By Michael Moss, M.A. student
The Masters of Arts in Human Rights program met for a personal conversation with Robert George, who serves on our program’s Advisory Board, before he spoke for the Catholic Information Center’s JPII New Evangelization award dinner. It was a delightful conversation, especially because of the rich relationship between him and the director of the M.A. program, Professor Bill Saunders. We spoke briefly about his professional history, which reaches far beyond academia into the world of international commissions for human rights work and international and interreligious dialogue. We discussed theories for the bases of human rights at length, noting the broad but fraught consensus on natural rights present at the time of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Professor George spoke about the type of consensus possible between Catholics and other groups, religious or otherwise. He highlighted the importance of actual dialogue between individuals who can always, if they try, find a basis for agreement and development. That may be an agreement as basic as the embrace of free intellectual inquiry, but it nonetheless provides a starting point for joint efforts toward a vision of the common good. His experience of working internationally for the protection of human rights provided unexpected examples of moral consensus between supposedly opposed groups. Professor George delivered an introduction to what some call the “New Natural Law” school, an increasingly popular basis for talking about human rights that can be extracted from the common experience of human life.
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