In an emergency we become acutely aware of our social duties, and are willing to surrender individual rights and freedoms to fulfill them. But this should not be a passing realisation. We must persistently remind ourselves of the roles we all have to play, as individuals, in the protection of the rights we fight so hard for.
One of the most striking things about the politics emerging around the Covid-19 emergency is its clear re-balancing of human rights and human duties. Political, social and economic life has become urgent for us all. The State risks being overwhelmed and we are all asked to do much more for one another as citizens and neighbours. Fulfilling our duties to one another has suddenly become essential to protecting and realizing our rights.
The return of human duties to public politics is overdue. The sheer dominance of rights has been a weakness in the West’s approach to political theory and practice as it has evolved since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This approach simplistically frames politics and the search for social justice as an ever-proliferating series of demands against the State – a sharp-tongued political and legal discourse of complaint and redress.
It is revealing that only Article 29 of the UDHR talks directly of our duties to one another, stating that “everyone has duties to the community” and limiting our rights and freedoms to ensure “due recognition and respect for others”. Apart from this, the whole basis of modern human rights is framed as the State’s duty to respect and realize the rights of its citizens. Modern human rights do not give any of us much to do except determine new rights, demand them from the State and then monitor State compliance.
The Covid-19 emergency reminds us all that rights are only really half the picture. Human rights are profoundly important to agree and vest in law but so too is everyone’s duty to work to get them protected and realized throughout society in the careers we lead, the choices we make and the small actions we take.
The COVID19 emergency reminds us all that rights are only really half the picture. Human rights are profoundly important but so too is everyone’s duty to protected and realized them throughout society.
The British political tradition is historically driven by an equal concern for human rights and human duties. John of Salisbury was probably Britain’s earliest systematic political theorist, writing his Policraticus in Canterbury in the twelfth century. Drawing on St Paul, Cicero and Plutarch, it was John who resuscitated the metaphor of the “body politic” and brought it to the modern world. Essential to his vision was how all parts of society have duties to one another and how equity and justice will only thrive if the different parts of society are working reciprocally together for the common good.
John sounds remarkably modern when he says things like “public welfare is therefore that which fosters a secure life both universally and in each particular person”. Like many in the British tradition, he writes staunchly in favour of free speech and against corruption, self-serving politics and tyrants. He sees the “distribution of duties” and mutual respect between the head, heart, arms, feet of society as vital to a healthy political body.
John’s theory is a deeply feudal political vision led by Church and Prince, but it also has a core belief in all people’s natural and lawful rights, and he clearly thinks well-ordered and reciprocal duties across government and society are the best way to realize rights and law.
Issue 88, 4th May 2020
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