Wrongs and Duties

Abstract

Few if any contemporary scholars have worked as hard or as effectively as Carl Wellman at the exacting task of teasing out the meaning of normative concepts and their mutual relationships. His hugely impressive series of works about rights is a monument to a considerable endeavour. It is one which I admire as a friend and respect as a colleague, and from which I have learned much, especially on those points on which he has been critical of, or taken a line opposed to, positions I have put forward on similar themes. On rights and duties, there may remain some minor points of difference between us, but in the main I have found myself moving towards his position on points on which we differ.¹ By way of worthwhile tribute to him, rather than going over old ground, I should like here to strike out a little off the beaten track and ponder the concepts of ‘wrong’ and of ‘duty’ and their interrelation. What I shall do is first to reflect upon the distinction of ‘wrong’ and ‘not wrong’, which I suspect is the most fundamental conceptual distinction in normative thought. Subsequently, I shall try to tease out some particular juridical usages of the ideas of ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’, to show that we might not wish to treat these as fundamental in the same way, but as having somewhat specialised functions in denoting particular kinds of normative position.