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The correlativity of rights and obligations is one of the few stock topics in the basic repertory of English-speaking philosophy th-t is considered suitable for assignment to philosophers specializing in political philosophy. It is a topic perennially discussed, chiefly for reasons that have little to do with its importance: namely, just because it is a recognized topic and because it appears to be a safely tidy one that lends itself readily to being tidied up further by formal or quasi-formal considerations. (...) For my part, I wish more effort went into discussing less tractable subjects like the individuation of rights and their delimitation vis-à-vis one another.What I have to contribute to the subject of correlativity, returning to the scene of my comments on David Lyons’ paper, “The Correlativity of Rights and Duties,” is mainly a stint of annual or biennial repair-work, designed to restore the obvious — the truth that rights do imply obligations and cannot be understood without accepting this implication. (shrink)

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Authority does, of course, raise practical questions, and sometimes these have been so provocative as to amount to social crises. People in the awakening colonial countries have had to cope with a painful transition between old foreign authorities and new indigenous ones. In the metropolitan centers of colonial authority, especially in France, there has been profound agitation about received political forms, though fortunately this has not yet resulted in the catastrophic disintegration of civil authority which Italy and Germany experienced during (...) the rise of fascism. (shrink)

The traditional problem of the social contract defies solution. Agents with the motivations traditionally assumed would not in the circumstances traditionally assumed voluntarily arrive at a contract or voluntarily keep it up, as we can now understand, more clearly than our illustrious predecessors, by treating the problem in terms not available to them: the terms of Prisoner's Dilemma and of the theory of public goods.

Setting Up the Problem. What personal responsibilities do we, people living in rich countries, have for relieving miseries in the less fortunate countries? A great variety of prophets and philosophers urge us without qualification to do everything that we can. I mean, everything. Sartre holds that everybody “carries the weight of the whole world upon his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself in whatever has to do with the character of their being.” Lévinas joins in: “I (...) am responsible for others without expecting any return, should it cost me my life. Any return is [the others’] business.” Peter Unger, following Peter Singer, asks us to do all that we can do to relieve suffering; and insists that the only limit, while the suffering continues, is our capacity to help. Jesus speaks most trenchantly of all: If you are to be saved, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor”, to which may be joined the injunction, powerfully worded in the Moffatt translation of the Bible, “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. (shrink)