"...Rights and duties, it might be argued, are simply corollaries of one another, so it does not much matter which system we propound. One may teach that 'you must not rob Mary as she walks down the street' or that 'Mary has a right to walk down the street without being robbed.' Whichever code is followed, the same result: Mary may conduct her business safely.

"I should counter that this is by no means the end of the story, for the two systems of moral catechizing produce very different states of mind in those who imbibe them. But let us meet this objection (that rights and duties are virtual equivalents) on its own terms by looking also at more immediate results. As a test case, let us consider the debate about the moral status of abortion.

"Supporters of the permissability of abortion deploy many arguements, but central to them all is that of a 'woman's right to choose what to do with her body'. Christians and other moral conservatives who standardly oppose abortion counter with their own slogan: 'the child's right to life.' Whose right will win?

"In the world of politics and moral debate around us, the victor in this argument is pre-ordained. The women who wish to 'choose'--to say nothing of the feckless boyfriends and anxious parents who wish to urge them on, and the much larger numbers of people with an interest in the availability of abortion to underwrite their 'sexual freedom'--are with us, voting and articulating their opinions. The unborn children are unable to speak and are reliant only on those who care about them and are unencumbered by anticipating a need to dispose of the consequences of their own sexual indiscretions. Hedonism wins: the child dies.

"Now let us recast the debate in the language of obligations and duties. Who, in this circumstance of an undesired pregnancy, has an obligation to whom? Again, the winner is pre-ordained. It is the child. For clearly the woman and her sexual partner--and perhaps others too--have a duty to nurture and protect it. To argue otherwise, it would be necessary to say that the child has a duty to die so that the mother and her partner (or relatives, or society) are not inconvenienced.

"Now it is not completely ridiculous to insist that, in certain circumstances, a person does indeed have a duty to die. Such a duty is implied, for example, when a war criminal who pleads that he was 'only following orders' while under a threat to his own life is sentenced anyway. The person who finds himself in such an extreme situation has a duty to die rather than to participate in such foul actions as constitute a war crime.

"But the situation of an (unknowingly) unwanted baby in the womb is not such a circumstance. In any case, the baby is unable to fulfil such an obligation in his or her own person--only to have it imposed from outside by the surgeon's knife. To speak of a 'duty to die' in such a case is presumably nonsensical.

"If we frame the question in terms of human rights, abortion wins. If we ask instead about moral obligations, the child lives. In both cases, the 'answer' was already present in the question.
--Meic Pearse, Why the Rest Hates the West

The man is brilliant. I wish I had the wherewithal to type the entire chapter, but there is neither space not gumption for such a copyright infringement. One of the reasons, according to Mr. Pearse, that there is such a divide between Westernized and non-Westernized cultures is that in the massive shift to modernity and modern thinking, the West has left behind any sense of innate moral obligation and replaced it with innate moral rights. The language of morality and philosophy then focuses on the rights of the individual rather than his duties; any sense of duty is shifted to the larger, amorphous whole of 'society' or 'government' or...anyone else, at any rate. So we speak in a hilariously contorted language of passive verbs: children ought to be cared for, the sick and the elderly ought to be given provision, the wronged ought to be given justice, the poor ought to be provided for...

And never once do we say, 'We ought to care for our children. You ought to be an honest businessman. I should provide for the poor, the widowed, and fatherless.' In Meic's words,

"Support without supporters, care without carers, provision without providers; to relapse into normal, active verbs would be to highlight the obvious: that moral action requires moral actors--an so to revert to personal obligations. To avoid this uncomfortable reality, public discourse through the Babel of the media adopts a curious duck-speak on moral questions, as if it is all a matter of better 'systems' and bureaucracy without any of us having to accept that we have duties...and that we have failed them.

"But people with no sense of obligations are people with no sense of personal sin. It is no wonder that Christians are quite unable to evangelize effectively in this environment--without, that is, resorting to shallow emotionalism or blandishments about the 'benefits' of 'coming to know Jesus.' If I have no obligations...I cannot envisage myself as a sinner, not even before a holy God. The central thrust of Chrisitan evangelism is thereby rendered ridiculous.

"Little wonder that the sense of personal sinfulness, even among Christians, is largely superficial...We see ourselves overwhelmingly as sinned against, not as sinning; as standing in need of a little therapy, more self-esteem and some assertiveness training, not of forgiveness."

I hope this makes as much sense to you, out of context, as it did to me. We live in a world where people are taught that they have rights that ought to be met. Where problems are not my problems, but the problems of a society or system that doesn't make it easy or profitable for me to love my neighbor. Here there is a tragic imbalance: I am owed (by whom?) whatever I have a right to; but what do I owe? Nothing.

If I owe nothing, than the dirt and smoke, the pall of destruction that wreaths our world is not my fault; it's your fault, and if not yours then someone else's: that amorphous system, those powerful people, the circumstances that made me who I am. I have a right to something better than this...not an obligation to make the world better than it is, an duty, a stewardship that I have failed.