The natural concept of obligations

The definition of the essence of the category of law for a long time remains the subject of numerous discussions. We explain this by the fact that law is a multifaceted category, which leads to the emergence and development of a significant number of approaches and concepts to its interpretation. The process of development of legal understanding continues today, taking into account the dynamic emergence of new social relations, which lead to the modification and adaptation of law to new conditions. However, in the process of the evolution of law, two fundamental concepts of legal understanding emerged, namely, positivist and natural-law. Undoubtedly, each of the above-mentioned concepts contains a number of separate currents and directions, however, in general, in their unity, they contain the most general patterns of consideration of the law from a specifically defined position, therefore, they are taken as a basis in the context of the study of legal understanding. The main position of the positivist school of legal understanding is that law is exclusively the result of state activity, and its sources are the will of the state expressed in laws. The opposite position is taken by the natural law school, defining law as a concept that means a set of principles, rules and values dictated by human nature itself and therefore independent of their legal recognition or non-recognition in a specific state. That is, in this case, the source of law is the objective laws of nature, a certain level of evolution of society as a whole and the individual in particular. Natural law is based on the principle of justice, through the prism of which the effectiveness and expediency of certain norms of positive law are determined. It is the natural-legal concept of legal understanding that contributes to the justification of law as a measure of justice, as a social ideal, the norms of which the majority of citizens seek to adhere to not out of fear of punishment, but out of respect and trust based on the rule of law. However, analyzing current scientific research on the topic of the natural concept of law, it is clear that more attention is focused on natural human rights than on natural duties. In our opinion, this state of affairs is to some extent misleading, establishing the opinion of the existence of only natural rights without any obligations. The objective laws of nature are the source of both freedom and the corresponding duties of man. In this way, there is a unity of natural rights and duties of a person - natural duties correspond to natural rights. Therefore, for the development of the naturalistic concept of human rights, more attention should be paid to the natural duties of a person, because even J. Locke claimed that there is a “law of nature” that gives a person freedom and imposes duties on him.