A mini-monograph of Population Policy Press

November 2002

*Originally published in New Humanist,

Journal of the UK Rationalist Press Association,

101 (3), Summer 1986, pp.21-24

We hear a very great deal about human rights these days – and everyone is for them, just as everyone is against sin – but not very much at all about the obverse side of the same coin, the human duties which have to be recognised and discharged before any alleged right can be realised in practice.

If the rights-deniers are brought into the homily at all, it is mostly in an oblique rather than a direct way, although of course there are notable exceptions. The human rights records of Presidents Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, and ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier are, or were, fairly safe, explicit targets for anyone not under their heels. However, even where the culprits are named, the accusations are still very often couched in terms of what the victims don’t receive, rather than what those responsible have a duty to provide.

This extremely lopsided view is clearly demonstrated in the academic and other institutes dedicated to the study and furtherance of human rights and in the technical literature. Examples of the former include the British Institute of Human Rights, the International Institute of Human Rights; the International Institute of the Rights of Man; the International Training Centre for University Teachers of Human Rights; and the United Nations Centre for Human Rights.

It is difficult to impossible to prove a negative case, but I have a strong suspicion that not one comparable institution acknowledges in its title the duties side at all, or gives it more than a sidelong glance in its literature and activities.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just what it says, a declaration of rights. Its 30 articles, many containing several subclauses, mention duties only once (Article 29/1), and then only marginally. The two international covenants on Rights, Civil and Political, and Economic and Social, respectively – drawn up by the UN and ratified by a number of countries – which came into force in 1976, are similarly long on rights and short on duties.

The current campaign for a Bill of Rights in Britain follows the same pattern, and I believe this is typical of virtually all thinking and action in this sphere. I wonder whether – since the promulgation of the Ten Commandments – there has ever been a Universal Declaration of Human Duties, or whether, tuck-ed away somewhere, there is – or ever will be – an Institute of Human Duties?

The literature shows a similar pattern. In three of four books on human rights pulled from Cardiff University Library shelves there was no entry for ‘duty’ in either Contents or Index (and no reference in the text as far as I could see from a good skim). (Haas. E. B.. Human Rights and International Action: The Case of Freedom of Association 1970; Moskowitz, M., International Concern with Human Rights, 1974; Robertson, A. H., Human Rights in the World: An Introduction to the Study of Human Rights, 1982.)

The fourth book – a collection of papers delivered by a mixed bag of philosophers, lawyers, theologians, and others at Durham University in 1978 and a moderately honourable exception – did have nine entries in the Index, though again nothing about duty in the nine chapters and 17 appendix headings listed under Contents. (Dowrick, F. E. ed., Human Rights: Problems, Perspectives, and Texts, 1979).

I haven’t researched this, but my impression is that it is equally hard to find references to duty in humanist literature. Although H J Blackham’s Humanism (1968) opens;

And there are two sections on responsibilities (‘Of humanists’ and ‘Of rulers’), there seems to be nothing about duty. Certainly the word duty itself, if it occurs anywhere in the book, was not thought important enough to list in the Index.

Similarly with Margaret Knight’s Humanist Anthology (1961), although in this case there are two or three brief mentions. The text starts with Confucius’ dictum;

A young man’s duty is to behave well to his parents at home and to his elders abroad

But none of the 68 contributors refer to duty, either in their titles or in the much larger number of subheadings, and again there is no entry in the Index.

The Humanist Dipper (undated) – produced by the British Humanist Association for use in schools – follows suit.

This does give prominence to the ‘golden rule’ of conduct – ‘do as you would be done by’ which implies duty in some senses – and quotes a couple of Alex Comfort’s modern ‘Thou shalt nots ...,’ but again has nothing to say about duty proper. (Although, to be fair, it doesn’t go on much about rights, either.)

Had it not been for a perusal of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which lists only four entries for rights (one of which stresses duties too) but 25 under ‘duty’, I would have had to suggest that ‘duty’ is just another four-letter word. Why is it necessary to make this point? Why should we be the least bit tempted to play down or even ignore the duties side of the equation?

I offer three tentative hypotheses, but first let me make it clear that I do not in the least degree wish to decry human rights or denigrate the sincerity or dedication of most of those who campaign for them. Rather, the attempt is made to steer both discussion and action into potentially more productive channels, making more realistic the demands and more likely the behaviour needed to realise them.

Despite the well-known Christian injunction, most of us seem to feel in our hearts that it is far more blessed to receive than to give. Rights sound like good things, to be passively received, whereas – at the same unthinking level – a duty sounds like something which is not too nice and which has to be actively given.

