7.1 Introduction
Rights discourse has been among the most prominent features of contemporary political philosophy — it argues that persons, mainly as individuals, are bearers of claims, liberties, and powers which the rest of society must acknowledge. This exaltation of rights has created deep unease regarding duties and obligations necessary for maintaining a just social order. Recent criticisms of rights-privileging have brought duties to the fore — not merely as complementary to rights, but as marking a space of their own.
7.2 Significance of Duty
Several reasons explain the renewed significance of duty:
- Rights discourse focuses exclusively on individuals without drawing attention to cultures and communities that enable people to be rights-bearers. Duties and obligations are necessary to sustain these cultures and communities.
- Preserving a fair system: denial of certain rights may prompt revolt even against an overall fair system. Duty discourse draws attention to the need to preserve such a system rather than rebel against it.
- Deep pluralism: diverse ways of life and ideals qualify the universalist claims of rights discourse. These ways of life demand commitment and duties from their followers. Given the deep pluralism of contemporary societies, duty-based evocations in public life cannot be ignored.
- Gandhi’s critique: the rights discourse has been fed into an unending chain of satisfactions and gratifications, insensitive to authentically human pursuits. It leads to exploitation of earth’s resources, breeding conflicts and violence. Foregrounding duty is necessary to sustain civilised ways of life.
- Caution against misuse: fascist and authoritarian orders have also stressed duty to counter liberal rights and Marxist pursuit of a just social order. This makes duty a deeply contested concept, susceptible to different pulls, contexts, and purposes.
India-specific concern: duty is often associated with dharma, which is in turn associated with varna and caste orders. Foregrounding duty without sensitivity to these associations may lead to uncritical endorsement of social grading, ranking, and deep inequalities.
7.3 Meaning
A duty generally prescribes what we ought to do and what we ought not to do — it is a reason for action. Duty specifies the terms binding on individuals and groups in their social practices.
Conscious practices can be motivated by three perspectives (Dworkin, 1978; Waldron, 1984):
- Right-based perspective
- Duty-based perspective
- Goal-based perspective
A duty-based perspective appeals to duty and the reasons embedded in it to uphold and justify our practices. It need not deny rights or satisfactions suggested by the other two perspectives, but asserts priority of duty over them. Example: “A citizen should vote and participate in public life. His civic and political rights must depend upon the extent to which he participates in public life. He cannot demand rewards and benefits from public life unless he has extended such support and participation.”
7.4 Duties and Rights
In pre-liberal societies, persons were caught in social roles and duties ordered their lives. Liberal thought shifted emphasis to rights, with duties seen as correlated to rights — if I have a right, others (individuals, groups, or the state) have a duty to protect and promote it. This correspondence between rights and duties, which effectively collapsed duties within rights, has been challenged both from within and outside liberal thought.
7.4.1 Distinct Spaces of Duties and Rights within Liberal Thought
Five distinct positions can be identified within the liberal tradition:
(i) Interest Theory
Initially stated by Jeremy Bentham — rights are not natural or moral but products of law. The law, by creating duties, stipulates rights. This is sometimes called the “sanction theory”: a right exists only if there is a corresponding duty sanctioned by law and liable to punishment.
- Individuals as members of non-state organisations are also subject to rules and sanctions — having duties and generating corresponding rights for those who benefit.
- Limitation: a duty constantly shored up by force and coercion has little intrinsic reason why an action ought to be performed or avoided. If the law grants a right to religious practice but an organised gang prevents it and society does not support such practices, the minority can scarcely be said to have a legal right.
- J.S. Mill: “To have a right is to have something which society ought to defend one in the possession of.” Duty cannot rest on force and sanctions alone.
(ii) Choice Theory
Propounded by H.L.A. Hart. A right is a form of choice — the essential feature of a right is that the person to whom the duty is owed is able to control the performance of that duty. The duty-right relation is a chain binding the duty-bearer, with the other end in the hands of the right-holder.
This gives the right-holder three capacities:
- To waive or extinguish the duty, or leave it in existence.
- After breach or threatened breach, to leave the duty unenforced or reinforce it by suing for compensation.
- To waive or extinguish the obligation to pay compensation resulting from breach of duty.
Limitation: the space of duty is not exhausted by its reference to rights alone. Duty-acts need not always correlate to right-acts, and several rights may not have corresponding duties.
(iii) Autonomy
Immanuel Kant: the non-human world acts subject to nature and instinct — heteronomously. To the extent humans act on appetites and emotions, they too act heteronomously. The characteristic mark of human beings is reason, which enables them to deliberate and will to act accordingly — this is autonomous action, and it is acting in accordance with duty. The morality prescribed by reason is a matter of “practical necessity.”
- Humans have a duty to cultivate autonomy and to treat others as beings possessing this capacity.
- Rights are expressions and means of nourishing autonomy.
- Persons possess intrinsic value and must not be used as instruments of others’ purposes.
- Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”
- Duty comes not from nature but is a priori, regardless of all empirical ends.
Mainstream contemporary liberalism draws from Kant’s principle — Right is before Good — but unlike Kant, does not propose any specific valued ends; ends and purposes are products of choices.
Joseph Raz (recent liberal who upholds autonomy):
- Personal autonomy consists of appropriate mental abilities, an adequate range of options to choose from, and freedom from coercion and manipulation.
- Autonomy is valuable only if exercised in the pursuit of good — there are multiple good forms of life; choice among them makes autonomy meaningful.
- Raz’s relation between rights and duties:
- An individual X has a right if X can have rights and an aspect of X’s well-being is a sufficient reason for holding some other person to be under a duty.
- Rights are grounds of duties — reasons for the duties to which they give rise. But duties can also be invoked by other considerations.
- One has a right not merely if one is an intended beneficiary, but only if one’s interest is a sufficient reason for holding another under a duty.
- Raz insists on the importance of general social structure and culture for personal autonomy — an autonomous life can only be lived in the context of shared institutions, values, and opportunities (culture of tolerance, range of career options). There are duties to cherish such a cultural ambience.
(iv) Justice
John Rawls proposes principles of justice which all reasonable people would concur with, establishing a fair and equal basis for collective life expressed in terms of rights. These lead to two types of principles:
- Principles for institutions: apply to the basic structure of society.
- Principles for individuals: set the duties and obligations of persons with respect to institutions and one another. Citizens are duty-bound to support just institutions as they themselves concurred to them.
Rawls’s distinction between duties and obligations:
- Natural duties: moral claims that apply to persons irrespective of their consent (e.g., helping others in distress, not being cruel). They are not tied to particular institutions but owed to persons as persons — prior to social agreement or choice.
- Obligations: moral ties voluntarily incurred through contract, promise, or other expressions of consent. They must also be just.
7.4.2 Duties and Rights in the Conservative Perspective
Conservatives stress duties, arguing that social institutions and mores are formed through the efforts of several preceding generations. Traditions and legacies assign definite tasks and responsibilities. By performing these, one fulfils oneself and furthers the purposes of society.
Key arguments:
- Individuals do not have the right to choose culture, mores, and institutions at will — every generation must be inserted into the culture and institutions of society.
- Insistence on rights undermines age-old institutions and hallowed ways of life, breeding insecurity, uncertainty, and widespread dissatisfactions.
- The arrogance of the rights-bearing individual falsely assumes access to all the knowledge that has gone into making social life — and to absolutely certain knowledge to transform it. Both claims are unfounded.
- Conservatives urge members to look at institutions with awe and respect rather than critical scrutiny.
- Duty is linked with values of: trust, loyalty, dedication, cooperation, obedience, and satisfaction with one’s station in life.
- They stress the limitedness of human understanding and the reach of reason.
- They are not necessarily against reform, but reform must be firmly based on existing order and its continuation.
7.4.3 Duties and Rights in the Communitarian Perspective
Communitarians are influenced by Aristotle and Hegel (as against the Kantian influence on autonomy theory). Their core argument: the capacity to conceive and exercise rights and pursue autonomy can only develop in society, through relations and interactions with others. Rights-priority neglects the social conditions that enable choices to be exercised — it subscribes to atomism, viewing individuals as self-sufficient agents outside society.
Key positions:
- Reject primacy of rights — individual rights do not have moral priority over duties, virtue, or the collective good.
- Stress duties to sustain institutions which promote virtue and collective good.
- Reject neutral political concern (central to rights-based liberalism) — the state must not remain neutral to all conceptions of the good life. Promotion of a society sharing common values must be prior to individual rights.
- Charles Taylor: given our dependence on a culture of freedom for individual liberty, we must have not only “negative duties of non-interference” but also “positive duties to sustain such a culture.” This requires stable and effective public institutions enjoying legitimacy, possible only if society is organised around shared concerns.
- Rights will not enjoy respect unless people are bound together by shared conceptions and ways of life sustained by duty.
- Communitarians do not all reject rights — but all argue that duties are significant not merely in relation to rights but in protecting and promoting common good.
7.4.4 Duties and Rights in the Gandhian Perspective
Gandhi is well known for his stress on duties and his identification of dharma as the path of duty. He also upheld swaraj (self-rule). The fusion of dharma and swaraj — duty and freedom — is the characteristic mark of Gandhian thought.
Key elements:
- Equality: Gandhi argued all men and women are equal. The doctrine of Advaita upholds this — “If I am That and besides That there is none else” — every being must be regarded as supreme. This belief led him to fight against Brahmin claims to superiority based on birth or knowledge.
- Swaraj: self-rule is within the reach of everyone. It involves the duty of self-discipline and transformation — the rule of the mind over passions. It enables pursuit of Artha and Kama within the bounds of dharma.
