On Moral Equivalency, Duties, and the State: A Study in Social Philosophy

Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara (1981)
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Abstract

Many philosophers suppose that a breach of a negative duty is far worse than a breach of a positive duty. Many moral thinkers hold, for example, that killing someone is more blameworthy than letting him die. This alleged asymmetry between negative and positive duties is often extended to cases of lying vs. withholding of vital information, etc. If there is such a moral inequality between negative and positive duties, this inequality may have farreaching consequences for business ethics, medical ethics, political philosophy, and so on. It may be a consequence of such an inequality thesis that advertisers do less wrong by omitting information than by lying to consumers, doctors do less wrong in omitting life-saving treatment than by injecting lethal doses of pain-killing medicines to their patients, governments do no wrong by only prosecuting those who breach their negative duties, e.g., thieves and murderers, and not those who breach their positive duties, e.g., so-called Bad Samaritans. ;In my dissertation, I challenge the view that there is a moral inequality between negative and positive duties, and, first considering the clear case of killing and letting die, show that there is no moral difference, as such, between negative and positive duties. I argue that there is no hard-and-fast metaphysical distinction between killing and letting die, no causal difference, and that it is no worse morally to breach the one kind of duty than it is to breach the other kind. ;This moral equivalency thesis, as I refer to it, also has farreaching consequences for business ethics, medical ethics, and political philosophy. We may have to assert that if one were to try to sell a product and maliciously withheld vital information from the customer, one would be behaving just as badly, all things being considered, as if one were to deliberately lie about the condition of the product. We may have to, as well, abolish the distinction between active and passive euthanasia. ;In my final chapter, I address the concern of some philosophers that an equality in strictness between positive and negative duties has the consequence that we may restrict individual liberty in ways unacceptable to moral agents. In so doing, I devote some time to the evaluation of the compatibility of Nozick's minimal state with the moral equivalency thesis. I believe in and argue for such a compatibility

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