Duties and Rights

Abstract

This chapter starts by clarifying the central concepts of this book: rights, duties, justice and virtue. This exposition of the fundamental concepts is distinctly Kantian in nature. Furthermore, this chapter elucidates the relation between rights and duties, and argues that perfect duties of justice are not, as is so often erroneously held, more binding or of greater importance than imperfect duties of virtue. Finally, the case is made for a duties-based perspective on morality instead of the by far more common rights-based perspective. In doing so, I defend myself against critics who fear that a renewed focus on duties will necessarily be detrimental to our rights. I, therefore, explain that, rather than weakening or endangering human rights, a renewed emphasis on our duties will prove to strengthen human rights, particularly by preventing the proliferation of unclaimable rights. Starting from duties rather than rights, furthermore, will enable us to recognize the importance of duties of virtue, to which the perspective of rights must remain blind as the duties it recognizes are limited to rights-based duties, that is, duties of justice. This chapter, in short, provides a Kantian theory of duties and rights, which will allow us to resolve practical problems from the fields of human rights law and politics in the remaining three chapters, which will discuss the two contentious duties singled out in Chap. 2, namely duties of aid to the global poor and duties to the community.