Dignity, Rights and Responsibilities

Abstract

Last year (March 23, 2009), the government in the United Kingdom issued a Green Paper entitled “Rights and Responsibilities: Developing our Constitutional Framework.” In it, the authors (Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice in the Gordon Brown administration and Michael Wills, a minister in the same department) deplored the fact that “[a]lthough we have a latent understanding and acceptance of our duties to one another and to the state,” responsibilities “have not been given the same prominence as rights in our constitutional architecture.” This lecture explores the more subtle ways in which rights relate to responsibilities. Unlike a crude obligation-analysis, this way of thinking can be genuinely empowering, though the limits of its empowerment implications remain controversial.