IB Philosophy 7.3.1 Rights, Duties and Responsibilities Notes

The Nature and Foundations of Rights

1. The concept of rights sits at the heart of political philosophy, connecting to questions about justice, freedom, and equality explored throughout Unit 7. A right is a justified claim one person holds against others: it tells those others that they must act, or stop acting, in a particular way.
2. The distinction between moral rights and legal rights is fundamental. Moral rights are claims grounded in ethical principles that apply regardless of whether any government recognises them.
   1. Legal rights exist only within a particular legal framework and depend on enforcement by political institutions. The two categories often overlap but can diverge sharply.
3. Natural rights theory, associated with John Locke, holds that individuals possess rights to life, liberty, and property prior to any social arrangement. These rights are not granted by governments but are inherent in human nature.
   1. Governments exist to protect natural rights, and any government that systematically violates them loses its legitimacy.

Philosophical Foundations: Bentham, Kant and the Basis of Rights

1. Jeremy Bentham famously dismissed natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts." For Bentham, rights are meaningful only when they are legally enacted and enforceable.
   1. Bentham took what is called a legal positivist position, the view that rights only exist when a government creates and enforces them. On this account, saying you have a 'natural right' outside of law is a bit like saying you have a winning lottery ticket with no lottery: the idea feels real, but it has no practical force. This directly challenges the case for universal human rights.
2. Immanuel Kant grounded rights in the dignity of rational agents. His key idea: human beings are not tools to be used for someone else's purposes. They have an inner worth simply by being rational, thinking creatures. Because of this worth, they have inviolable claims against others, rights that cannot be taken away or traded off no matter how useful doing so might seem.
   1. Kantian rights come from reason itself, not from anything we observe about human beings in the world, not from the fact that people feel pain, or live in societies, or happen to be biologically human. The source of rights is the capacity to reason, full stop.
   2. Imagine a government that tortures a suspected terrorist to get information that might save lives. A Kantian would say this is wrong, no matter how many lives are at stake. Treating the suspect as a mere tool to benefit others denies their dignity as a rational person. The moment you use a person purely as an instrument, you destroy the very thing that makes rights meaningful in the first place.
   3. Kantian rights are thus absolute in a way that utilitarian rights are not: they cannot be sacrificed for a greater good.

Inalienability, Utilitarian Rights and the Legal-Moral Gap

1. The question of whether rights are inalienable (meaning impossible to give up or take away, even voluntarily) depends on where rights come from. If rights derive from human nature or rational agency, then no one can ever truly sign them away, just as you cannot agree to stop being a person.
   1. If rights are social constructions, they may be modified or revoked as political circumstances change. This debate shapes how we understand the authority of international human rights law.
2. Utilitarian theories, particularly John Stuart Mill's account in On Liberty and Utilitarianism, offer a different account entirely. Mill argued that rights are rules whose consistent enforcement produces the best consequences for society as a whole.
   1. Rights are not natural or self-evident but are justified by their utility: societies that respect rights to free speech, property, and personal security tend to flourish, while those that violate them tend to stagnate. This troubles those who regard rights as constraints on consequentialist reasoning.
3. The relationship between legal rights and moral rights raises practical questions. Slavery was once legally permitted in many societies, yet we now recognise it as a gross violation of moral rights.
   1. Conversely, some moral rights (such as a right to housing) may not be legally guaranteed. The gap between the two categories is a persistent source of political struggle.

Human Rights: Universality and Critique

1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations in 1948, represents the most significant attempt to codify human rights at the international level. Its thirty articles enumerate civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights that all human beings are said to possess "without distinction of any kind."
2. The UDHR was complemented by the Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities (1998), which sought to articulate the obligations that correspond to human rights. This document recognised that rights cannot exist in a vacuum: the enjoyment of rights by some depends on the willingness of others to fulfil corresponding duties.
   1. It explicitly linked rights to responsibilities at individual, communal, and state levels.
3. Cultural relativists argue that the UDHR reflects specifically Western liberal values and cannot claim universal validity. The 'Asian values' debate of the 1990s brought this challenge into sharp focus: political leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore argued that East Asian societies prioritise communal harmony, family obligation, and respect for authority over individual rights, making the UDHR's individualist framework inappropriate.
   1. On this view, imposing Western-style human rights is itself a form of cultural imperialism. Defenders of universality respond that some rights protect basic human interests that transcend cultural difference.
   2. The right not to be tortured, for example, does not reflect a specifically Western preference but a universal interest in bodily integrity. Amartya Sen has argued that the dichotomy between 'Western' individualism and 'Asian' collectivism is itself a misleading oversimplification, since traditions of dissent and individual freedom exist within every major civilisation.

