Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The conventional belief about the well-known dichotomy of duties and rights is that the former are premodern and the latter are modern. Some have celebrated “the age of rights” while others express concern that modernity takes “rights talk” too far. There is a human rights movement, as if duties require none. The last American secretary of state ostentatiously called together a “Commission on Inalienable Rights,” but no one would ever say that the president he served took personal or political duties seriously. And while some philosophers have been subtle in recognizing that any right implicates a duty, our recent thinkers have mostly battled about how to justify the various rights that moderns claim. Conservative oracles instruct that rights come from God or nature (the Roman Catholics among them having overcome their modern anxiety that rights were liberal and relativistic), while liberals have bickered about whether to establish their foundations in contract, reason, or practices. At the height of postmodernism, academics mused about how rights could persist — as they clearly have — in “the age of interpretation.” The canonization of human rights at the end of the Cold War, as the international public morality of the end of history, called forth an entire library of writings on where they came from. But there is no interest in whether the duties of citizens or humans remain alive — or what their intellectual tradition looks like. The continuing interest in rights, and the commonplace that duties were superseded by them, misses something dramatic in our intellectual history. It obscures, or entirely overlooks, a great struggle to modernize duties. That struggle, one might even suppose, may determine nothing less than the future of our ethics and our politics. Certainly the character of liberalism, and even its political future, depends on a recognition of that struggle, and on our support of it. Recovering the fraught but indispensable attempt to reclaim duties for a liberal or liberatory program is of far more than historical interest. “Every legal culture has its fundamental words,” Robert Cover, the legendary Yale Law School professor, a guru in some quarters, remarked in 1988 in a classic essay on duties, “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order,” that has defined his intellectual legacy. “The basic word of Judaism is ‘obligation’ or mitzvah,” he continued, expressing the fallacy that if duties pertained to premodern ethics, then modernity — including liberal modernity — must be based on a successor and supplanting concept of human rights which has ousted duties, or subordinated them to a servile role in the culture of rights, with a kind of residual form of responsibility to acknowledge or vindicate rights. As Cover expressed it starkly, “the myth of Sinai is essentially a myth of heteronomy,” whereas “the myth of social contract is essentially a myth of autonomy.” Cover perfectly epitomized the conventional wisdom, according to which the philosophical and political situation is an either/or: duties or rights. Though Cover’s account is the best-known version of this canonical view in recent American legal discussion, the myth is omnipresent. The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, defined premodern ethics in terms of role-performance. The scripts that our ancestors followed and bequeathed to their descendants “are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties.” Moderns, by contrast, are contentless, unobligated, anonymous: “lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.” Rights, MacIntyre held, are not just corrosive, relativistic, and solipsistic; they are also incoherent, having pried men (and possibly women) out of the realm of their performance of excellence. Such voices are correct that in modern times the substance of ethics shifted in the direction of autonomy and self-making — thankfully so. But it is not true that duties were simply overthrown by rights. The change was incomplete. An ethics of duties, far from being simply usurped by one of rights, endured the great modern rupture. Indeed, consecrating a new culture of duties, a modern culture of duties, became a high intellectual and political goal. Recalling how this critical but neglected movement was accomplished, so as to complicate the familiar canard about human rights as a kind of