Current Philosophy

0012 Onora O'Neill. "Rights, Obligations, and Needs." Logos: Philosophic Issues in Christian Perspective 6 (1985), pp. 29-47.

If we think about rights and obligations abstractly enough, they appear to be the same thing viewed from opposite sides: rights from the standpoint of recipients and obligations from the point of view of agents. But O'Neill shows that as we become less abstract in our approach, a gap opens up between the two. There are human needs that a theory of rights fails to attend to. but which a theory of obligations accommodates.

The advantage of speaking about rights is that it puts recipients in a less passive role. They need not wait for the fruit of someone else's beneficence, but can demand that others act. In O'Neill's estimation, however, this benefit is not worth much. Furthermore. it is outweighed by the problem of unallocated obligations. When it is indeed right that a given obligation be met, but it is not anyone in particulars clear obligation to meet it, no one can have a claimable, enforceable right that it be met. There are two ways this problem expresses itself. Either the rights are stated in a general, and generally ignorable, fashion, as manifesto rights, e.g., the right to food. Or worse, the rights in question are simply denied legitimacy as rights at all.

One attempted escape from this problem has been to claim that the needy have special rights arising out of identifiable circumstances. Thus, the plight of less developed nations is blamed on a colonial past or an economically oppressive present. But even if there is validity in these contentions, it is impossible to trace the effects to specific causes and culprits, and no one can be assigned the duty of meeting the claim.

Another approach has been to assert that everyone has basic rights to the fulfillment of basic human needs. But we fall into the same difficulty here. If we try to specify what actions this approach permits and requires of whom, we are left empty-handed.

We avoid this difficulty, however, if we concern ourselves with obligations rather than rights. Furthermore, the language of obligations is tied much more directly to ethics: rights typically have to be translated into obligations before they tell us what should be done.

O'Neill, therefore, is taking up the Kantian enterprise. She does this explicitly in the latter portion of her essay, by asking what obligations can be held by all agents. Or, to put first things first, she asks with Kant what principles are inherently incapable of being made universal. Kant has shown that this approach leads to at least two major principles of justice: noncoercion and nondeception. But his approach also leads to the conclusion that rational beings whose desires outrun their resources cannot will themselves to live in a world where lack of consideration for others needs or neglect of others talents is universally adopted. Therefore we have an obligation to help others meet their needs and develop their talents, the very sort of obligation that is not successfully dealt with by a theory of rights.

O'Neill argues further that Kantian deliberations on noncoercion support the obligation to meet basic human needs in that those in desperate straits are too susceptible to offers they cant refuse. The recognition of such positive duties clearly has implications not only for individuals. but for public policies concerning aid, trade, and development as well.

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