It is an honor to be asked to ‘meditate with Fritz’ but never an easy assignment, not just because he always knows so much more than the rest of us, more philosophy, more law, more International Relations Theory, but also because of his own unique and sometimes inscrutable way of presenting his ideas. I still recall vividly taking a PhD seminar on International Law with Kratochwil at Columbia University in the early 1980s. We students spent much of the semester befuddled about what Kratochwil really thought, and asked him finally in desperation, what he ‘was’ (meaning, what kind of IR theorist he was). He answered: ‘A Humean’, which befuddled us even more. At the time, I thought it was a sly joke on nosy grad students. Today, I understand that he was giving us deeper insight into his mind that continues to be revealed in this volume – that Kratochwil is mainly concerned about the big questions of classical political philosophy rather than the squabbles of IR theory.

Fast forward over 35 years, and the task of trying to meditate with Kratochwil is still demanding. In the eighth meditation, on ‘the limits and burdens of rights’, Kratochwil is at his most philosophical: his main concern is to refute the claim that ‘rights could provide us with a fully-fledged moral theory’.Footnote ¹ Kratochwil is ultimately concerned about whether founding morality on rights is conceptually incoherent, not whether rights activism works in practice compared to activism based on other existing theories of justice. When he concludes that those who ‘hope that a theory of rights is “the answer” will be disappointed’, he means the hope of founding morality on rights, not mainly the hope that rights might be effective in improving well-being in the world.Footnote ²

The editors of this Symposium suggested that the common thread throughout The Status of Law in World Society is that Kratochwil follows an approach that could be called critical pragmatism, ‘understood as an approach that assesses the meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application’.Footnote ³ It may be that the editors and I understand practical application in different ways, but in my mind, practical application often seems quite absent from the text. At least in the meditation I was assigned, Kratochwil's pragmatism is about theory building, not, I think, the application of theory to practice, or the ways in which practices inform theory. In his Tartu Lecture, Kratochwil argues for a pragmatism of ‘Letting go of unrealizable plans and notions that lead us down the road to delusional projects and acquiring instead the ability to “go on” in spite of uncertainties and the unknown is probably the most valuable lesson to learn’.Footnote ⁴ In Meditation 8, at times Kratochwil appears to suggest that human rights itself is a ‘delusional project’, full of ‘unrealizable plans and notions’. But he does this in a way that fails to distinguish between many rights claims in national settings (such as animal rights) and actual rights embodied in national law and international law, and between claims embodied in soft international law (e.g. the right to peace) and hard human rights law. I would have preferred to see him take on the actual content of human rights law and point to which of these rights in particular he finds delusional.

Kratochwil's concerns are not so much with rights per se but with the ‘hegemonic’ character of rights talk. And in particular, he is concerned that rights talk is displacing former conceptions of the public good, of civic or personal virtue, or of duties that we owe to ourselves or to others. This in turn, he fears, leads to a certain impoverishment of the political and perhaps even moral discourse. Kratochwil worries whether an ‘overabundance of rights’ undermines a greater cosmopolitan project that is not only about ‘what is owed to us’ but also about ‘what do we owe to others’.Footnote ⁵

Despite this penetrating critique, Kratochwil offers no proposal for any alternative he envisions. Given his remarks about alternative conceptions of the public good, civic virtue, or even duty, it would appear that he gestures here toward an alternative that would more fully incorporate responsibilities to balance the tendency of rights to proliferate in a self-defeating and egoistic way. So, in the spirit of Kratochwil's stress in his Tartu lecture on ‘acquiring instead the ability to “go on” in spite of uncertainties and the unknown’ let me try to offer some thoughts about a way of moving ahead in the realm of human rights from my new book that involves rediscovering ethical and political responsibilities as necessary complements to rights that could contribute to deeper implementation of human rights in the future.Footnote ⁶

In this book I too express a critique of extensive rights language when unaccompanied by an equally robust discourses and practices of responsibility.Footnote ⁷ I agree with Kratochwil that ‘the notion that each right has only one duty-bearer’ is misleading, but my concern is not mainly with the philosophical incoherence of rights, but indeed with the practical application of these rights discourses.Footnote ⁸ I am not talking about responsibilities rather than rights and not about adding more legal responsibilities to human rights law. In other words, I am not shifting the focus from rights to responsibility but rather thinking about ethical and political responsibilities as ways to implement rights more fully.

