D.J. Sullivan: Rights and Duties in Relation to Society

“JUST AS PHILOSOPHERS differ about the origin of society, so too they dispute the foundation of rights and duties. For those who hold that man is rational and free, and therefore social by nature, the foundation of right and duty is the natural law. Our rational insight into the natural law tells us what we ought to do to realize our destiny, and our duties are precisely those things which the natural law prescribes for us as necessary. But as a correlative to this obligation, we have a claim on those goods which we need to carry out our duties. We have a right to them. Duties and rights are, then, something which flow out of the very nature of man. This is the reason why we describe certain rights, such as the freedom of speech and conscience, as inalienable: they are rooted so deeply in human nature that to remove them is to destroy or mutilate the very personality of man.

“Opposed to the doctrine that our rights and duties are linked to human nature itself is the view of those philosophers who. Following Hobbes and Rousseau, root the rights of man in the state itself. In the original social contract by which, according to their opinion, the state is founded, the individual surrenders his basic liberty as the condition for a peaceful life in society. Henceforth, the state itself becomes the fountainhead of rights and duties, specifying them and changing them at will.

“The repercussions of these conflicting doctrines about the nature of rights and d are apparent in the deep cleavages that divide modern society. The modern totalitarian state, in which there is no such thing as an unjust law, is the inheritor and exponent of the doctrines of Hobbes and Rousseau. Justice is what the state says it is, and if the citizen enjoys certain rights within the community, it is by the good leave of the state, which is free to withdraw those liberties again. Similarly the state tells the citizens what its duties are, and it may change them at will, so that what is duty today may be as crime tomorrow.

Finally, the illusions and distortions of the naturalist philosophers who helped prepare the way for the modern tyrannical state must be added to the corrosive effect of moral skepticism. There are few greater enemies to man’s freedom than the moral skeptic, for whom the words “right” and “duty” are empty sounds, since what does not exist or what is illusory is not worth struggling for. In the face of apathy and doubt the ruthless and the strong take over and “right” becomes synonymous with “might.”

~Daniel J. Sullivan: An Introduction to Philosophy: The Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition

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