Critiques and Defences of Universal Human Rights

1. Alasdair MacIntyre argued that rights claims are the moral equivalent of belief in witches and unicorns: there are no self-evident moral facts that ground universal rights. For MacIntyre, moral claims are always embedded in particular traditions and communities, making the idea of culture-independent human rights philosophically incoherent.
2. Martha Nussbaum argues that the capabilities approach offers a way to ground human rights that avoids both imposing Western assumptions and collapsing into empty relativism. She identifies a list of core human abilities, including bodily health, physical safety, the power to reason, and political participation. Her claim: any society that fails to secure a minimum level of each of these for every citizen is violating their basic rights.
   1. A society that provides equal income but denies women bodily autonomy through forced marriage, for instance, fails the capabilities test. This framework grounds rights not in abstract reason or cultural tradition but in the concrete conditions necessary for a recognisably human life.

1. The distinction between negative rights (rights not to be interfered with) and positive rights (rights to be provided with something) generates further debate. Negative rights, such as freedom from torture, are relatively uncontroversial.
   1. Positive rights, such as rights to education or healthcare, are more contested because they impose resource demands on others and on the state.
2. Denials of rights throughout history illustrate the stakes of these debates. The exclusion of women, colonised peoples, and enslaved persons from rights frameworks reveals that universality has often been proclaimed in principle while being denied in practice.
   1. Contemporary denials of rights to refugees, stateless persons, and minorities continue to test the limits of human rights discourse.
3. The deeper philosophical question is whether human rights are discovered or invented. Natural rights theorists say they are built into human nature, which means no government can override them. Constructivists say rights are useful political tools we create, not facts we uncover.
   1. If rights are invented rather than discovered, they are still valuable political tools. But they lack the deeper foundation that would make them truly untouchable. They would be like rules in a game: useful and important, but ultimately things we made up and could unmake.

Non-Human Animals and the Expansion of Rights

1. The question of whether non-human animals have rights extends rights discourse beyond its traditional anthropocentric boundaries. If rights are grounded in sentience (the capacity to suffer) rather than rationality (the capacity for moral reasoning), then many animals qualify as rights-holders.
   1. This forces a re-examination of the foundations of rights theory.
2. Peter Singer argues in Animal Liberation (1975) that the capacity for suffering is the relevant criterion for moral consideration. To exclude animals from moral concern solely because they belong to a different species constitutes speciesism, which Singer regards as analogous to racism or sexism.
   1. However, Singer's utilitarian framework speaks of interests rather than rights in the strict sense.
3. Tom Regan offers a rights-based argument in The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Regan holds that animals who are "subjects-of-a-life" (beings with beliefs, desires, perception, and a welfare of their own) possess inherent value and therefore have rights that must not be violated for the benefit of others.
   1. This is a deontological approach, one that says certain things are simply wrong regardless of outcomes, and it goes further than Singer's consequentialist view, which only cares about which action produces the best results.
4. Arne Naess developed deep ecology, a philosophical position that extends moral consideration to the entire natural world. Naess distinguished between shallow ecology (which values nature only for its usefulness to humans) and deep ecology (which recognises the intrinsic value of all living beings and ecosystems).
   1. On this view, rivers, forests, and species have value independent of human interests.

