Enabling Rights

If I am obligated to perform an action, you can wrong me by preventing me from performing it. The possibility of being wronged in this way suggests the existence of enabling rights— claim-rights that function to protect our ability to do our duty. At first glance, the notion of an enabling right indicates that some of our rights are justified directly by our duties. I label this the Default View. This view presents a puzzle: it appears to ground some of my rights in something that does not reflect my importance: my duties, which appear to reflect the importance of others. I vindicate the Default View by showing that a person’s obligations are the right sort of features to ground fundamental rights: status-embodying features the moral importance of which reflects her own. The idea that our obligations reflect our status is made vivid in cases of marginalization and oppression, where the public denial of the importance of a person’s obligations can function as an element of demeaning social erasure. I conjecture that we can situate these observations about the reflections of moral importance by reviving a traditional claim about human dignity: it is reflected in responsibilities, not merely entitlements.