What is the relation between rights and responsibilities? Politicians sometimes say that
responsibilities are the opposite of rights, and that it would be better if people had a stronger
sense of their responsibilities and were less preoccupied with their rights. Philosophers
remind us that rights and responsibilities are formally speaking correlatives, at least if
responsibilities are understood in the sense of duties. My rights correlate with your
responsibilities, and if we all have rights against one another, then it follows that we all have …

In Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities' Jeremy Waldron offers a characteristically thoughtful
and elegant account of rights, or as he calls it, responsibility-rights. As Waldron rightfully
acknowledges, rights understood as a form of responsibility are not meant to capture every
species of rights, but to provide us with a new analytic resource for better understanding a
particular subset of rights that curiously entail a form of responsibility on the part of the rights
holder. The link between rights and responsibility, Waldron argues, is built upon a strong …