Rights, Duties and Responsibilities

Rights, Duties and Responsibilities

One can hardly avoid talk of rights and duties in any contemporary discussion of issues of personal and public concern - at all events, in developed liberal democracies. Such talk is certainly embedded in debates about education, schooling and childcare with regard to which any and all acceptable policy-making needs to be mindful of and sensitive to the rights as well as the responsibilities of such diverse stakeholders as children, parents, teachers, social workers and officers of the law. However, it should also not be hard to see that the prospects of any legislation that aspires to do full justice to the rights and claims of all interested parties are likely to be dim in (the not uncommon) circumstances where rights claims are at some odds with one another. Thus, for example, one can see how a professional proposal to promote religious or sex education in the school curriculum - on the grounds that children have a right to such provision - may well be resisted by some parents, precisely on the grounds that such instruction violates their rights to protect their offspring from what they regard as dubious influences. Again, a prima facie parental right to custody over their natural offspring may well come into conflict with what social workers are likely to regard as the rights of the child (not to be harmed) in circumstances of apparent parental neglect or abuse.

Hence, even if we can make sense of the attribution of educational or other rights to human (or other) agencies, it is evident that rights claims or attributions seldom form consistent or mutually agreeable sets - and it is far from clear, in the face of evident conflicts between competing rights, on what principled grounds such tensions might be resolved (see, on rights in general, Waldron 1984). In this light, it will be the aim of this brief chapter, not to focus upon any particular issues or questions of educational rights, but more generally to explore some influential concepts of rights and responsibilities in the works of a number of key past and social and political philosophers.

It is commonly claimed (see, for example, Almond 1991) that the idea of rights hails from so-called natural law theory that is also usually traced back to classical antiquity -perhaps primarily to the Stoics, but also (a little more controversially) to themes in Plato and Aristotle. Concepts of natural law turn basically on the idea that just as the world of empirical experience derives its order and coherence from rationally discernible laws of nature, so there are rationally discernible and divinely, or otherwise, ordained moral laws [Page 21]by reference to which human wellbeing or flourishing may be comprehended. From this viewpoint, a good or flourishing human life would be one that is lived in the light of (perhaps rationally principled) observance of the imperatives or prescriptions of natural law -specifically in recognition of the human rights that such law identifies and the duties that it enjoins with respect to those rights. The more difficult question now is that of what such rights and corresponding responsibilities could be, and of how such rights might be rationally grounded?

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