The Dialectics of Power, Rights, and Responsibility

Abstract

t is not uncommon for a treatment of rights to be treatment against power with some concession to the responsibilities that a tutelary of rights enjoys. We owe it to legal philosophers of the Scholastic persuasion who recognized rights as the entitlements that allow a person to fulfill duties— whether these arise from nature or from contract. In this sense rights were subordinate to and enjoyed for the sake of duties that one had. One may debate this way of putting things, but it had the marked advantage of clarity and showed the internal connection between rights and duties. Also in the scholastic anatomy of rights, there was such a thing as the “term” of the right—he against whom the right could be claimed, and therefore he or she upon whom a duty was incumbent to desist from transgressing the right of the tutelary. In this sense a “right to” was concomitantly “power against,” but power, in the sense of claim or entitlement. For the power to enforce, one had to look to what scholastic philosophers called the “title” of the right—and this could be natural law, positive law that, of course, included contracts. I do not think that this was bad at all, but I would like to pick up the subject today by paying attention to two leading figures: Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas.