True Rights as the Good of the Whole

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Regarding the Roberts nomination proceedings, Erik Jaffe on Volokh Conspirator makes an extremely important point in this post.

Demanding a Justice that would distort the laws to serve a particular end, be it civil rights, the environment, or what have you, is basically demanding a jurist who would be dishonest and violate his oath of office. Judge Roberts has naturally refused to be goaded into such silliness.

Benedict XVI enlarges upon the concept, albeit not in direct reference to Roberts but in reflecting upon freedom and individual rights:

The criterion of real right—right entitled to call itself true right which accords with freedom—can therefore only be the good of the whole, the good itself..... Accordingly, the history of liberation can never occur except as a history of growth in responsibility. Increase of freedom can no longer lie simply in giving more and more latitude to individual rights—which leads to absurdity and to the destruction of those very individual freedoms themselves.

Increase in freedom must be an increase in responsibility, which includes acceptance of the ever greater bonds required both by the claims of humanity's shared existence and by conformity to man's essence....

For Benedict, the responsibility we need to be exercising in a country of democratic freedom, needs to be a responsibility that answers to the truth of "man's being." Such a responsibility, then, is something we grow into. In his words, it consists in "the purification of individuals and of institutions through this truth."

It is this demand made upon us by the truth of who we are that means we must be people who listen.

One idea, which is implicit in this experiment, seems to me correct: reason must listen to the great religious traditions if it does not wish to become deaf, dumb and blind precisely to what is essential about human existence. There is no great philosophy which does not draw life from listening to and accepting religious tradition. Wherever this relation is cut off, philosophical thought withers and becomes a mere conceptual game. The very theme of responsibility, that is, the question of anchoring freedom in the truth of the good, of man and of the world, reveals very clearly the necessity of such attentive listening.