Something of a critique of modern libertarianism today. The notion of everybody for themselves doesn’t hold water in a Christian worldview. Creation roots our species as a social one. It may be that some people are more or less inclined to relationships with others. That’s fine. People who consider themselves above and apart from every other person would be disordered in some way.
The Relational Structure of the Human Person
26. Viewed through the lens of the relational character of the person, human dignity helps to overcome the narrow perspective of a self-referential and individualistic freedom that claims to create its own values regardless of the objective norms of the good and of our relationship with other living beings. Indeed, there is an ever-growing risk of reducing human dignity to the ability to determine one’s identity and future independently of others, without regard for one’s membership in the human community.
Libertarianism’s big miss is the notion of responsibility and duty in addition to personal rights. Not to mention a struggle to recognize the rights of other people.
In this flawed understanding of freedom, the mutual recognition of duties and rights that enable us to care for each other becomes impossible.
Let a recent pope take the mic drop:
In fact, as Pope St. John Paul II recalled, freedom is placed “at the service of the person and of his fulfillment through the gift of self and openness to others; but when freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content, and its very meaning and dignity are contradicted.”[John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 19]
Click this link to read the DDDF document on the Vatican site.
Catholic Sensibility 