5 José, which the Court has already established in the Case of the Mayagna Community. III. Right to life 17. The Inter-American Court has issued a large number of decisions concerning the right to life —essential right, root of all others, supporting all the rest of the rights and freedoms as a whole. Article 4 of the American Convention, which addresses this issue, lays the primary stress on curtailing the arbitrary deprivation of existence and on restricting capital punishment. This is the main focal point of most of the paragraphs of the article. Thus, the rule in the Convention protects individual life against any excesses committed by the State —an active and often deliberate behavior—, invariably threatened by acts of public agents either through illegal violation or lawful breach pursuant to laws providing for the termination of life as a punishment. The central features of such provision are thus arbitrary death and death. 18. Some remarkable decisions by the Court have shifted the focus towards the other side of the right to life which, seen from yet another perspective, constitutes the other face of State duties: beyond the mere omission curbing arbitrariness or mitigating punishment, action is required to create conditions to guarantee a decent existence. In this view, the right to life is restored to its original status as an opportunity to choose our destiny and develop our potential. It is more than just a right to subsist, but is rather a right to self-development, which requires appropriate conditions. In such framework, a single right with a double dimension is set, like the two-faced god Janus: one side, with a first-generation legal concept of the right to life; the other side, with the concept of a requirement to provide conditions for a feasible and full existence, that is to say a concept among the ones considered “second-generation rights”, to employ a figure of speech that has become successful. Hence the principle “you may not kill" and its counterpart "you shall favor life.” Both concepts protect the human being and bind the State. 19. This rule, which is a dogma of humanism, one of very few unimpeachable dogmas that enables, and even calls for, a democratic society, charges the State with an ethically-driven, teleological task, and crystallizes the conviction that political society has been established, as propounded in the late 18th century, for the protection of natural rights and the well-being of people. This is what justifies the State. This idea, which influenced the anthropocentric constitutionalism of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, lies at the heart of International Human Rights Law and governs the language and the spirit of the American Convention. 20. Such is the origin of the protective function of the State: it is vested with powers so that it fulfil its duties —otherwise, such power would lack an ethical basis and legal grounds—, which are aimed at furthering, in the best practicable conditions, the development of the human being, respecting its dignity and its own decisions. Needless to say, the State does not relieve individuals from running their lives, but rather it provides them —or should provide them— with favorable conditions for their self-development, which involves supplying a large number of pertinent means. This is where a number of rights including the right to work, education, health, and housing come into play, together with their corresponding duties.