I argue that the language of political and ethical responsibilities is often missing from the practical action discourse of human rights, and that this is detrimental to the effectiveness of rights movements. The human rights approach is excessively state-centric, stressing above all the responsibilities of states to fulfill rights. But states are often unwilling or unable to fulfill their obligations to protect and promote human rights on their own. In some cases, it is impossible for human rights ideals to be reached without cooperation from other agents. Following Onora O'Neill, I call these other possible responsible actors ‘agents of justice’.Footnote ⁹ Many other potential agents of justice exist in addition to states, including international organizations, non-governmental organizations, social movements, corporations, universities, and individuals. Some of these are already fighting for justice, and yet many scholars and activists have not found ways to talk about and theorize these networked obligations to fulfill rights.Footnote ¹⁰ I include myself in that category. I have worked on human rights on and off for the last 37 years, and yet my writing includes few discussions of responsibility and none of duty until 2017.

Following Iris Young's arguments, in this new work, I do not use the common legal meaning of responsibility focused on who is accountable, liable, or to blame. This is what Young called ‘backward-looking responsibility’, or the ‘liability model of responsibility’.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, I focus on ethical and political responsibility that Young called forward-looking. Forward-looking responsibilities are held by states and corporations, as well as by non-state institutions and by individuals who are not necessarily liable or to blame for a common human rights problem but can nevertheless help address and resolve it. This type of responsibility asks not ‘who is to blame’, but ‘what should we do’.Footnote ¹² It is aimed at accomplishing things effectively rather than punishing those who are to blame.Footnote ¹³ The forward-looking responsibilities I discuss here are those necessary to promote a broad range of human rights, including civil, political, economic, and social rights.

Many human rights advocates avoid using the explicit language of non-state responsibility, but their private sense of duty is deeply felt, and often motivates and sustains their lives. In other words, diverse human rights actors already have robust responsibility practices. Yet we do not articulate clear norms that would generalize our personal beliefs about responsibility to motivate a wider range of actors. In fact, there appear to be norms that one should not talk about responsibility of a wider range of actors, because this would potentially take the pressure off the state or even risk blaming the victim.

Some progressive writers and activists are so focused on rights that they bend over backwards to frame issues as rights claims rather than speaking of responsibilities. This is part of what Kratochwil means when he speaks of the proliferation of rights. For example, environmental activists have increasingly started to frame their issues in terms of rights: the right to a clean environment, the rights of trees, the rights of the rivers, or the rights of Earth Mother herself, as reflected in the Pachamama laws of Bolivia and Ecuador. With regard to the environment and climate change, I believe it is more important to stress the responsibilities of countries, corporations, states and municipalities, organizations, and individuals to protect trees, rivers, and the environment as a whole.

Such an approach involves moving beyond rights to also stress an ‘ethic of responsibility’, a term used by Max Weber in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’ to denote one of the most important qualities for people acting in politics. For Weber, such an ethic did not just mean taking responsibility, but also being morally ‘answerable for the (foreseeable) consequences of one's actions’ or inactions. Weber also advocated a form of responsibility that was forward-looking, in the sense of looking to the future not to the past. He criticized the search for ‘guilty men’ and instead advocated the ‘true concerns of the politician – the future and his responsibility towards it’.Footnote ¹⁴

An ethics of responsibility can also be informed by Hannah Arendt's understanding of political responsibility, and especially by the parts of Eichmann in Jerusalem that have to do with personal responsibility not in the sense of guilt, but in the positive sense of an expression of citizenship.Footnote ¹⁵ Arendt's discussion of how the Danish people and government took political responsibility for protecting Jews in Denmark during WWII from repression and deportation to the death camps is such a case. Arendt argued that the case of Danish rescuers should be ‘required reading for every political science student’. Even as Arendt dissected the great power of the totalitarian state, she never ignored issues of political responsibility.

Arendt believed that political responsibility derived from common membership in a country. But citizenship in a country is too constrained a criterion for today's world. Mathias Risse conceives of human rights as membership rights in a world society, and then spells out the global responsibilities implied for different actors, especially states.Footnote ¹⁶ In Responsibility for Justice, Young argues that it should be the condition of ‘social connection’ to a structural injustice, rather than citizenship, that yields responsibility. This more cosmopolitan understanding of political responsibility is necessary to complement and implement the international protection of human rights.

Onora O'Neill provides one of the most explicit applications of arguments about responsibility and international human rights.Footnote ¹⁷ Kratochwil quotes O'Neil as saying that humanity cannot be a duty-bearer, but he does not go on to acknowledge her argument that multiple other agents of justice can be duty bearers.Footnote ¹⁸ O'Neill argues that ‘[r]ights could be realized only if the counterpart obligations were held by competent agents’. States must always be among the primary bearers of obligations, but O'Neill also discusses multiple agents of justice who carry moral obligations to further rights, including importantly, the victims of human rights violations.

