Question

brian orend breifly discusses the “correlativity” of rights and duties. Do you agree with this thesis? Can you think of any right that don’t automatically give duties to others? Or what about duties we might have that don’t necessarily give others a right to something?

Answer 1

To a large extend, one person's rights will mean another person's duties. In general sense, consider rights such as the right to practice a religion of your calling. With this right comes the obligation of the state to perform its duty to safeguard this right of its citizens, in such a way that adequate law and order is put in place so that those who try to defy the rights of the minority religous groups and spread hatred are punished.

However, there can be rights that do not give duties to others and duties that have to be perfomed which do not guarantee rights. These can be as follows -

• Citizens can be given the right to information act, in which the citizen is given the right to demand information from the government personnel. However, this right does not bind the government officials with the duty to respond to every request for information, especially if it threatens national security.
• Citizens have the duty to pay taxes to the government. However, this does not give them the legal right to any of the services that the government promises to provide with the tax revenue generated.