In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer morally obliged to do further good, even at very low cost to oneself. More specifically, they ask: under precisely what conditions is it plausible to say that that “point” has been reached? A crude account might focus only on, say, the amount of good the agent has already done, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is indeed too crude. We (...) develop and defend a nuanced account according to which considerations of three types are all relevant to whether one has satisfied one’s duties to assist: “inputs” (types and quantities of sacrifice made), “characteristics” (the beliefs and intentions that informed the donor’s decisions), and “success” (the extent to which the donations in question succeeded in generating value). (shrink)

In response to recent criticisms of traditional theories of political obligation, scholars have advanced moral reasons for complying with the law that focus on natural duties to assist other people who are in need. In discussions of political obligation, these ‘rescue principles’ are presented as alternatives to traditional principles. I argue that theories of political obligation based on rescue principles are not able to fulfill the role theorists assign them. If the underlying assumptions of rescue theories are uncovered, (...) they can be seen also to support more traditional obligations to obey the law. Accordingly, rather than serving as alternatives to traditional principles, rescue principles can only supplement them. Key Words: political obligation • rescue • Copp. (shrink)

Libertarians are attracted to the self-ownership thesis because it seems to satisfy four important theoretical desiderata. First, the thesis treats all persons equally by assigning them the same initial set of rights. Second, the thesis gives people the strongest set of ownership rights possible. Third, it assigns persons a determinate set of rights. And, finally, it grounds the libertarian rejection of a duty to assist, benefit, or rescue others. This article argues that these four desiderata cannot be simultaneously satisfied. (...) Specifically, it contends that the first three desiderata can be jointly satisfied only if the thesis merely gives people the right to include their owned bodies in various actions (as opposed to a stronger version of the thesis that gives people permissions to do things with their bodies). However, such an interpretation of the thesis will not satisfy the final desideratum. Thus, libertarians face a tetralemma when defining the self-ownership thesis. (shrink)

Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or (...) to confront widespread social ills such as those currently befalling public health (obesity) and the environment (climate change). As such, the corporate duty to assist approach provides a novel justification for sustainable business practices in such cases. The paper concludes by arguing that traditional stakeholder approaches have not articulated this duty of assistance obligation, though a new utilitarian stakeholder theory by Thomas Jones and Will Felps may be coextensive. (shrink)

In his classic article, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, pp. 229–243), Peter Singer claimed that affluent people in the developed world are morally obligated to transfer large amounts of resources to poor people in the developing world. For present purposes I will not call Singers argument into question. While people can reasonably disagree about exactly how demanding morality is with respect to duties to the desperate, there is little question in my mind that it is much more demanding than common (...) sense morality or our everyday behavior suggests. Even someone who disagrees with this might still find some interest in seeing what a demanding morality would imply for well-off residents of the rich countries of the world. I proceed in the following way. First, I survey humanitarian aid, development assistance, and intervention to protect human rights as ways of discharging duties to the desperate. I claim that we should be more cautious about such policies than is often thought. I go on to suggest two principles that should guide our actions, based on an appreciation of our roles, relationships, and the social and political context in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

Is there a moral requirement to assist wild animals suffering due to natural causes? According to the laissez-faire intuition, although we may have special duties to assist wild animals, there are no general requirements to care for them. If this view is right, then our positive duties toward wild animals can be only special, grounded in special circumstances. In this article I present the contribution argument which employs the thought that the receipt of benefits from wild (...) animals is one such kind of special circumstance. If this argument is correct, then the circle of moral agents required to assist some wild animals is significantly widened. (shrink)

This paper examines the links between acting upon a duty to assist, responsibility for these actions, and how such actions link with incremental moral duties that can amass as a consequence of such action. More specifically, this paper is concerned with practices of international aid and assistance, whereby public and privately funded donations enable the actions of parties outside of the territorial and jurisdictional boundaries of a community and state to directly influence the functioning of that community, and (...) the incremental moral duties to which such action can give rise. Using a Senian account of the basis of moral duty, it explains how agents are responsible for the outcomes of their acts of assistance, even when mediated through international institutional actors, and how such acts can give rise to accumulative duties and obligations that are not bound or constrained by territorial boundaries or pre-existing special obligations. (shrink)