O'Neill argues that an emphasis on obligation helps human rights victims sustain themselves as agents. She writes: ‘We must be committed to strategies and policies that enable them to become and to remain agents. If we do anything less, we do not view others as doers like ourselves’.Footnote ¹⁹ Talking about social connection models of responsibility grants equal respect for all human agents and can be empowering.

For Young, drawing on Arendt, a key feature of forward-looking responsibility is that it can be discharged only by joining with others in collective action. I agree that forward-looking responsibility is primarily discharged through collective action, but I would not like to exclude individual actions taken in the context of collective action. Often the interaction between individual action and collective action is a productive one, and forward-looking responsibility may be discharged in combined individual and collective action. For example, the civic responsibility to vote is ultimately an individual act, though it may be surrounded by and embedded in forms of collective action.

One of the theorists who influenced Young, Henry Richardson, argued for a moral ‘division of labor’ for institutions and individuals engaged in forward-looking responsibility in which we are responsible for a range of concerns in certain contexts.Footnote ²⁰ But our responsibilities may not always be clearly spelled out, and thus there is room for agents to deliberate. Young, following in this line of thought, saw forward-looking responsibility as conceptually more open and discretionary than duty: ‘It is up to the agents who have a responsibility to decide what to do to discharge it within the limits of other moral considerations’.Footnote ²¹

Because forward-looking responsibility is discretionary, Young says that there is no set of rules or a method for deciding what to do. But she provides four parameters agents can use for reasoning about their actions and those of others: power, privilege, interest, and collective ability. These derive largely from ‘the social positions’ each actor occupies.

I advocate this more open and discretionary nature of how agents may discharge forward-looking responsibilities. As such, there is no single set of instructions or policies by which institutions or individuals discharge their forward-looking responsibility for human rights. It is very possible that Kratochwil, having argued against a proliferation of rights, would be equally concerned about this proliferation of discretionary responsibilities. But it is also possible, as John Tasioulas has argued, and as Kratochwil might find persuasive, that taking duties and responsibilities more seriously would give us tools to call into question the proliferation of rights.Footnote ²² If agents of justice are not willing to step forward and accept responsibilities for the implementation of these new rights, perhaps they are not human rights at all.

Human rights responsibilities can and will conflict, just as rights also come into conflict with one another. But this is nothing novel in international politics. As Richardson argues, his view of a moral division of labor is useful as ‘a vehicle for constituting and coordinating complex cooperative action, which has no simple overall purpose. This system lacks an all-knowing and wholly wise administrator’.Footnote ²³ This is an apt description of the nature of international politics.

With regard to problems of global human rights for example, the international system indeed lacks an all-knowing administrator. Richardson's notion of ‘a specialized division of deliberative responsibility’, and Young's idea of responsibility having more openness and discretion gives us a workable definition of how responsibilities might function in the realm of human rights. Through the promotion of rights and multiple exercises of responsibility, often involving legal, ethical, and political deliberation and struggle, there are processes of constituting and coordinating this complex cooperative action. Our responsibilities as individuals, and the responsibilities of multiple institutions of which we may be a part, is to take up some modest share of constituting and coordinating this complex cooperative action.

Often the link between our modest exercises of responsibility and human rights change in the world may seem quite distant and even far-fetched. Did that letter I wrote, the petition I signed, the march I joined, make any difference at all? Our individual and collective actions cumulate in unexpected ways, at times marvelous, more often, obscure, mysterious, exhausting, and frustrating.

People may say they want more precision – what exactly are our responsibilities? The nature of the human rights system and the nature of responsibilities mean that there are not precise or definitive answers. We know that for every right, there are duty bearers responsible for helping ensure the enjoyment of that right, and that most often the state is the primary duty bearer. But we also know, historically, that leaving it to states and continuing to create more rights without sufficient attention to implementing our existing rights has led to disillusionment and pessimism about the very enterprise. There is a need for more political and ethical attention to the work of multiple agents of justice. There is a need for more actors to use the openness and discretion of the notion of forward-looking responsibility not to evade it, but to choose it. Human rights advocates, working in transnational advocacy networks, have been doing this for decades, and in some cases (anti-slavery, women's suffrage) for centuries.Footnote ²⁴ We need to understand that many agents of justice have multiple responsibilities and some kind of division of labor, to continue to help constitute and coordinate the complex global action that is international human rights.