# Imputed Rights



## yeutter (Aug 19, 2017)

Professor Robert V. Andelson is not someone I know much about. In the early 1970s Russell Kirk praised this book in the *University Bookman*. Kirk was impressed with Andelson's attempts to renew the metaphysical foundations of natural rights. 

Recently I discovered this book was still in print.

In his book *Imputed Rights: An Essay in Christian Social Theory*, Professor Andelson sets forth a ground for Christians to appeal to natural rights. He examines the radical humanist and utilitarian approaches to the idea of rights and exposes the difficulty of holding to such a position. 

Andelson's thesis is that the will and grace of God are the absolute grounds for human rights.

On a personal note, when I first read this book, about forty-five years ago, I was somewhat enamored with the thinking of Ayn Rand. This book caused me to utterly reject Ayn Rand's ideas. I loaned my copy to a hardliner student of objectivism. He read it and told me; that he now understood how objectivists and Catholic libertarians could be co-belligerents.

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