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.