Human Duties

A duty is an intentional response to the compelling power and binding nature of religious, cultural, moral, legal, or political norms that commit individuals or groups to a particular kind of action or behavior. Human duties, in a plural and political sense, refer to individual or collective responsibilities that owe their imperative character to institutionally established norms, conventional social roles, or political coercion. This entry considers different cultural understandings of human duties, offers an overview of conceptions relevant to political behavior, identifies tensions and complementarities between human duties and human rights, and presents the notion of collective responsibilities as a broader framework for contemporary understandings of human duties.