Father MacLaren in his Aquinas Paper, Private Property and the Natural Law, builds his thesis around the question of the interpretation of such statements from the papal encyclicals on the social question as: ‘The right to own private property has been given to man by Nature, or rather by the Creator himself’. What do such statements mean? he asks. ‘Do they mean that the right to private property belongs to the nature of man in the same way, let us say, as the right to life itself? Do they mean that private property is the only legitimate way in which a man can own material possessions? In other words, is private property an absolute right completely excluding any other way of possessing material things?’ I should agree with Father MacLaren in answering the first two questions in the negative but I should hesitate about the third, because it seems to contain a certain confusion of thought that flaws the whole argument in his paper and which makes a yes or no answer impossible. In other words, the question implies that unless a right is ‘exclusive’ it is not ‘absolute’.

Primary Natural rights, of course, are both absolute and exclusive. They flow from the very nature of man. Each is essential if man is to exist as man. Each covers its own field entirely. Thus, for example, the right to life itself. Secondary Natural rights are drawn from primary natural rights as conclusion from premiss.