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18 Moral Duties are Subject-Grounded

18  Moral Duties are Subject-Grounded

One of Buchanan's arguments against the Mirroring View (or the Orthodox Conception of human rights) is that, if IHR must be grounded in antecedently existing moral rights, then the IHR could not be as extensive as they seem to be (if we take the UDHR and the two Covenants) as our guide.



"The moral right has a much less demanding set of corresponding duties [than does the legal right], because the demanding set of duties we ordinarily associate with the legal right to due process is simply not justifiable from a standpoint that grounds duties solely in morally important aspects of the individual right-holder” (Heart of Human Rights  160).

“The key point is that to justify the assertion that A has a moral claim-right to R, it is not enough to show that someone has a duty or even that someone has a duty regarding A; one must show that that duty is owed, morally speaking, to A or that A is morally entitled to the performance of that duty, and to show that one must identify something about A that is sufficient to ground the directed duty”  (Heart of Human Rights 59).

“The core idea is that: Because the duties that correspond to moral claim-rights are directed, that is, morally owed to the right-holder, they must be solely subject-grounded. That is, to establish the existence of the directed duties and hence of the right it is necessary to make the case that there is something about the right-holder that justifies the assertion that the duties are owed, morally speaking, to him or her” (Heart of Human Rights 63).

Not all duties are 'directed duties.'  The duty of beneficence is not a directed duty. We have a duty of  beneficence but it is not directed at any given or particular person. No one has a right to our beneficence (if they did, then it would not be beneficence--it would be like repaying a debt). But if we start from the moral right that a person has, then the correlative duty is directed to or at that person--the one who has the right.

Philosophers say that beneficence is an "imperfect" duty--that is, a duty that cannot be completely fulfilled (there are always more acts of beneficence one could perform). The duty not to kill or steal is called a "perfect" duty--it is perfect in the sense that it can be perfectly or completely fulfilled (by not killing or stealing from anyone).

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