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.
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