Reinforcing this tendency is the fact that for some decades now in Britain, and possibly other developed countries, too, there has been a powerful current of opinion in political propaganda, Parliament, the schools, literature, the media, and practically everywhere else, placing great stress on individual and group ‘rights’. Everyone is entitled to freedom, justice, food, health, education, work, housing, leisure, transport, television, fridge and so on, in other words to ‘welfare’ in general.

Of course I don’t want to knock any of those things, many of which a lot of people used to be severely deprived of, as some still are, and most of which I am fortunate enough to enjoy myself. However, there is a danger that in this torrent of concern for self-realisation and social justice, focussing almost entirely on what we should receive, the baby (duty) is being thrown out with the dirty bathwater (social injustice), leaving us with almost insatiable cravings for goods and services from others, coupled with a rather marked lethargy when it comes to the return delivery of goods and services to them. Self-interest has been strongly reinforced by socialisation.

Part of this syndrome is indicated by the expression often used to preface a judgment on some social or ethical issue:

It seems to me that many of us want very much to make moral judgments, so much so that this propensity could well have an evolutionary biological basis. One of the things that has struck me most in the behaviour of children, my own when they were very young and others since, is their passionate sense of (in)-justice. ‘It’s not fair!’ they screech with all the concentrated fury their small bodies can muster when they don’t get what they think is their due, and a reasonable case could perhaps be made for the evolution of an instinctive sense of fair play in complex creatures programmed to live in groups.

Nonetheless, the prevailing climate of opinion, in Britain at least – I’m not sure how widespread it is – seems generally to damp down our urges to make and express clear moral judgments without fear or favour. To many of us, urging others to discharge their duties sounds like an especially obnoxious form of moralising, whereas making sympathetic noises to or about those deprived of their rights – though still, undoubtedly, a form of moralising – sounds much more acceptable.

Despite the typical self-interest and evasions above, it is easy to see – in terms of a temporal sequence – why people open to an active concern for the persecuted (the majority, it seems, is not) tend to be led into a narrow focus upon the rights side of the equation. When such a person hears of a Nelson Mandela or Amina Lawal⁽¹⁾ he or she will initially tend to sympathise with the sufferings of that individual fellow human being and only later – though it might be soon – arrive at a considered awareness of the whole situation and a condemnation of those causing the problem coupled with a demand that they should discharge their duties by liberating the victim.

Even in those later stages, the image of the individual victim and his lack of rights will continue to loom very large in the mind of the sympathiser, and the smaller the power of the latter to achieve any significant amelioration of the situation, the greater will be this tendency. It seems likely that the activist’s tendency to focus unduly on the rights side of the equation will be further reinforced by the ‘cultural flywheel’, the resultant of all those forces of conservatism which tend to maintain individual and group norms and social institutions against the forces of change.

These well-meaning folk will be steeped in the literature – especially that concerning the major historical landmarks in this field, the American and French revolutions, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the United Nations declarations, and so forth – and can hardly fail to be pushed into an almost total concentration on the rights side, with, at best, a perfunctory acknowledgment of their absolute dependence on duties.

Truly inspiring though these landmarks are, surely they must not be allowed to overshadow the realistic thought and action needed to bring their high ideals to fruition.

First an apologia. As far as I can recall I have had a strong sense of both right – I’m not sure about rights – and duty since I was quite small (perhaps the childish ‘instinct’ mentioned earlier never left me), though I can’t say where it came from or claim that it led to any enhanced nobility of character. At sixteen I had a powerful feeling of empathy with the Spanish Republican cause and at eighteen a strong sense of duty to do my bit to help defeat Fascism. The first was not urgent enough to get me out to Spain, but the latter did prise me out of my ‘reserved-occupation’ in a munitions factory to fly with the RAF as soon as the regulations permitted.

Later on in the war and afterwards, pangs of conscience led me quite deeply into the rights and wrongs of conscientious objection, though not far enough to become a pacifist. In postwar years I have more than once found myself agonising until it was too late over whether the family greetings cards should be bought from Oxfam, Amnesty, the Humanists, or yet another good cause – a pathological sense of duty if ever there was one.

Despite this background, I didn’t put any real effort into the study of rights and duties until the middle sixties (my middle forties) when I became increasingly involved with problems of population, poverty and development and rapidly concluded – at that stage, largely on an intuitive basis – that population control was an inescapable part of the solution.

As would-be libertarian, I then became very troubled by the inroads which it seemed that population control must make into the right to reproduce, and individual liberty in general. For a time the cure seemed worse than the complaint and this misgiving was reinforced by the then generally received wisdom, still not quite neutralised, that large families tended to produce the most rounded individuals and therefore the best citizens. (For a detailed critique of this belief, see Chapter 7 of my Population Fallacies, Pemberton 1977.)

