Shue, Henry. "Correlative Duties". In Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, by Henry Shue, 35-64. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Shue, Henry. "Correlative Duties". In Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, by Henry Shue, 35-64. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

• Many politicians and philosophers, including the US government, try to create a distinction between 'negative rights' and 'positive rights', with all negative rights being essential, and no positive ones being so. This viewpoint assumes that all negative rights [liberty, not being tortured] are more important than positive rights [food, water] because they are negative (35-36).
• Positive rights require people to do things, like give food to others, whereas negative rights simply require them to not doing things, like not murder political dissidents (36-37). This dichotomy is false, as realistically states must expend resources to protect negative rights, meaning that both kinds of rights incur costs (37-39).
• The author proposes a hypothetical isolated village in which one family owns the largest tract of land. The peasant is not rich, but still the wealthiest in the village; his plot provides 1/4 of all beans to the market and he is the only one to hire laborers. One day that peasant accepts a generous offer from a company to grow and sell flowers for export and receive labor-saving machinery. His decisions means that the price for beans soars, and reducing the number of laborers hurt the wages of poor families who can not longer afford sample foods (41-42).
• This scenario represents a situation in which a right is certainly being violated, the right to subsistence is being violated for poor farmers, but who is responsible is unclear. Neither the businessman nor the wealthy peasant are obviously responsible for the malnutrition since it was not caused intentionally, but their deal clearly did cause the malnutrition and something should be done to prevent contracts like this from violating rights (43-44). The actual nature of that solution, however, is not clearly proscribed (45).
• In this scenario, the line between positive and negative rights is unclear and an unhelpful distinction. The violation of the right to subsistence does not obviously prevent the wealthy peasant and the businessman from planting flowers or require the government to distribute food to prevent malnutrition. Most of the world functions like this, where the situations requiring positive duties come from people not obeying negative duties (45-46).
• Economic deprivation in the real world is usually systemic, deriving from multiple factors which cannot all be predicted or controlled. This systemic deprivation can either be accidental or essential, depending on whether it was foreseen during the creation of the system; most failures to provide for subsistence are accidental, but certainly not all (47).
• Because economic deprivation can be essential, as in actors have purposefully created a system or planned policies knowing it will result in depriving people of subsistence, the vulnerable need protection from these threats. In this way, the right to subsistence can be both positive and negative in different circumstances (51).
• The invocation of a right can imply three distinct kinds of duties on others: a negative to not deprive them of rights, a positive duty to protect them from others who would deprive them, and a positive duty to aid those deprived of their rights. All basic rights require fulfillment of all three kinds of duties (52-53); while one could envision a society where protection renders individual action irrelevant or common morality makes public protection irrelevant, in the real world all three kinds of duties are needed to enforce rights (60-62).
• While the first duty can be wholly negative, this is insufficient because we do not live in a world where everyone will respect human rights. This means that the other duties to protect the rights of others and to aid those deprive of their rights are required (55).
• Duties to aid, the third kinds of duty, can come in three distinct forms. The first is a relational obligation to aid, such of that of parents towards their children (56). The second form is the duty to provide aid to those deprived of rights by others, while the third is the duty to aid those deprived of rights due to non-human factors, like natural disasters (57).