PUFENDORF AND 18TH-CENTURY SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY moral duties, of morality. They belong to different disciplines: Moral Philosophy concerns duties. Natural Jurisprudence concerns rights. On the other hand, rights and duties are correlatives, like father-son or debt-credit. Thus we see that there is such a correspondence between the rights of men and the duties of men that the one points to the other, and a system of the one can be substituted for a systemof the other.-** But this is hardly consistent with the view that rights and duties are dealt with in different disciplines. Reid, incidentally, continues, after the passage quoted, to answer certain objections to the effect that some duties seem to lack correlative rights. But he disregards possible objections totheeffect that some rights may lack correlative duties. This suggests that he has followed Hutcheson’s example and omitted the concept of a right as an active moral quality, because in that sense a right can indeed be said to lack a correlative duty. For instance, a creditor for a debt payable on demand does have a right in the sense of having an ability to act with moral effect. But if he does not act, that is, if he does not make a demand for the payment (and he is of course free to do so), then the “moral effect”, that is, the other party’s duty to pay, does not come into being. It is significant that Reid’s definitions are essentially the same as Hutcheson’s. A right action is said to be an action agreeable to our duty, and rights are then explained in terms of duty, so that in effect they are defined in terms of right action. The rights of men comprise all that a man can lawfully do, possess or use, or claim of another. Moreover, to have a right to do x means that all have a duty not to hinder me from doing x; I have a real right or a property right means that nobody can take the object from me or molest me in the possession of it; and my right to demand x from a person means that person has a duty to perform x.^® In spite of these differences, there is nothing in Hutcheson, nor in subsequent writers like Reid or Stewart, that explicitly suggests any major difference between the continental and the British versions of natural jurisprudence. (Note however, that also on the continent some writers deviated from Pufendorf in similar ways.) Some of the confusions arising out of this are, I suspect, still lingering. 127 IV So far, we have taken note of some important differences between Hutcheson and Pufendorf. We might now ask why Hutcheson deviated, and why he was so discreet about it, in striking contrast to Bentham, who advanced Reid (1843) p. 325; (1969) p. 380. =>« Reid ibid. 29
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