Responsibilities are more fundamental than Rights
By: Rex Kerr
Tags: Civil Rights, Responsibility, Society, Philosophy

Rights are funny things. I supposedly have a right to life, yet I am certain to die. I have a right to liberty, but I have to show up to work every day whether I feel like it or not (or suffer, before long, quite unpleasant consequences). I have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and I have no idea how anyone could stop me from that even if I was straitjacketed in solitary confinement; I might not be able to accomplish much, but I could still try to pursue happiness.

Why doesn’t this make any sense?

The reason it doesn’t make any sense is that, logically, responsibility is the more fundamental concept. We can’t just dictate terms to the universe: “universe, we declare that people don’t die”. Instead, we build communities that safeguard each others’ lives. How can the community do that? By being comprised of people who take responsibility for safeguarding each others’ lives, either individually, or by building institutions that take (some of) that responsibility.

Furthermore, conceptualizing the role of society in terms of responsibilities automatically infuses the idea with morality (at least Kant’s categorical imperative, which is approximately the same as “the golden rule”). If you want your society to do something, you have to be willing to take on the corresponding responsibility. Do you think society should provide free health care? Then you think that it is your responsibility to fund health care for everyone who needs it. It also deals more directly with issues of unequal means. Just as you might expect that someone strong should carry a greater portion of groceries in from the car as compared to someone less strong, you also might expect that people of greater means (whether it be financial, intellectual, political, or whatever) should have a greater proportion of responsibility for maintaining their society. In contrast, when speaking in terms of rights, it encourages a morass of selfishness and “un-funded mandates”.

This distinction is particularly critical, I think, with the current emphasis on racial injustice in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the world).

If we frame the situation as us having the responsibility to enable each other to flourish and better attain our potentials (and yes, this includes enabling us to compete with each other in some cases!), then many points of contention suddenly don’t seem so contentious any more. Are institutional practices getting in the way of flourishing? Then it is the responsibility of the institution — it is the responsibility of those in the institution and those who direct and fund it — to fix that. Is it “institutional racism”? It hardly matters if you tag it with the label. When we fail to live up to our responsibility, we should redouble our efforts to do better, and figure out who or what process is accountable for the failure. Conversely, if we find in some area that responsibilities are appropriately levied and met, then even if the outcome is unequal we don’t need to argue about whether we should still call this “systemic racism”. This part seems to be working as intended, and the way it’s intended seems good. Even if you can’t immediately identify where the inequity is still coming from, you can stop arguing about terminology and go fix something else! (Maybe you’ll eventually realize that some responsibility is not being met or hasn’t been assigned, or maybe the other fixes will, whether for known reasons or not, end up making any residual problem go away.)

Most importantly, to have responsibility requires that one have the ability to enact change. It doesn’t have to be very much, but if you’re completely impotent to affect a process, you cannot have responsibility over it. We all have the ability to treat each other with dignity and respect, and to try to help each other better ourselves. That, it seems, should always be a responsibility.

Of course, reasonable people can still disagree on what additional responsibilities are appropriate. But I think even there it sets a more fruitful stage for discussion and debate. Even when people have radically different ideas — for instance, one person who expects basically no responsibilities for themselves or anyone else, vs. another who accepts and expects lots of responsibilities — it should quickly focus their attention on this fundamental incompatibility instead of wasting a bunch of time arguing past each other about self-reliance vs poverty causing high incarceration rates. And unreasonable people will be quickly exposed as those who take very little responsibility and yet expect others to take lots.

Rights are a convenient simplification that help us focus attention on ends that we wish to achieve, or injustices that we wish to remove. When the injustice is incredibly blatant and has very clear causes, the simplification can help. But now I think we need not another Civil Rights Movement, but a Civil Responsibilities Movement.

Are you willing to be a responsible member of civil society? I am. I endeavor to live up to my responsibilities, and I am happy to be called on it in any case where I don’t.

If you want to read a deeper discussion of the relationship between rights and responsibilities (or rights and duty), I had planned to write more, but found that it has already been written on more skillfully than I would have. There is a splendid Boston Review article on the topic by Samuel Moyn from 2016: https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/samuel-moyn-rights-duties.