However, several years of intensive research and rather hard cerebration, strongly encouraged by Hector Hawton, led to the production of a manuscript for Pemberton Books which was so large that it had to be split into two titles.

The first of these came out in 1971 as Population versus Liberty, an attempt to square the obvious need to balance population against resources with the need to preserve the right to individual liberty.

In essence the conclusions were that no liberty can be absolute, everything is conditioned by the total environment. Liberty is affected by population growth itself as well as by control measures, so that there comes a time in the growth of numbers when population control is required not in spite of the need to preserve individual liberty, but in order to preserve it.

I also examined the concepts of rights in this context, notably the right to reproduce, and concluded that the duty not to reproduce too prolifically was just as strong, but that both it and duties in general were largely ignored by the commentators:

Of course I didn’t then and don’t now claim that relating rights to duties is a new idea. I drew attention to Mazzini’s impassioned plea for us to recognise and discharge our manifold duties:

I also quoted Thomas Paine’s clear and simple plea:

Even Dipak Nandy in his fierce attack, in the New Humanist, Spring 1985, on Britain’s allegedly systematic stripping away of human rights and general slide into totalitarianism, found space for three lines (out of about 550) on ‘the burden of obligation’.

My conclusion was that while a few commentators touch upon the duties side – and most individuals would, if pressed, probably admit their relevance – most of us, most of the time – even the experts – prefer to ignore both the lead given by such thinkers as Mazzini and Paine and the duties themselves.

Fifteen years later [now 31 years later] the above analysis still seems valid, but I want to add a brief commentary from three additional perspectives: first, that of physics and mathematics, stressing the concepts of equivalence and conservation; then those of developmental psychology, taking up again in this context the idea of conservation; and thirdly, that of ethology, touching on ‘displacement activity’ but stressing ‘redirection’.

In the context of physical science ‘conservation’ does not mean preserving things of value, or the wise use of resources, but – as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts it (a formulation of the First Law of Thermodynamics):

It defines the ‘equivalence of force’ as:

Chemists have similar concepts, astronomers talk about the conservation of area, and logicians of ‘equipollence’, (the equivalence of two symbols or propositions) so we might infer that these important concepts in a number of disparate disciplines, themselves have a sort of equivalence reflecting a really basic aspect of the world about us.

My first hypothesis is that this may apply in some sense, if only as a metaphor, to action (energy?) in social systems, and the first stage of exploration is to look at the learning of conservation and equivalence in children.

The classic studies of Piaget and his colleagues showed that the capacity to understand and correctly apply the concepts of equivalence and conservation is only slowly and painfully acquired. In our earlier years we have little or no idea of conservation even in such concrete spheres as those of matter (mass), weight and volume.

Piaget’s findings were based on such experiments as giving a child a ball made of modelling clay and asking him to make another exactly like it, ‘just as big and heavy’, from an ample supply of the same material. When this was done the experimenter changed the appearance of one of the balls – perhaps by cutting it in half or rolling it into a sausage shape – and then asking if the amount of clay was still the same (technically, whether the mass was conserved). (See The Development Psychology of J. Piaget by J. H. Flavell, 1963.)

A long series of experiments of this and other kinds showed that very young children have virtually no idea of conservation, but systematically evolve one as they mature. Each of the three basic types of quantity (mass, weight, and volume) shows a comparable trend through three clear stages: from complete non-conservation to a hit-and-miss rule-of-thumb mode – valid in some cases but notin others – through to an intuitively certain, almost axiomatic, conservation in every transformation of the quantity in question.

However, there are important differences in the rate of acquiring conservation-competence in the three spheres. (We need words for this process, analogous to ‘numerate’ and ‘numeracy’ – how about ‘conservate’ and ‘conservacy’?) In Piaget’s subjects conservation of matter became common at 8 to 10 years, and of weight at 10 to 12 years, whereas conservation of volume was found only at 12-plus. He then came up with interesting ideas linking these patterns with the growth of knowledge, and intellect, particularly logic.

From here it is but a small step to hypothesise a possible parallel in the fields of economic, political and moral thinking up to and including adult life. Do we start off with zero knowledge of and judgment in these fields – as in the case of mass, etc. – and slowly acquire competence as we age and learn? If so, is there a further parallel in that the rates vary between the different spheres so that ‘conservacy’ tends to arrive in economics before politics, say, and in politics before morality?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to both questions, can anything be said about typical rates of learning and thresholds, and is it possible that many – perhaps most of us – never reach a reasonable level of competence in some or even all of these spheres? I have a hunch that true conservacy in these three areas of human aspiration might be the quality we have in mind when we use the words ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, and, in passing, I can’t help wondering how often readers feel impelled to apply these to people they know, or know about.

