Here is Simone Weil's 'Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations':

A concrete conception of obligation towards human beings and a subdivision of it into a number of obligations is obtained by conceiving the earthly needs of the body and of the human soul. Each need entails a corresponding obligation.

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.

The fundamental obligation towards human beings is subdivided into a number of concrete obligations by the enumeration of the essential needs of the human being. Each need is related to an obligation, and each obligation to a need.

The needs in question are earthly needs, for those are the only ones that man can satisfy. They are needs of the soul as well as of the body; for the soul has needs whose non-satisfaction leaves it in a state analogous to that of a starved or mutilated body.

The principal needs of the human body are food, warmth, sleep, health, rest, exercise, fresh air.

The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complement one another.

The human soul has need of equality and of hierarchy.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. Hierarchy is the scale of responsibilities. Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy.

The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty.

Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest our coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money.

Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression.

The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien. It requires that in the domain of thought there should never be any physical or moral pressure exerted for any purpose other than an exclusive desire for truth; which implies an absolute ban on all propaganda without exception. It calls for protection against error and lies; which means that every avoidable material falsehood publicly asserted becomes a punishable offence. It calls for public health measures against poisons in the domain of thought.

But, in order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.

The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.

The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.

Personal property never consists in the possession of a sum of money, but in the ownership of concrete objects like a house, a field, furniture, tools, which seem to the soul to be extension of itself and of the body. Justice requires that personal property, in this sense, should be, like liberty, inalienable.

Collective property is not defined by a legal title but by the feeling among members of a human milieu that certain objects are like an extension or development of the milieu. This feeling is only possible in certain objective conditions.

The existence of a social class defined by the lack of personal and collective property is as shameful as slavery.

The human soul has need of punishment and of honour.

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognise freely some day that its infliction was just. The reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognised as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.

The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation.

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

The human soul needs above all to be rooted in several natural environments and to make contact with the universe through them.

Examples of natural human environments are: a man's country, and places where his language is spoken, and places with a culture or historical past which he shares, and his professional milieu, and his neighbourhood.

Everything which has the effect of uprooting a man or of preventing him from becoming rooted is criminal.

Any place where the needs of human beings are satisfied can be recognised by the fact that there is a flowering of fraternity, joy, beauty, and happiness. Wherever people are lonely and turned in on themselves, wherever there is sadness or ugliness, there are privations that need remedying."

I quite liked this. I think it is right and proper that a bill of rights be presented inextricably entwined with a bill of obligations. It states many things that our civilisation has forgotten, or pretended to forget. It is a statement about the rights and obligations of individuals, which rejecting the view of Holmes Rolleston III, I assert to be the only entities which have rights and obligations.

The chief failing of this statement of human obligations from a practical view is that it is non-quantitative. There is no effort made to indicate what should be done when two or more obligations come into conflict with each other: which is to be master? While a practical failing, this is no serious ill in a poem or a manifesto.

There is only one part that I disagree with in toto.

As a dweller in the 21st century, and a product of nations that are recent products of conquest and mass immigration, I reject the notion that "Everything which has the effect of uprooting a man or of preventing him from becoming rooted is criminal." Among other things, this last obligation provides a backdoor for reintroduction of the whole perfidious mob of 'group rights' which the statement otherwise dispenses with. The Difference Engine is a celebration of a universe in which men are uprooted and prevented from becoming rooted to a prodigal extent. The countries of Earth are promiscuously rearranged and jumbled together, humanity emigrates on an unprecedented scale to countless new places that have no shared past, and the alien things of the new places erupt catastrophically into the old. New languages and cultures arise; economies are transformed, so that hardly one occupation that afforded a living at the beginning of the process will still be there at the end- if there was an end. Technologies arise and metastasise as swift as they do in our world, and swifter. We establish, then abandon, not just ghost towns, but ghost worlds, like the Mars of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. We of the Difference Engine are still in environments; we still make contact with the universe through them, but they are dynamic environments, chaotic environments, and we cannot put down roots there.