7.3 Value profile: respect

Respect: recognizing and honoring rights

Respect is one of the five values included in the Statement of Values developed by the University of Puerto Rico’s College of Business Administration. The following statement of respect was drafted by a committee of academic stakeholders in 2006:

Acknowledge the inherent dignity present in its diverse constituents by recognizing and respecting their fundamental rights. These include rights to property, privacy, free exchange of ideas, academic freedom, due process, and meaningful participation in decision making and policy formation.

The purpose of this module is to explore this value further by developing a conception of rights that are treated as modes of respect for human autonomy.

Along these lines, this module will present a framework for explaining and justifying rights and showing the correlativity between rights and duties. This framework is useful to explain and clarify widely accepted rights claims as well as to examine critically less widely accepted, more controversial rights claims. The content of the rights-based approach is summarized below in a table. Different sense of autonomy, loosely interpreted from Ética Para Ingenieros, help to provide a rough justification for the notions of rights. Finally, exercises help students progress from justifying and understanding non-controversial rights claims, to examining more questionable (and complex) rights claims, to examining rights in the context of community development and appropriate technology.

Six statements on rights

1. definition: a right is an essential capacity of action that others are obliged to recognize and respect. (the key word is “essential.” essential here means essential to the development and maintenance of autonomy. for more on autonomy see below.)

2. definition: a duty is a principle that obliges us to recognize and respect the autonomy of others (and of ourselves).

3. correlativity of right and duty. rights and duties are correlative; for every right there exists a series of duties that spell out how to recognize and respect the corresponding right, who should recognize and respect this right claim, and on what occasions.

• Note that duty and right are defined, one in terms of the other. A right is a capacity of action that others are obliged (=have a duty) to recognize and respect. A duty obliges us to recognize and respect the autonomy (=rights) of others.
• For every right, there is a correlativity duty to recognize and respect that right claim. (Actually a whole series or levels of correlative duties).
• Rights (as modes of exercising autonomy) while essential to being human are also fragile, that is, vulnerable to certain kinds of threats. If the capacities or capabilities bundled under a right are not exercised or protected from these standard threats, then they disappear. (For example, humans are capable of speech but only if at certain key developmental times, they are exposed to and stimulated by speech.)