This article deals with a foreign policy question of extraordinary importance: what responsibilities do States have to provide economic and technical assistance to other States that have high levels of need affecting the health and life of their citizens? The question is important for a variety of reasons. There exist massive inequalities in health globally, with the result that poorer countries shoulder a disproportionate burden of disease and premature death. Average life expectancy in Africa is nearly 30 years shorter than (...) in the Americas or Europe. In one year alone, an estimated 14 million of the poorest people in the world died, while only an estimated four million would have died if this population had the same death rate as the global rich. (shrink)

All over the world millions of children are without parental care. As a consequence they are liable to suffer serious harm. I argue the general duty to assist those in need extends to children without parental care and that some people are under a moral duty to adopt rather than have biological children. I defend this claim against the following objections: (1) intimate decisions are excluded from the duty to assist, (2) adopting children is too costly to be (...) required by morality, (3) the duty to assist is a collective duty, (4) the duty to assist is an imperfect duty, and (5) there are, in fact, very few adoptable children. (shrink)

This chapter examines the issue of who has the duty to love a child, supposing that there is a right to be loved. It makes the striking claim that everyone has this duty, even when the biological parents are available. It explains that everyone’s having this duty does not mean that everyone has to do the same thing, and that biological parents should be given the status of primary dutybearers while others have associate duties to assist the primary (...) dutybearers in carrying out this duty. This chapter also considers how demanding the duty to love a child should be and it argues that while there are limits as to how much we are required to sacrifice to fulfill this duty, we may be required to sacrifice more than what common sense morality supposes. (shrink)

Cases of dementia present us with difficult ethical dilemmas as we strive to care for those unable to care for themselves. In this article, I review the relevant Islamic texts on caring for the ill, alleviating suffering, and feeding the hungry-all in light of the modern clinical environment. I find that the ethical appropriateness of tube feeding at the end of life is not as clear-cut as it may seem. My analysis, however, suggests that Muslim scholars ought to favor insertion (...) of a feeding tube in patients who can no longer respond to assisted feeding. Nonetheless, several important issues require further clarification in this clinically important but neglected area of ethical inquiry. (shrink)

John Rawls’s case for a duty of assistance is partially premised on the assumption that liberal societies have an interest in assisting burdened societies to become well-ordered: Not only are well-...

This paper provides an introductory discussion of questions about three moral duties in the context of global poverty: the duty to aid; the duty not to harm; and the duty to promote just global institutions.

In this essay we argue that an agent’s failure to assist someone in need at one time can change the cost she can be morally required to take on to assist that same person at a later time. In particular, we show that the cost the agent can subsequently be required to take on to help the person in need can increase quite significantly, and can be enforced through the proportionate use of force. We explore the implications of (...) this argument for the duties of the affluent to address global poverty. (shrink)

What are our responsibilities in the face of injustice? How far should we go to fight it? Many would argue that as long as a state is nearly just, citizens have a moral duty to obey the law. Proponents of civil disobedience generally hold that, given this moral duty, a person needs a solid justification to break the law. But activists from Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi to the Movement for Black Lives have long recognized that there are times (...) when, rather than having a duty to obey the law, we have a duty to disobey it. -/- Taking seriously the history of this activism, A Duty to Resist wrestles with the problem of political obligation in real world societies that harbor injustice. Candice Delmas argues that the duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and political association impose responsibility to resist under conditions of injustice. We must expand political obligation to include a duty to resist unjust laws and social conditions even in legitimate states. -/- For Delmas, this duty to resist demands principled disobedience, and such disobedience need not always be civil. At times, covert, violent, evasive, or offensive acts of lawbreaking can be justified, even required. Delmas defends the viability and necessity of illegal assistance to undocumented migrants, leaks of classified information, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, sabotage, armed self-defense, guerrilla art, and other modes of resistance. There are limits: principle alone does not justify law breaking. But uncivil disobedience can sometimes be not only permissible but required in the effort to resist injustice. (shrink)

abstract Most moral philosophers accept that we have obligations to provide at least some aid and assistance to distant strangers in dire need. Philosophers who extend rights and obligations to nonhuman animals, however, have been less than explicit about whether we have any positive duties to free‐roaming or ‘wild’ animals. I argue our obligations to free‐roaming nonhuman animals in dire need are essentially no different to those we have to severely cognitively impaired distant strangers. I address three objections to (...) the view that we have positive duties to free‐roaming nonhuman animals, and respond to the predation objection to animal rights. (shrink)

