AddresseesDuties are meant to guide persons in their behavior. This means that
duties are always addressed to one or more agents.
We use the general term “agent”, because as well as real persons, groups of persons and
organizations can also be under a duty.Sometimes a duty addresses everyone. This is, for instance, the case with the duty
not to torture. A duty can also address a set of one or more agents, such as the duty
that rests on John Doe and Jean Doe to clean away the snow from the pavement
before their house. An in-between version is that a duty rests on everyone who
satisfies particular conditions, such as the duty for all car drivers to carry a driver’s
license.
Content of Duty Every duty has acontent, which indicates what the addressee of
the duty is supposed to do. The action that a duty prescribes can both be doing
something and abstaining from doing something.
An example of a duty do something is the duty to pay one’s income tax. An example of a
duty to abstain from something is the duty not to commit theft.Prohibition Aprohibitionis nothing more than a duty to abstain from something.
The duty not to commit theft is therefore the prohibition of theft.Implicit Permissions Permissions come in two forms. Often permission is nothing
more than the absence of a prohibition. This is what might be called animplicit
permission.
If we say that it is permitted to walk on the grass, this means nothing more than that it is not
prohibited to walk on the grass.
An implicit permission is not really something; it is rather the absence of
something, namely the absence of a prohibition, the absence of a duty to abstain
from something, which boils down to the same thing.
Explicit Permissions However, there are alsoexplicit permissions.
Police officers, for instance, are usually permitted to carry out a body search on suspects of
serious crimes. This permission is not merely the absence of a prohibition. In fact thereisa
prohibition: it is in general forbidden to search persons in this way. However, along with
this general prohibition there exists an exception for police officers in connection with
suspects of serious crimes. Police officers are permitted to do what no-one else may do,
namely to search suspects of serious crimes.
In general, explicit permissions makeexceptions to prohibitions. For this reason,
they need to be stated explicitly. It is not necessary to formulate a rule to create an
implicit permission because implicit permissions do not have to be created. They
are nothing other than the absence of a prohibition. Explicit permissions need to be
created because they only make sense if there is a general prohibition. The
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