This paper studies topological duals of Banach function spaces (BFS). We assume a finite measure but our arguments extend to general locally convex function spaces whose topology is generated by seminorms that satisfy the usual BFS axioms. The dual is identified with the direct sum of another space of random variables (Köthe dual), a space of purely finitely additive measures and the annihilator of $L^\infty$. In the special case of rearrangement invariant spaces, the second component in the dual vanishes and we obtain various classical as well as new duality results e.g. on Lebesgue, Orlicz, Lorentz-Orlicz spaces and spaces of finite moments. Beyond rearrangement invariant spaces, we find the topological duals of Musielak-Orlicz spaces and those associated with general convex risk measures.