There is a frequent misconception that the freedom of the individual implies a lack of duty to others. Usually this comes in the form of raging against the provision of “welfare,” or pooling private funds into a social insurance fund like Social Security. Such claims should go further, to demonstrate against payments for policing and public safety, fire control, the paving of roads, etc. And some, to their credit, take just this tack to its logical conclusion. That conclusion is, basically, that social requirements, or duties, of me to which I did not explicitly commit are an infringement of my right to freedom. To understand why this is nonsense, let us first look at the nature of rights.
The most successful definition of a right is in relation to a corresponding duty (this is not universally accepted, I admit). That is to say, if I have a right, then you have a duty to uphold the content of that right. For example, my right to the freedom of speech» entails that you have the duty to protect my freedom of speech. And if you also have that right, then I have the same duty in regards to you.
Thus, if I have any right to freedom» , then you have the duty to protect that freedom. In a free society, all persons have the right to freedom, and all the rights that are entailed thereby; thus, all persons have the duty to protect one another’s freedom, and all the duties that are entailed thereby.
But – aha! – what is the content of those duties? Those who reject their social duties claim that those duties implied by rights are those of non-intervention. That is, that my right to the freedom of speech entails that you have the duty not to prevent my speech – if anybody else does prevent my speech, well, it’s not your problem. Similarly, you might say that my right to be unharmed means only that you have the duty not to harm me, but not the duty to protect me from violence.
The difficulty with this view is that it separates having rights and duties from actually being able to follow through on them. If your duty is non-intervention in my enjoyment of a right, then my inability to attain those rights is inconsequential. We have parliamentary procedure so that everyone may have an equal opportunity to exercise their right of the freedom of speech in an assembly. If, however, your duty is to non-interference with my right to free speech, then I have only the right to be heard above the shouting of others also trying to be heard in the assembly. After all, you have no need to see to the realization of my rights as I choose to use them, only not to keep me from speaking.
Under this formulation of right and duty, my claim to my rights becomes counterfactual at best. I could speak freely, if I can manage to be heard. I could remain safe, if I can manage to defend myself. However, if we want our rights to be actually realized, we must accept that we have more thorough duties to fulfill those rights. Namely, we have the duty not only to not interfere with the pursuit of one’s rights, but the actual positive pursuit of those rights. We do not merely have the duty not to prevent speech, but to provide equal time for any and all who wish to speak to do so – thus we have parliamentary procedure. We do not merely have the duty not to cause harm, but the duty to protect one another from violence – thus we have publicly-funded police.
In any case, the centrality of freedom to social organization does not entail the absence of duty. The question merely becomes what kind of duties do we then have?