Non-Human Rights and Environmental Ethics

1. Naess's ecosophy holds that all life on Earth, human and non-human alike, has value in itself, and that people have no right to destroy natural diversity except to meet basic survival needs. This challenges the anthropocentric (human-centred) assumption baked into traditional rights thinking, the idea that only humans are the kinds of beings that can hold rights, and raises the question of whether rivers, forests, or entire species can meaningfully be said to have rights too.
2. Christopher Stone argued in Should Trees Have Standing? (1972) that natural objects such as rivers, forests, and mountains should have legal standing in courts. On this view, a guardian could represent the interests of a natural entity in the same way that a guardian represents a child or an incapacitated person.
   1. Stone's proposal has gained real-world traction through the rights-of-nature movement. Ecuador's 2008 constitution recognises the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth) to exist and regenerate, while New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017.
3. A persistent tension exists between individual animal rights (Singer, Regan) and holistic environmental ethics (Leopold's land ethic). Leopold's principle that an action is right when it preserves the integrity of the biotic community could justify culling individual animals for ecosystem health, which directly contradicts Regan's insistence on individual inherent value.
4. Intergenerational justice raises the question of whether future generations have rights that current generations must respect. If rights require a rights-holder who can claim them, then unborn persons present a philosophical difficulty, since they do not yet exist to make claims.
5. Many indigenous philosophical traditions challenge the Western assumption that only humans can be rights-holders. Traditions such as the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) treat rivers, mountains, and forests as ancestors or kin with their own standing, rather than as resources to be managed.

Duties, Responsibilities and Conflicts of Rights

1. Rights and duties are correlative: every right held by one party implies a corresponding duty on the part of others. If an individual has a right to free expression, others have a duty not to silence them, and the state has a duty to protect that expression.
   1. This link between rights and duties is called the correlativity thesis: the idea that every right necessarily comes with a matching duty on someone else's part.
   2. The legal scholar Wesley Hohfeld mapped out these connections in detail, showing that 'having a right' can mean several different things: a claim, a liberty, a power, or an immunity, each with its own corresponding duty on others.
2. The Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities emphasises that rights without responsibilities become empty entitlements. It identifies duties at multiple levels: individuals have responsibilities to their communities, communities to their members, and states to the international order.
   1. This framework insists that rights exist within webs of mutual obligation.
3. Conflicts of rights arise when the legitimate claims of different parties are incompatible. The right to free speech may conflict with the right to protection from hate speech.
   1. The right to religious practice may conflict with the right to equality. These conflicts cannot be resolved by simply asserting one right over another. They require philosophical judgement about the relative weight of competing claims.
4. Several approaches exist for resolving rights conflicts. Rights hierarchies rank certain rights as more fundamental than others (for example, the right to life over the right to property).
   1. Proportionality analysis asks: does limiting this right actually achieve a worthwhile goal, and was there a less restrictive way to do it? Contextual balancing looks at the specific details of each situation rather than applying a fixed formula.

Denials of Rights, Responsibility and the State

1. Denials of rights occur when individuals or groups are systematically excluded from the protections that rights are supposed to guarantee. Historical examples include the denial of citizenship rights to colonised peoples and the denial of political rights to women.
   1. Contemporary denials include the treatment of refugees and the suppression of dissent under authoritarian regimes.
2. The concept of responsibility goes beyond legal duty to include a broader moral accountability for one's choices and their effects. Iris Marion Young drew a useful distinction here. The liability model blames specific people for specific harms. The social connection model says that anyone who participates in an unjust social system shares some responsibility for fixing it, even if they did not directly cause the harm.
3. The relationship between rights and the state raises questions explored throughout Unit 7. As discussed in 7.1.1, the state's legitimacy depends partly on its capacity to protect rights.
   1. Yet the state is also the most common violator of rights. This paradox, that rights require the state for enforcement but also need protection from the state, is a central tension in political philosophy.
4. Mill's harm principle (discussed in 7.3.2) connects rights theory to liberty: the rights worth protecting in law are those that shield people from harm by others. Joel Feinberg refined this further by separating genuine harm from mere offence, helping clarify which interests the law should protect.
5. These debates connect to the discussions of freedom in 7.3.2 and censorship in 7.3.3. The question of what rights legal systems should recognise, and how conflicts between rights should be adjudicated, remains one of the most practically urgent problems in political philosophy.
   1. Every decision about the limits of freedom is ultimately a decision about the scope and weight of rights.