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Abstract
While there are rights with duties and without — ‘dutiful’ and ‘dutiless’ rights — it is rights correlative with duties that logically rank as our primary type of rights. It is a distinctive feature of normative rules that they basically operate through pairs of rights and duties, since such rules are concerned not alone with action-guidance but also with the distribution of benefits and burdens as between two individuals. There can be no right, Bentham remarked, unless the duty ‘assures’ a certain ‘good’ in the other.1 What is more, the right-holder does not merely state his interest, however much he does that too, he also claims an appropriate response: that the other should respect his grievance by at least offering a justifying excuse, or by making good an injury he has done, or abstaining from harm he intends to do, or by returning money or a thing which is the claimant’s property. Normative relationships, whether moral or legal or both, thus break up into dual components in that two-party relations have to include a right on the one hand with a duty on the other. It would be pointless to say that a personmay do something without there being other people related to that ‘may’; only if there is correlativity can ‘may’ in fact do its truly distinctive work. Of course the words right and duty are sometimes used in a looser sense, it being said that there can be rights without duties as well as duties without rights.
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Notes and References
See G. Marshall, ‘Rights, Options and Entitlements’, in A. W. B. Simpson (ed.)Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, 2nd ser. (1973) pp. 228, 236–7.
Stuart M. Brown, Jr., ‘Inalienable Rights’,Philosophical Review, 64 (1955) pp. 192, 193–4.
M. G. Singer,Generalisation in Ethics (London, 1973) pp. 311, 315.
See R. B. Brandt, ‘The Concept of Obligation and Duty’,Mind, 73 (1964) pp. 374, 376.
C. H. Whiteley, ‘On Duties’,Proceedings Aristotelian Society, 53 (1953) pp. 95, 97.
D. Lyons, ‘The Correlativity of Rights and Duties’,Nous, 4 (1970) pp. 45, 47ff.
See also D. Braybrooke, ‘The Firm but Untidy Correlativity of Rights and Obligations’,Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1 (1972) pp. 351, 360–2.
M. G. Singer, ‘The Basis of Rights and Duties’,Philosophical Studies, 23 (1972) pp. 48, 49ff.
C. Arnold, ‘Analyses of Right’, in E. Kamenka and A. S. Tay (eds)Human Rights (London, 1978) pp. 74, 77, 82ff.
See R. B. Brandt,Ethical Theory (New Jersey, 1959) p. 441.
W. D. Ross,The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930) pp. 19ff, 28ff;Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939) pp. 84ff.
And see A. I. Melden, ‘The Play of Rights’,Monist, 56 (1972) pp. 479, 481ff., 491.
P. Jones, ‘Doubts About Prima Facie Duties’,Philosophy, 45 (1970) pp. 39, 43ff.
See e.g. B. A. Richards, ‘Inalienable Rights: Recent Criticisms and Old Doctrine’,Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, 29 (1969) pp. 391, 397.
On all this, see L. J. Russell, ‘Ought Implies Can’,Proceedings Aristotelian Society, 36 (1936) pp. 151, 181; Don Locke, ‘Natural Powers and Human Abilities’,Proceedings Aristotelian Society (1974) pp. 171, 177, 182, 185;
R. M. Chisholm, ‘The Descriptive Element in the Concept of Action’,Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964) pp. 613, 614ff.
- Samuel Stoljar
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© 1984 S. J. Stoljar
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Stoljar, S. (1984). Rights and Duties. In: An Analysis of Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17607-6_4
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