- Civil duties: flow from self-cultivation and voluntary internalisation of obligation to others. Real rights, for Gandhi, are the results of the performance of duty.
- Freedom and moral growth: Gandhi opposed domination — “no society can possibly be built on the denial of individual freedom; it is contrary to the very nature of men.” Freedom is necessary for moral growth.
- Equality and dignity: Gandhi rejected gender, birth, class, caste, education, and nationality as justifications for unequal treatment. Equality, dignity, and integrity were closely interwoven.
- Varnashrama dharma: Gandhi upheld varna as the appropriate path of duty, but reinterpreted it radically. For him, varna upholds “absolute equality; although the way it is presently expressed it is a monstrous parody of the original.” Varna is not a ranking of status based on inherited division of labour, nor innate ability. It is “nothing more than an indication of a duty that has been handed down by our forefathers.” It conserves energy by making one expend little in pursuing one’s inherited livelihood — thereby freeing people for higher, spiritual pursuits.
- Varna is binding only for the mode of acquiring one’s livelihood, not for acquiring knowledge — “A Shudra has as much right to knowledge as a Brahman, but he falls from his estate if he tries to earn his livelihood through teaching.”
- Non-attachment and non-violence: one sets oneself free for self-realisation through non-attachment to material possessions and freedom from desires and passions. Non-violence rests on extending the principle of respect and equality towards others.
- Autonomy: Gandhi’s vision of autonomy was based not on abundant material resources but on conscious control, regulation, and denial of material resources — freeing people to make truly authentic choices.
7.5 Types of Duties
The simple distinction between negative duties (refrain from action/non-interference) and positive duties (act positively to do something) is too naïve:
- “Negative” duties like the right to security require extensive positive action — tax contributions, maintenance of a public security system.
- “Positive” duties like subsistence rights involve complex combinations of interventions and non-interventions.
Important distinction: the duty not to violate a right ≠ the duty to prevent violation of rights. For instance, the duty not to assault others is not the same as the duty to prevent a third person from assaulting someone. The first is of greater import than the second.
Three types of duties for every basic right:
| Type | Content |
| Duties to avoid depriving | Refrain from making unnecessary gain by means detrimental to others’ claims; do not deprive others of means that would have provided them satisfaction |
| Duties to protect from deprivation | A secondary duty, arising when the duty to avoid is not fulfilled; enforces the primary duty; often performed by governments acting on behalf of common interest |
| Duties to aid the deprived | Transfer of resources to those who cannot provide for their own survival |
No right can be fully guaranteed unless all three types of duties are fulfilled, though they carry differential binding force.
Three sub-categories of duties to aid:
- Duties attached to particular roles or relationships — e.g., duties of parents towards young children; duties of grown-up children towards aged parents.
- Duties arising from causing deprivation — when some people eliminate the last available means of subsistence and the responsible government fails to protect the victims; duty to aid falls on those responsible.
- Duties arising from natural disasters (hurricane, earthquake) — victims are helpless and require aid to maintain themselves; a truly humanitarian duty.
Duty to design social institutions that do not exceed the capacity of individuals and groups — if duties to avoid and protect are fulfilled, duties to assist may not be urgently called for; in their failure, duty to aid becomes critical.
Rights not immediately correlated with duties — four types:
| Type | Description |
| Claim Rights | Demands one party has on another; reciprocal duty exists. Example: workers’ right to wages, employers’ duty to pay them |
| Liberty Rights | Simply called liberties; do not immediately suggest duties. Example: my right to wear a dress does not invoke an immediate duty from others |
| Powers | Capacities invested in people by law and custom — either universally (right to vote) or selectively (judges’ power to adjudicate); do not necessarily have corresponding duties |
| Immunities | Protections against the reach of powers (e.g., immunity against arbitrary conscription); not correlated with a set of duties |
Liberties, powers, and immunities mark an enlarged space for rights without correlated duties.
7.6 Summary (Key Takeaways)
- Rights and duties are often correlated, but different theories apportion them different weights. Duties are prioritised in perspectives that valorise a substantive conception of the good.
- Within liberal tradition: interest theory (Bentham) — law creates duties which stipulate rights; choice theory (Hart) — the right-holder controls performance of duty; autonomy theory (Kant, Raz) — duty is grounded in rational agency; justice theory (Rawls) — natural duties and voluntary obligations both bind citizens.
- Conservative perspective: duties uphold age-old institutions and traditions; rights discourse breeds insecurity and arrogance.
- Communitarian perspective (Taylor): duties sustain the culture and shared values without which rights cannot be meaningfully exercised.
- Gandhian perspective: dharma and swaraj are fused — real rights are the result of the performance of duty; autonomy is grounded in self-discipline and non-attachment, not material abundance.
- Even where rights and duties correlate, they cannot be paired one-to-one. Their ambits markedly vary. Some rights have no immediate correlated duties; some duties, as they distance from immediate correspondence with rights, sustain the common good.
