오노라 오닐(Onora O’Niell)의 의무 중심 이론

In contemporary discourse, human rights are often considered as the trump card to every soscial problem, not to mention them being reconized as indispensable values of our society. They are suggested as solutions to wide range of issues, from authoritarian governance to climate crisis. As a result, the list of rights claimed to be human rights has been growing longer over recent decades, which is a phenomenon frequently described as ‘rights inflation’. Several theorist have cautioned on the potential side effects of this inflation, urging alternative frameworks for addressing social challenges. Among these thinkers, Onora O’Neill proposes the most fundamental reorientations: a transition from a rights-based to a duty-based approach. Based on Kant’s constructivism, O’Neill draws an ethical principle from Kant’s categorical imperative. According to the principle, moral agents have to act with regard to every person who can be affected by their actions. O’Neill argues that with globalization, the range of individuals to whom we owe moral consideration expands in a cosmopolitant manner. With this ethical principle, O’Neill; analyzies the structure of deontic propositions in terms of moral agents, highlighting that to have recipients enjoying rights there must exist agents performing correlative duties. In other words, rights depends on duties to be upheld. On the other hand, O’Neill also observes the fact that there are duties which do not directly correspond to rights, by examining the institutionalization of rights. That is to say, the extent of duties are broader than that of rights. For this reason, duties, instead of rights, should be the starting point of ethical and political reflection. From the duty-based approach, feasible duties required to realize rights would be discussed. Also, O’Neill emphisizes that it is the key to overcome statist perspective — which confines moral responsibility to states — and expand agents of duties to non-state actors. O’Neill, by advocating the duty-based approach, underscores the need for active participation by agents of all levels to ensure effectvie implementation of rights.