Reddit mentions of Justice: Rights and Wrongs

Nicholas Wolterstorff will be your man. And this will be your book. It's pretty technical and slow through the first 1/3 but it picks up. Wolterstorff does a fantastic job at keeping extremely technical and boring things interesting.

I do believe humans are valuable, immensely so. First off, without God (and especially without the Christian God), it seems almost impossible to ground any sorts of rights for human beings to have. If human beings do not have rights, it seems to follow they don't have any value (and I think the argument works the other way around as well).

Christians have a tendency to try and ground rights and value in the fact that they were created in the image of God. While I feel this pull, ultimately I don't think it is successful. Wolterstorff thinks, as do I, that if we ground human rights in the Image of God, then we need to get precisely at what this means. The bible, as Woltestorff thinks, always associates the Image of God with acting on dominion over the earth (exercising this sort of power human beings are endowed with). This is troublesome. Why? Well, there are human beings that clearly have value and rights but cannot exercise this sort of power (think fetuses, or those in a coma). What about them? It seems that we cannot ultimately ground value and rights in being created in the image of God.

This isn't a problem, thinks Wolterstorff; let's shift our thought to something that is more metaphysically powerful: God's love. Ultimately, Wolterstorff thinks that a society is just insofar as each and every human creature enjoys what they have a right to. Now your question is how can we get to a theory which satisfies this theory. Wolterstorff is brilliant here: because God loves each and every creature equally and permanently, an immense worth supervenes from that said love. With this value/worth, we can begin to ground rights. (He gets into Augustine's three forms of love which I wont explain here).

Let's suppose that I have a teddy bear. It doesn't have any inherent worth or value. But suppose I love this teddy bear with the love of attachment and benevolence. It is my teddy bear and because of how much I love it, it gains extreme value. If you were to wrong my teddy bear, not only would you be wronging the bear, but me! I think this is perfectly analogous with God's love (especially because God's love is absolutely perfect in every sense of the word). God loves each and every human being perfectly. Thus they have immense worth and value, etc. If God loves us, a great worth supervenes and thus we are able to ground rights in our worth through God's love.

If a human person is wronged, not only is the person's worth disrespected, but God is wronged. This is why justice is so important to God. I'll end with a quotation from Wolterstorff:

And God loves the presence of justice in society not because it makes for a society whose excellence God admires, but because God loves the members of society… God desires that each and every human being shall flourish, that each and every shall experience what the Old Testament writers call shalom. Injustice is perforce the impairment of shalom. That is why God loves justice. God desires the flourishing of each and every one of God’s human creatures; justice is indispensable to that. Love and justice are not pitted against each other but intertwined. (Justice: Rights & Wrongs)

Sorry for the short reply and the catpiss grammar. I'll come back later.

A few good books that I found helpful, at least for my own benefit (mid-20s, similar situation):

• "The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth" by Dr. M. Scott Peck
  
• "Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Towards Spiritual Growth" by Dr. M. Scott Peck. In this book he discusses his four stages of spirituality, from (1) sinner to (2) churchgoing/religious to (3) skeptic/freethinker and finally (4) independently spiritual.
  
• "America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us" by Paul Froese and Christopher Bader is an intriguing look at people's views of God along a two-dimensional plane describing God's judgmentality and activity in human affairs, and how that affects their politics, morals, religion and other viewpoint (with atheists for control). This would be great for both your friend and her parents.
  
• Getting a little deeper into ethics and morality, "Justice: Rights and Wrongs" and "Justice in Love" by ethical professor Nicholas Wolterstorff can be good, especially for the parents, in highlighting the need to respect people as rational moral agents with the right to make their own decisions—as well as a rights-based system of justice that is different from authoritarian Christianity (without being moral anarchy).
  
  EDIT: Link formatting issues.