May 22, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    In a diary entry for the year 1906, Tolstoy angrily notes: "People write pompously in books that when there are rights, there are also obligations. What audacious nonsense--what lies! Man has only obligations. MAN HAS ONLY OBLIGATIONS!" (The capitalized repetition is Tolstoy's)

    The opening sentences in Simone Weil's tract, written upon De Gaulle's urging in 1943, in the last year of her short life, go as follows: "The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation toward him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much" (The Need for Roots, Putnam, 1942).

    How far we have strayed from these sentiments of the first half of the twentieth century! Since the 1960s, all we hear are rights--not only the older rights of workers and women, but also the newer ones of minority peoples, gays, transsexuals, illegal immigrants, and animals. Another common point of view of our time is that rights can only be obtained by force, the idea being that people in power are not going to cede an inch unless the powerless threaten it with vast, chanting, noisy, fists-in-the-air marches. On the face of it, this is only sound mechanics: in the physical world, force can only be overcome by force--greater force. Even in the sentient (but nonhuman) world, the strong can be overcome by the weak, but only if the weak are organized into the strength of numbers. As for humans, some show of force may always be necessary. Nevertheless, certain rights can be obtained through moral suasion, which is an appeal to virtue in the powerful, that virtue being their sense of obligation to heed the arguments of fairness and justice.

    Rights can be freely given. So far as I know, the brown bears of California have never marched for their rights, yet they are beginning to have a few, thanks to good people. Obligations, however, cannot be given. One has them, or one doesn't. Bears lack all sense of obligation. Having received their rights from people, you might expect them to feel some obligation to help old ladies cross the streets. But no. Demanding rights without obligations turns us humans into bears and other endangered animals--into mere recipients, damaging thereby our dignity as agents, able ourselves to grant rights.

    Whence comes this sense of obligation--a virtue that appears to be unique to the human species? Children as young as eighteen months feel it. When they see an adult struggling to put up something, for instance, they make an effort to help even though they can barely stand on their wobbly legs! They a natural urge to oblige, an urge absent in chimpanzees, our closest primate cousins (F. Warneken and M. Tomaseelo, "Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees," Science, vol. 311, 3 March 2006, p. 1301). Shouldn't we encourage this empowering virtue in humans rather than ceaselessly demanding rights and only rights?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu