The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio rightly spoke of the primacy of rights in current political and legal discourse as a radical overturning of the millennia-old practice of considering moral philosophy’s chief task to consist in the drafting of a catalog of duties, rather than of rights (Bobbio 2009, p. 432). From Moses’s two tablets, to Cicero’s De officiis, onto even Immanuel Kant – who viewed his Sittenlehre as a “doctrine of duties,” (Kant 1996, Ak 6:239) –, moral philosophy was believed to be a study of man’s duties. Thus, the overarching question of Kant’s second Critique is not “What are my rights?,” but rather “What should I do?”. This traditional prevalence of duties over rights in moral philosophy, Bobbio goes on to say, was mirrored by the privileging of the viewpoint of the ruler over that of the ruled in political philosophy. Naturally, one also owed duties to one’s fellow citizens – e.g., one ought to refrain from assaulting them and from stealing from them –, though often these were considered to be, in fact, duties to the sovereign. For instance, if one assaulted a fellow citizen, one did thereby not merely (perhaps not even especially) wrong him or her, but one also (or perhaps even especially) violated one’s duty to the political community in general and therefore wronged the sovereign in particular, who is tasked, after all, with maintaining the laws and peace in the community. It is such a train of thought that lies at the foundation of Hobbes’s statement that even the intention of breaking the law is not so much (or not merely) a sin against the potential victim of one’s crime, but rather “the purpose to breake the Law, is some degree of Contempt of him, to whom it belongeth to see it executed,” (Hobbes 1996, Ch. 27, p. 201) i.e. the sovereign. The performance of our duties was thus owed to the sovereign and the political community as a whole, rather than to individuals as bearers of rights.