Sources & Extracts

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Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was a Catholic philosopher and a Thomist. He believed that each individual has a direct relationship to God or "the Absolute." That relationship implied that each individual has a "destiny superior to time." On the basis of that relationship and that destiny, each individual has certain "fundamental rights." Here is how he puts it:
To sum up, the fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one's own life as a master of oneself and of one's acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to the pursuit of eternal good (without this pursuit there is no true pursuit of happiness); the right to keep one's body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one's choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society -- all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.[The Rights of Man and Natural Law, p. 116]