The duty to rescue is a highly plausible and powerful ethical principle. It requires agents to assist others in extreme need in cases where doing so does not conflict with some weighty moral aim; requires little personal sacrifice; and is likely to significantly benefit the recipients.1 As a general obligation, it binds all persons simply qua persons, and it is owed to all persons simply qua persons. Clinical investigators working in low-income countries frequently encounter sick or destitute people to (...) whom they might possess a duty to rescue. Investigators may often ask themselves, what can I do, what should I do, to help? Such investigators often help people in the future by carrying out their... (shrink)

There is considerable concern that climate change will displace many people in developing countries from their homes. This article examines whether developed countries are morally obligated to assist people displaced by climate change in developing countries. The article argues that there may not be a moral duty to assist climate change migrants as a category. Nonetheless, developed countries may have duties to assist vulnerable people elsewhere and may be obligated to assist climate change migrants along (...) with other vulnerable people. In addition, there likely is a duty to assist a particular subset of climate change migrants, specifically the citizens of small island countries existentially threatened by climate change. The article concludes by assessing the implications of its moral analysis for the focus of law and policy. Instead of developing new treaties to assist climate change migrants as a number of academics and practitioners have recently proposed, law and policy should be concerned with assisting migrants at risk generally, and/or the citizens of small island countries existentially threatened by climate change. (shrink)

This paper is about the implications of a common view on global justice. The view can be called the Minimalist View, and it says that we have no positive duties to help the poor in foreign countries, or that if we do, they are very minimal. It might seem as if, by definition, the Minimalist View cannot require that we do very much about global poverty. However, in his book World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge pointed out that (...) this conclusion is at least up for debate. Although Minimalism countenances very few positive duties to the global poor, it certainly countenances negative duties not to harm. Perhaps one can argue that these negative duties are somehow being violated, and thus even a Minimalist must make substantial compensation to the global poor. However, in this paper I argue that Pogge’s argument about Minimalism does not succeed. The second half of the paper offers ways to revise and improve the argument in order to make the case for assistance to the global poor. (shrink)

This article is concerned with a discussion of the plausibility of the claim that GM technology has the potential to provide the hungry with sufficient food for subsistence. Following a brief outline of the potential applications of GM in this context, a history of the green revolution and its impact will be discussed in relation to the current developing world agriculture situation. Following a contemporary analysis of malnutrition, the claim that GM technology has the potential to provide the hungry with (...) sufficient nourishment will be discussed within the domain of moral philosophy to determine whether there exists a moral obligation to pursue this end if and only if the technology proves to be relatively safe and effective. By using Peter Singer’s duty of moral rescue, I argue that we have a moral duty to assist the third world through the distribution of such GM plants. I conclude the paper by demonstrating that my argument can be supported by applying a version of the Precautionary Principle on the grounds that doing nothing might be worse for the current situation. (shrink)

Amid the controversies surrounding physician-assisted suicides, euthanasia, and long-term care for the elderly, a major component in the ethics of medicine is notably absent: the rights and welfare of the survivor's family, for whom serious illness and death can be emotionally and financially devastating. In this collection of eight provocative and timely essays, John Hardwig sets forth his views on the need to replace patient-centered bioethics with family-centered bioethics. Starting with a critique of the awkward language with which philosphers argue (...) the ethics of personal relationships, Hardwig goes on to present a general statement on the necessity of family-centered bioethics. He reflects on proxy decisions, the effects of elder care on the family, the financial and lifestyle consequences of long-term care, and physician-assisted suicide from the perspective of the family. His penultimate essay, "Is There a Duty to Die?" carries the idea of family-centered ethics to its logical, controversial, conclusion; comments upon this essay from Daniel Callahan, Larry Churchill, Joanne Lynn, and journalist Nat Hentoff offer differing views on this highly charged subject. As advances in medicine prolong patient's lives, the welfare of those ultimately responsible for medical care-the family-must be addressed. Hardwig's courageous and illuminating essays set forth a new direction in bioethics: one that considers the welfare of everyone concerned. (shrink)