Ethologists have shown us that animals often switch energetically to another, often quite unrelated, activity when their current behavioural urge is frustrated. Most Humanists, even, have probably been sadistic enough at one time or another to tease a kitten with a tuft of wool on a bit of string, tantalisingly dangling or tugging it along but jerking it away just as the little hunter pounced.

A common response to this is a number of energetic attempts to capture the prey followed by a complete switch of attention into furious face-washing, often followed by another bout of hunting, and so on.

Two labels are used for behaviour in this general category, ‘displacement-activity’ – perhaps the better known – and ‘redirection’, and behaviour of both kinds is found in human beings.

The best illustration I know is from the work of the distinguished zoologist, Cloudesley-Thompson, who happened to be a tank-commander in World War II during the 1944 advance into Normandy:

He noted that in such circumstances an overpowering desire to sleep was ‘no new experience’, though it was some time before he realised its true significance as a displacement-activity, which occurs, 'for example, when the instinct to flee conflicts with the instinct to fight'. He pointed out, too, that conflict between drives can also lead to ‘redirected activity’: for instance, ‘a man may bang the table when he is irritated with his wife, because he is inhibited from striking her’.

Prima facie it seems likely that just as animals and people switch energetically to some other activity when a basic drive is frustrated, so human rights activists may tend to fight shy of the painful, difficult, time-consuming and often near-impossible task of persuading powerful individuals or groups to discharge those duties which would generate the rights demanded, and ‘redirect’ their frustrated reforming zeal towards some vague general audience which may not realise it is being addressed, or even the victims themselves who are very unlikely to object.

The more powerful the rights-deprivers and the nearer the reformer gets to them then the stronger will be the temptation to ‘redirect’ reforming zeal towards ostentatious displays of sympathy for the victim and diffuse recriminations against the status quo.

No simple formula can possibly comprehend the complex domain of rights and duties. Although I suggest that there is a metaphorical truth in saying that the ‘mass’ of rights consumed must have ‘equivalence’ with the mass of duties discharged – and that the basis of this is or should be reciprocity, as suggested by the Golden Rule – it is obvious that there are many exceptions.

Everyone would agree that human babies have rights against adults but no duties in return, and most that much the same goes for many animals. Other examples of asymmetrical reciprocity can be produced, employer/employee, for instance, but the total absence of reciprocity will be the exception rather than the rule.

A further problem arises from the fact that ‘action’ to generate rights for others connotes doing things, whereas some rights can be ensured by inaction, by refraining from interference, although action on the part of ‘A’ may be required to enforce inaction on the part of ‘B’ in order to ensure the enjoyment of a right by ‘C’, and so on

Clearly there are many problems with the above analysis, but so are there in the usual approach, that in which the vital message that someone, somewhere, has got to do things – take on further duties in order to create the rights demanded – is implicit rather than explicit, so that those whose behaviour deprives others of their rights can more easily pretend it is not addressed to them or ignore it altogether.

A not too far-fetched analogy with the present situation is a society in which 99 per cent of the anti-crime effort is addressed to the actual and potential victims; exhorting them to be more aware of their rights not to be burgled, robbed, raped, or otherwise injured, and only 1 per cent to the criminals, to law, police, probation, prisons and the like.

It would take far more space than is available here to try to meet the above and other objections but it does seem useful, at the metaphorical level at least, to use as a starting-point the following three ideas:

1. That if rights are to be generated and enjoyed rather than just talked about, then the social energy/mass of duties discharged has to be equivalent: in other words the energy/mass must be ‘conserved’;

2. that humans experience great difficulty in learning to conserve, even in the relatively concrete spheres of mass, weight and volume;

3. that if and when we do attain a reasonable degree of ‘conservacy’ in social and moral affairs, we still find it only too easy to redirect our reforming energies away from their proper, and difficult, targets – the people responsible – towards those distinctly ‘softer’, targets, the victims.

The human rights dialogue surely ought not to be between their advocates and those people deprived of them, but between the advocates and those responsible – and few of us can entirely escape responsibility – for the deprivation in the first place.

My main point is that we should never, or hardly ever , advocate human rights without at the same time – and with at least the same emphasis – advocating the human duties necessary to generate them.

These are the two halves of the same equation, each meaningless without the other, and – as with mathematical equations – the two sides have to be equivalent; you can’t get a quart of rights out of a pint pot of duties.

Despite my insistence on the essential equivalence of the two sides, it might be salutary to soft-pedal this aspect for an indefinite probationary period (to begin to compensate for generations of distortion and neglect) and to translate every intended statement about rights entirely into the language of duties.