Rights and obligations are accurately described as sujbjective choices and not just external ones.
Reconceive two basic terms of moral and political phi;losophy so as to more accurately describe their subject matters and also that they complement one another rather than are in opposition to one another. These two terms are “right” and “obligation”.
A right is usually regarded as a permission to do something, such as engage in free speech or petition grievances against the government, these rights considered by Jefferson as unalienable, which means inherent in being a human being. A right can be redefined as the opposite: the capacity not to do something even if a person is enabled to do so. A person does not have to engage in protest or go on demonstrations even if the person has the freedom to do so. Requiring demonstrations reduces free speech to pagents organized in North Korea. A person need not vote if one does not care to, even if in Australia people are required to show up to show they are there to vote but can sign that they do not care to vote even for an independent or a write-in party. The goal is attendance to the event rather than casting a vote. Medical forms allow for people to indicate religion or ethnicity so as, I suppose, to get the proper clergyman assigned or to allow the collection of demographic data, but those checkoffs are regarded as voluntary lest the assignment of one or another is considered a status that places a person with some discriminatory purpose. In general, the idea of right includes the idea of being indifferent to an exercise of the right, a person allowed to be unpolitical even with regard to political matters.
An obligation is generally thought of as an imperative to act which is warranted by another person, whether by an employer or sovereign or by God. Obligations are moral in nature and can become identified, as is the case in the Old Testament, with the law, which are state strictures rather than customs, incumbent on followers whether they want to or not and where volumes and volumes can fill how a particular stricture is to be applied in a particular event, a process of the general to the particular that to C. E. Moore thought silly because it was impossible to square the two. But a useful insight of the concept of obligation is that it can spread to include matters that might be thought of as additional or unnecessary measures rather than central ones. So mercy can be thought of not as a supplement to justice, whatever that is, an extra virtue, but a requirement of law driven social life, when one can command alms for the poor as an obligation on the person rather than discretionary even if hard hearted, and so raising taxes to feed the poor can also be thought a moral obligation rather than out of the spirit of generosity.
But obligation can be conceived of as only something of one’s own volition rather than from some authority. It is something you take on as a right of your own life and for your own life because it seems the right thing to do and so part of one's own self rather than an external instruction. A person decides to follow a career or to be kind to animals because, as Hume might say, it feels more comfortable and pleasant to do so rather than answering to a scolding judge. And in political terms, a person decides which candidate to vote for out of their own sense of what is the right way of things or how events should be altered.
In that case, right and obligation are commensurate. You vote for yourself as an impulse or analysis and so that is an obligation to yourself but it is also a right in that the governmental structure allows you to be indifferent to the process. The same is true of other features of rights and obligations. You have the right not to be sexually abused as a matter of right, that is enforced by law, and also the obligation to yourself not to be abused because it can upset your own equilibrium. Freedom of sexual abuse is also a right in that it does not allow a person to be sovereign of their own body and so is indivisible, even if a right until recently not generally recognized as binding.
The contradiction between right and obligation is well recognized in political philosophy. Isaih Berlin positreed the two as the difference between an anglo american insistence on right as tube meaning of liberty--that it was entailed with self anointed choice-- and liberty as the ability to do something as when people were free to be given an education or a democratic government. Berlin was obviously enough preferring the Anglo- American meaning of liberty to the Continental one that had allowed for facism but the idea is deeper than that because it pivots on the difference between the internal and the external, rights internal and obligations external, while I am suggesting that both terms can also be internal however much eased by government in their fulfillment.
Resistance by citizens to government can be exercised effectively by using the double senses of both right and obligation depending on the fashions of the culture. During McCarthyism, resistance or compliance was through the exercise of explicit Constitutional rights. Witnesses before Congressional committees could invoke their right to refuse to answer on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves. That was a right recognized in the Constitution so as to prevent torture as a way to extort self-incrimination. The refusal to use this right took place at the time when James Wechsler, the editor of the then liberal New York Post, suspended his rights so that he could defend his principles. Elia Kazan felt the obligation to the country to tell the committee the people with whom had been associated, to “name names”, as the expression went, and Lillian Hellman, the long term Satalinist, felt her obligation to herself not to disown her own past.