In World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge argues that the global rich have a duty to eradicate severe poverty in the world. The novelty of Pogges approach is to present this demand as stemming from basic commands which are negative rather than positive in nature: the global rich have an obligation to eradicate the radical poverty of the global poor not because of a norm of beneficence asking them to help those in need when they can at little cost (...) to themselves, but because of their having violated a principle of justice not to unduly harm others by imposing on them a coercive global order that makes their access to the objects of their human right to subsistence insecure. In this paper, I claim that although Pogge is right in arguing that negative duties are crucial in an account of global justice, he is wrong in saying that they are the only ones that are crucial. Harming the global poor by causing their poverty provides a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the global rich to have a duty of justice to assist them. After engaging in a critical analysis of Pogges argument, I conclude by suggesting the need for a robust conception of cosmopolitan solidarity that includes positive duties of assistance which are not mere duties of charity, but enforceable ones of justice. (shrink)

Assisted dying (AD) has not been legalized despite a number of presentations to parliament. It is necessary for doctors who support AD to justify themselves in the context of repeated legislative failure. This article describes the author's personal approach to the problem, one that prioritizes respect for autonomy above legal or societal objections. It is argued that for debilitated patients, the preservation of autonomy depends on a doctor's empathy and willingness to advocate. This sequence can be interrupted by externally and (...) internally imposed barriers. External factors include indiscriminate respect for the law and society's institutions, an inaccurate perception of the balance of risks to society and insufficient compensation for the dying person's inability to mount a sustained challenge. Internal brakes to advocacy such as elevation of personal morality above the needs of patients, attenuation of the therapeutic relationship in cases of moral complexity and the temptation to abdicate the role of physician are also explored. It is concluded that if AD could in theory be of benefit to a patient, but cannot be achieved due to its illegality, doctors have a duty to actively represent their demands as they would for other forms of treatment. (shrink)

In contemporary debates on euthanasia, physician assisted suicide and withholding and withdrawing life prolonging treatments, besides commonly used reasons, which are based on presumption of freedom and avoidance of pain, there is also an idea of a duty to die. Given that individuals are also members of society, and that they have families and loved ones, it is necessary to discuss cases when illness causes severe burdens for lives of loved ones. We consider that patient’s just assessment of duty to (...) die can be legitimate candidate for justification of procedure of acceleration of death, taken care of necessary conditions of justified social support for patients and necessary aliment from family and society. In this paper we examine main features of duty to die thesis, extract objections, and offer guidelines for continued discussion. We also want to express the importance of establishing social circumstances and preconditions for protecting the individuals.U suvremenim raspravama o eutanaziji i liječnički potpomognutom samoubojstvu, te odustajanju od tretmana, osim uobičajenih razloga koji se temelje na slobodi i izbjegavanju patnje osobe koja traži ubrzavanje smrti, postoji i teza o dužnosti umiranja. S obzirom na to da je pojedinac ujedno i član zajednice, odnosno da ima obitelj i voljene, nužno je raspraviti o slučajevima kada bolest izaziva značajne teškoće za život njegovih bližnjih. Smatramo kako i pacijentova pravedna prosudba o dužnosti umiranja može biti legitiman kandidat za opravdanje postupaka ubrzavanja smrti, uz nužne preduvjete pravedne društvene podrške pacijentu i dužne skrbi od strane obitelji i društva. U ovom tekstu razlažemo osnovne značajke teze o dužnosti umiranja, izdvajamo prigovore i dajemo smjernice za nastavak rasprave te izražavamo važnost ustanovljavanja društvenih okolnosti i preduvjete za zaštitu pojedinaca. (shrink)

Victims of injustice are prominent protagonists in efforts to resist injustice. I argue that they have a duty to do so. Extant accounts of victims’ duties primarily cast these duties as self-regarding duties or duties based on collective identities and commitments. I provide an account of victims’ duties to resist injustice that is grounded in the duty to assist. I argue that victims are epistemically privileged with respect to injustice and are therefore uniquely positioned (...) to assist fellow victims. Primarily, they discharge this duty through testimony: victims alert other actors to the need for assistance and initiate and coordinate resistance efforts. I briefly provide an account of oppression that ranges from persecution to structural injustice. Through the examples of torture and ‘manterrupting’, I illustrate the duty and its limits. I outline shortcomings in victims’ epistemic privilege and explore means by which these can be overcome. I respond to objections from demandingness and fairness, arguing that victims have an essential, albeit circumscribed, role to play in defeating injustice. (shrink)

