State’s Authority Versus Individual Rights, An Attempt At Balancing Powers And Duties

State’s Authority Versus Individual Rights, An Attempt At Balancing Powers And Duties Through Finnis’ Lenses

Amudhini Anbarasu, LLB, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University

ABSTRACT

Complex societies often pose conflicts and limitations to individual’s rights. Their balance includes possibly imposing negative rights and duties by modern state authority, to maintain functioning social orders. The extent to which institutions with law making powers can impose stultifications and what constitutes as fair authority to do so has been differentially interpreted. By combining modern notions of rights with classical concerns for basic goods, Finnis’s natural law theory argues for the existence and importance of achieving such basic goods through practical reasonableness, while upholding the common-good of society. Albeit alluding to lack of legal obligation in moral sense to obey unjust laws, he attempts to capture the focal meaning of law to fulfill societies coordination problems with reciprocity between subject and ruler and a generalized moral obligation for obeying the law.1

This paper will attempt to analyze the said reciprocity in light of individuals absolute and limited rights, duties and considerations of constituting just authorities and the impact of unjust exercise of law imposition on citizen’s obligations. It will also examine whether Finnis’s presumptive moral obligation to obey authority is theoretically overarching to give space for contradicting its very own objective of promoting common-good of citizens in exercising rights.