Apply the definitions of the two moral terms, which are opposite to the conventional definitions, to another actual case of choice, understanding that moral terms describe how choices are made rather than just serve as moral imperatives. The case in point was the Vietnam War and how I, as a young citizen, should respond to it. I could not invoke the law as a reason to be opposed to it however much I thought the war wrongheaded. The Bay of Tonkin Resolution was a legitimate declaration of war. I could not claim my opposition was a matter of right because drafting soldiers was not in violation of any right, just undesirable. Some citizens claimed a higher law. They were conscientious objectors to all wars and submitted papers to show that their religious beliefs prohibited fighting. Others got doctor’s notes showing bone spurs or asthma or a planter’s wart to become ineligible. So the conventional view of right and obligation did not apply. My view was that as a citizen I could judge which war people were asked to go to were so objectionable that citizens could desist becoming sworn into military duty. I argued against taking the oath of allegiance to the armed forces in the hope that the soldier would be sent to Germany rather than Vietnam on the grounds that it was chancy and once sworn in you were obliged to go where you were sent. Better to exile yourself to Canada. I was already overage to be drafted and so I signed a petition saying I felt the same responsibility as those who burnt their draft cards. It really wasn’t much of a risk in that Attorney General John Michell was unlikely to arrest tens of thousands of graduate students and young professors because it was so politically damaging, but I did put myself open to that.
These many years later, my view at the time would have been better conceptualized as in accord with the new definition of obligation. Not only did a person decide what they felt obligated to do to resist the war, but they could scale the level of self obligation to whatever seemed possible or comfortable. Some people thought declaring their views menough while some felt the need to engage in a protest or else, like myself, offer what would almost certainly be only a symbolic violation of the draft law, as was my case. I don’t think any American had immolated himself as a war protest, as had some Buddhist monks in Saigon. That was not part of the cultural ambiance, just as today Hamas fighters can imagine dying for their course but it is not culturally possible for them to engage in civil disobedience, peacefully sitting down on Tel Aviv streets for the Israeli authorities do what they will, which would confound and make westerners crazy but not likely to happen as a tactic because such an action would not suit the Hamas amour propre. Gandhi was right to think civil disobedience had the initiative and also that it had to be self-motivated.
What about rights and obligation correctly understood as self referential with regard to resistance to whatever policy Trump tries to enforce when he takes office? Rights as the refusal to engage in rights is a plausible response because there will be so many occasions that might happen where rights are violated. Even illegal aliens have the right to due process if they are within American jurisdiction. So a person can respect the right of due process by providing sanctuary cities and churches and so passively waiting for the violation of rights to take place. Kant may say that everyone has the obligation to tell the truth to a police officer but a refusal to engage in a right to assist those who go after illegals provides the higher right of selectively deciding which laws are valid and which are not. There are any number of ways in which citizens can exercise their right to be uncooperative, however much there is no codified idea of non-cooperation as a right, never mind the numerous examples that might crop up of feeling free to exercise rights challenged by the new administration, There will not only be ICE officers to resist. There might well be the need to protect their own political views, as a matter of right, when the Trump Administration tries to purge the civil service, or surround Jack Smith from arrest which is what Trump claims he will do.
Obligation to self is a concept that can straighten out about moral choice was something Jean Paul Sartre was accurately teaching for but got garbled. He claimed in his very influential essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”, written in 1946, just after the war, that people decide first, which means, act first, and explain later, which means explain or justify later. He was trying to say that people really did have free will. The example he gave was of a young man during the German occupation of France, was wondering whether to join the Resistance and had asked Satre for advice. The young man was torn between his patriotic loyalty and his care for his aged mother. Sartre views this as an occasion where the young man would leap to one choice or the other and then deal with its consequences including bringing along the justifications for having done so. Sartre had a deep insight into how choices were made but got it wrong by thinking the decision came first out of an impulse or perhaps an existentialism leap across the void, and then the explanations or rationalizations for the decision coming later. Think of this description of choice rendered more accurately as a person deciding on first weighing the consequences and then deciding whether what is to be done finds itself as an obligation to himself. He had to join the Resistance because he felt he found he could not betray his obligation to himself to honor the Resistance by joining it whatever the consequences. He discovered in himself how deeply he felt that allegiance, that moral imperative, and the depth of that feeling might reveal itself with surprise but did not mean that the possibilities had not been thought out and that the final decision was other than rational.
Such mental deliberations that precede decision making occur in ordinary life, not just in wartime. The very ordinary occurrence of falling in love does not mean an instant spark without explanation but recognizing in a person’s manner and rhetoric even at first view how that person has a relation to reality that seems compatible and extraordinarily fitting even if surprising when it is recognized even if it is not possible to explain the basis for compatibility. Similarly, people follow careers because the choice is well suited even if not well organized in one's reflections only later finding that the career suited oneself. I know someone who went into engineering not liking it very much for some external reason such as it seemed a good way to earn a living and found his eventual role as doing administration for the people who did engineering. People in many trades just find themselves apprenticed to whatever occupation was available and didn’t think they could do otherwise, bhutan that was characteristic of most people in most work-- being a peasant or a carpenter rather than a princess or a saint or a feel for how wood works-- and that was a limit of liberty even if not yet recognized as a liberty that had been constrained.