O’Neill integrates a legitimate role for religious discourse in public reasoning and rights rhetoric, moving beyond incommensurability battles of the recent past. He argues that well-formed religious narratives can ground respect and fund adherents’ moral imagination in applying and mobilizing to protect rights. He elaborates how his own Christian tradition’s contributions consist in calls to prophecy, forgiveness, and martyrdom. Countering tendencies to oppose secular and religious approaches, he demonstrates how religion can ground and interpret public reason. For example, he emphasizes how forgiveness is compatible with redress and reparations, rather than a form of “cheap forgetting,” for “mercy is not less than just.” He carefully yet unapologetically intertwines civic and religious narratives with the integrity of civil-rights era rhetoric. Bringing together religious discourse’s presumption of rights rhetoric with ethical discourse’s systemic imperatives for juridical protection, he reminds us that “public reason is thick before it is thin.” Whereas their compatibility is convincingly established, political co-optation of religious claims and the construal of rights-bearers in certain religious traditions may pose challenges to his inclusive vision that warrant further consideration.
Practical payoffs of O’Neill’s threefold framework of rights as narrative grammar emerge in his incisive applications to mass incarceration, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and intergenerational responsibilities to the nonhuman world. There it becomes clear how victims’ own articulation of their rights can help redress the inadequacies of formal procedural reciprocity amid not only disparities in agency, but also distortions of social truth and ostensible consensus. Centering collective memory illuminates how rights play not only regulative roles, but also constructive and reconstructive ones, helping incorporate formerly excluded groups. O’Neill identifies enslaved, female, transgendered, and disabled voices among those “sidelined” who must redress our “moral myopia.” Too often, prevailing rights regimes have masked exclusionary dynamics, rationalized by beliefs about inherent difference or the criminalization of Black bodies and “illegal aliens.” As O’Neill puts it, in both instances the will to punish
remains a potent force in polities wherein social bonds are already frayed and violence is naturalized. In a perverse dialectic, vindictive resentment, especially against frightening symbols of difference, seems to have its own cathartic rationale: difference is feared and punished, reproducing (essentializing) the very difference we fear and consequently punish.
His own approach interrupts these cycles and offers structural remedies. For example, if forced migration is not a crisis to “manage” but a longer-term consequence of systemic rights denial, an internal rights regime must address its complex push factors beyond the well-founded fear of persecution, such as generalized violence, famine, and disease, as in Syria and Yemen. Its “perpetrators” bear correlative duties of making restitution and reparation, whether through resettlement quotas, more equitable sharing of responsibility, or juridical redress of gender-based violence. These welcome shifts reflect not only the broader perspectives signaled by the 2020 protests, but also attention in the social sciences, ethics, and the current papacy to influential structures, ideologies, and incentives. Emphases on the links between exploitative structures and rights violations in Evangelii gaudium and Fratelli tutti are ecclesial advances in this vein; in a sense, the foundations of the intergenerational solidarity that Pope Francis calls for in Laudato si’ are theorized in O’Neill’s applications as well.
Throughout his analysis, O’Neill regularly turns readers’ attention to concrete voices and faces. Reflecting upon the Lucan parable of the forgiven woman, O’Neill contrasts the Pharisee’s retributive “moral squint” with Jesus’s restorative one by attending to her in her concrete particularity as the genuine host: “‘Do you see this woman?’ She is not a figure or cipher of transgression in this house of murmuring men, but this woman, who loves so richly, whose faith is saving, who leaves with the blessing of divine šālôm.” Taken together, O’Neill’s emphases on testimonies as constitutive of rights talk, and on unexpected voices (the woman who “loves enough to brave the censoring gaze, to see only Jesus,” the Samaritan who invites us to “take the victim’s side” as our own) as constitutive of solidarity provide an illuminating “pedagogy of seeing,” à la the Cameroonian sociologist and theologian Jean-Marc Éla.
Emerging threats to the rhetorical practices he prioritizes—whether from surveillance capitalism, “post-truth” epistemic entitlement claims, or the distractions and distortions of social media— remain troublesome. Yet O’Neill advances tools to expose and counter new risks. Prioritizing marginalized voices and truth-telling may be more important than ever, given the current landscape. O’Neill sounds a characteristic note of humility as he wraps up his book, suggesting it offers but a “flawed, humble beginning, more abandoned than finished.” Nevertheless, this ambitious and generative work is likely to shape human-rights discourse and practice for many years to come.
Reimagining Human Rights
Religion and the Common Good
William O’Neill, SJ
Georgetown University Press
$44.95 | 264 pp.