by the playwright Robert Bolt. It's from his play A Man for All Seasons. He has his character Thomas Moore respond to his son-in-law in the following way. They're discussing the law. And if you think about this normative metanormative distinction, you will see the wisdom in Bolt's play. The quotation goes this way, the law is not a light for you or any man to see by. The law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely. So immediately we will have the comments by the father Robert Seriko. As you see at his dress, Robert Seriko is a priest, is a member of the Order of St. Paul. And this priest is also a great economist and a great philosopher. He has created and is now managing with Chris Moran the Lord Acton Institute. Why Lord Acton? Because Lord Acton was a very huge liberal, classical liberal in the 19th century, but also a great Catholic. And Father Seriko employs energy to explain and especially to Order of Priest in America. He has created these institutes in view to train the priest to a philosophical and economic reflection and train the priest to conciliate the virtues of the ethics of Catholic church and principles of freedom. Bob Seriko is a very frequently member of our society and once more I'm very happy to welcome his Bob. Thank you Professor Guerrillo and thank you also for the opportunity once again to be able to address this very significant conference here in Ex-improvence. It's a particular honor to engage in a dialogue with Professor Rasmussen who together with his colleague Professor Denial have proven the truth of the adage that says that the natural law always buries its undertakers. I think these two professors have in many ways begun a renaissance in thinking with regard to the natural law and in particular with regard to its application to the social political sphere. I have only a few random comments that are designed to augment and perhaps supplement some of the ideas of the thesis that has been put before us this morning. And the first is to affirm the initial insight of this presentation, namely that people do not go to the barricades, people do not risk their lives for a utilitarian concept. People risk their lives, people are motivated out of moral concern. Therefore it is imperative from a utilitarian perspective that the liberal idea be grounded in a moral framework. Liberty is not a virtue in itself. One tends to think in that way because people risk their lives to attain liberty. Some of you know that better than I do. And yet once one has attained liberty, some other questions must come into play. Some questions that become even more important than liberty in a sense. Liberty is not a virtue. It is the context in which virtue becomes possible. Liberty is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The description of rights as a meta ethical concept is helpful in countering the religious and theological objection that says that the liberal society falters on its claim by believing that man has some claim of right against God. Lord Acton put this concept that is the concept that professors Rasmussen and Denial have articulated in a slightly different way. Lord Acton said that liberty is the political end of man. This identifies the right to one's liberty as instrumental and is not to be confused with Christian teleology which asserts that man's true end is not liberty but God. It is the political end of man which is liberty. This is a narrow and a modest claim. Nonetheless, it is a critical claim because it reminds us that human beings are never means to other people's ends. They are ends in themselves. In order for people to act virtuously, it is necessary that they have free will. The moral space about which Professor Rasmussen speaks using the phrase of Robert Nozick is really the context in which God situates the human family. God who is the only one for whom absolute power has not been corrupting has situated the human race in the context of liberty, giving man the awesome power to reject his own creator. If God does this in the context of creation, by what right do political authorities seek to curtail human liberty in the social realm? The thesis that Professor Rasmussen has presented also acts as a corrective to some crude libertarian theorists who espouse a kind of moral relativism in the name of the liberal idea and who completely sever the connections between liberty and truth, leading to the conclusion that as long as an act is free, that act is moral. As long as an act coerces no one, that act can be considered a moral action. This type of approach allows two false alternatives to emerge. In the face of such a relativist liberalism, there are those who would construct a society that is free but lacks virtue, or another group might attempt to construct a society that curtails human liberty in the name of virtue. We can reject both of these alternatives. By the use of this idea of a meta-ethical principle, we can ground the liberty of human actions in the political sphere without surrendering the claim of moral truth upon all people. We need not equate the liberal idea with libertinism. Furthermore, this approach has the advantage of responding to a stereotype of a liberal conception. Perhaps it is a stereotype that you have encountered in your dialogues with other people. That stereotype says that the liberal idea is essentially atomistic, that it disregards the social nature of man. This approach is essentially social, in the sense that it recognizes that human motivation, pardon me, human maturation, can only flourish in relations with other people. This approach, that is Professor Rasmussen's approach, acknowledges the fact that human beings are two things simultaneously. We are individual from the moment of our conception. We are biologically distinct from our mothers, even while we exist in relationship, that is, we are also social with our mothers. The whole of human development from conception onward is the balancing between this sense of autonomy and individuation. Finally, there is a temptation on the part of morally sensitive people to use whatever means available to achieve moral ends. This is a very dangerous concept, as history has demonstrated time and time again. It is dangerous because it fails to respect the legitimate autonomy in human relationships, the legitimate autonomy of various sciences and insights that emerge in social relationships. Furthermore, it collapses the distinction between what Robert Nesbitt identifies as power and authority. Both power and authority are forms of constraint. Power is a form of constraint that is political and essentially coercive. Authority is a form of constraint to which people acquiesce, even at times begrudgingly. It is within the realm of the legitimate exercise of power, that is, within the realm of political discourse, that the insight of meta-ethical norms applies. Finally, the high level of abstraction with which the state addresses its own ends simultaneously makes the state inept at getting at the deeper human virtues. And this problem was discussed in a slightly different context. In Friedrich Hayek's book, The Fatal Conceit, the assumption on the part of the state that it knows and is capable of achieving the deeper moral ends for which human beings were made. So the thesis put forth here, I think, is a compelling one and one that augments the moral vision for the liberal society, a vision that I think ultimately will offer a far more persuasive motivation for people to join us in the changes that are sweeping the globe. Thank you for the opportunity.