Putting Duties to Rights¹, 31 May 1994.

footnotes: ¹ The Times

For some time now, there has been a perceptible change in the language of British politics. A new agenda for the Nineties is beginning to form, and its protagonists can be found on both sides of the political divide. Its themes are the family, community and the renewal of the bonds of interconnectedness that make up civil society. Increasingly, politicians have felt the need to enter territory that was traditionally the preserve of moralists and religious leaders.

The debate is bound to be sharpened by David Selbourne’s new book, The Principle of Duty. Selbourne argues that what has destroyed our political culture has been an over-insistence on rights at the expense of responsibilities. What is now needed is a politics of duty enforced if need be by new “courts of obligation.” Citizenship is no longer to be seen as a set of automatic entitlements. In the future it will have to be earned, and those who abuse it will risk having their civic entitlements withdrawn.

It is a timely analysis. The concept of rights has played a vital role in modern politics, securing a domain of individual liberty against the tyrannical or over-intrusive power of the State. But rights are only one element in the life of society. When they dominate at the expense of all else, they distort and undermine the political process.

One reason is that rights conflict, leaving us with no criterion for preferring one to the other. Does a foetus have a right to life, or does a woman have the right to choose to abort it? Does an author have the right to freedom of expression, or do religious groups have the right to protection against blasphemy? Do parents have the right to go their separate ways, or do children have the right to paternal support? These questions generate fierce, even violent, controversy. But they cannot be answered in the terms in which they are asked. If we want to settle a conflict of rights we must find some larger principle than rights.

The other reason is that rights are like cheques. They have value only if there is money in the bank. They presuppose a society in which we are collectively willing to pay the price of the many claims made upon us. As advocates of liberty have long recognised, without duties there can be no rights. John Locke, the great philosopher of rights, nonetheless wrote of “every man’s indispensable duty to do all the service he can to his country.” Friedrich Hayek, the hero of today’s libertarians, spoke of obedience to moral rules as part of the “apprenticeship of liberty.”

When rights are claimed in isolation from the rest of moral and political life they devastate public debate. Rights-talk leads to a politics of single-interest lobbies, pressure groups and competing claims which cannot all be satisfied. The result is disillusionment and cynicism, the most notable feature of societies in which rights-talk has prevailed.

Selbourne is right to insist on recapturing the sense of duty. Where he is less helpful is in suggesting how this might happen. His primary answer is law: Draconian sanctions against those who fail to make their contribution to the common good. But law is the crudest of all instruments of moral education. Laws can prevent us from doing evil, but they cannot make us good. Nor in a free society can laws do more than enforce the morality we have. They cannot recreate a morality we have lost.

Far more compelling is the view of American social theorists like Amitai Etzioni and Robert Bellah who have focused our attention on the real birthplace of responsibility: families and communities. It is in these intimate associations that we learn and practise responsibility, understand the mutuality of the social bond and discover the power of the good we seek in common.

It is no accident that rights, not responsibilities, have come to the fore in political debate. The modern State, having lost the underpinning of a shared morality, is too abstract to enlist our loyalties. It is not something in which we feel involved. Instead it is something against which we make claims. In the meantime, family and community have eroded as institutions, leaving us to form more temporary and conditional alliances. Our range of commitments has narrowed and our historical horizon foreshortened. The sense of belonging to a long-term project, society, of which we are the collective guardians for the sake of our children, has suffered an eclipse.

But it need not be permanent. Among the young people I meet I see no lack of a desire to serve. What they lack is a framework in which to do so. If community work were to be part of the national curriculum and if religious groups, voluntary organisations and local associations were enlisted in training for citizenship, a new and practical expression could be given to civic duty. It is a supreme irony that we treat community service as a punishment instead of a universal and challenging part of education.

“Duty,” said Lord Acton, “is not taught by the State.” But the State can empower other groups to do so. The transition from rights to duties is possible. It is urgently necessary if we are to preserve our law-governed liberty. But it will happen through the agents of moral change in our society, not through the brute force of law.