Among Anglo-American philosophers, contemporary debates about global economic justice have often focused upon John Rawls’s Law of Peoples. While critics and advocates of this work disagree about its merits, there is wide agreement that, if today’s wealthiest societies acted in accordance with Rawls’s Duty of Assistance, there would be far less global poverty. I am skeptical of this claim. On my view, the Duty of Assistance is unlikely to require the kinds and amounts of assistance that would be sufficient to (...) eradicate much global poverty. This is because the DA cannot require societies to rapidly or radically change their ways life, and because the kinds and amounts of assistance that are most likely to eradicate global poverty would cause rapid and radical changes to the ways of life of the societies that undertook them. (shrink)

In light of the extent of wild animal suffering, some philosophers have adopted the view that we should cautiously assist wild animals on a large scale. Recently, their view has come under criticism. According to one objection, even cautious intervention is unjustified because fallibility is allegedly intractable. By contrast, a second objection states that we should abandon caution and intentionally destroy habitat in order to prevent wild animals from reproducing. In my paper, I argue that intentional habitat destruction is (...) wrong because negative duties are more stringent than positive duties. However, I also argue that the possible benefits of ecological damage, combined with the excusability of unintended, unforeseeable harm, suggest that fallibility should not paralyse us. (shrink)

Here I pursue two main aims: (1) to articulate and defend a Kantian conception of duties to self, and (2) to explore the ramifications of such duties for the moral justification of paternalism. I conclude that there is a distinctive reason to resent paternalistic intercessions aimed at assisting others in fulfilling their duties to self (or the self-regarding virtues necessary thereunto), based on the fact that the goods realized via their fulfillment are historical, i.e., their value depends (...) on an individual's casual contribution to their fulfillment. (shrink)

Several states in the United States of America and countries in Europe punish parents when their minor child commits a crime. When parents are being punished for the crimes committed by their children, it should be presumed that parents might be held responsible for the deeds of their children. This article addresses the question whether or not this presumption can be sustained. We argue that parents can be blamed for the crimes of their children, not because they have the duty (...) to control their children as is often maintained, but because they have the duty to assist their child to develop in such a way that s/he becomes a morally competent agent. (shrink)

Several states in the United States of America and countries in Europe punish parents when their minor child commits a crime. When parents are being punished for the crimes committed by their children, it should be presumed that parents might be held responsible for the deeds of their children. This article addresses the question whether or not this presumption can be sustained. We argue that parents can be blamed for the crimes of their children, not because they have the duty (...) to control their children as is often maintained, but because they have the duty to assist their child to develop in such a way that s/he becomes a morally competent agent. (shrink)

Aulisio and Arora argue that the moral significance of value imposition explains the moral distinction between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. The former objects to directly performing actions, whereas the latter objects to indirectly assisting actions on the grounds that indirectly assisting makes the actor morally complicit. Examples of non-traditional conscientious objection include objections to the duty to refer. Typically, we expect physicians who object to a practice to refer, but the non-traditional conscientious objector physician refuses to refer. (...) Aulisio and Arora argue that physicians have a duty to refer because refusing to do so violates the patient’s values. While we agree with Aulisio and Arora’s conclusions, we argue value imposition cannot adequately explain the moral difference between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. Treating autonomy as the freedom to live in accordance with one’s values, as Aulisio and Arora do, is a departure from traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy and consequently fails to explain the moral difference between the two kinds of objection. We outline how a traditional liberal understanding of autonomy would help in this regard, and we make two additional arguments—one that maintains that non-traditional conscientious objection undermines society’s autonomy, and another that maintains that it undermines the physician-patient relationship—to establish why physicians have a duty to refer. (shrink)

This chapter critically explores the extent to which pharmaceutical companies have a moral obligation to assist poor patients in least developed countries who currently have no or inadequate access to lifesaving medications. Focusing on the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic in LDCs, the first section of this essay begins with some background information of the disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS in LDCs. The second section provides a brief overview of some of the salient arguments for holding multinational antiretroviral treatment manufacturers as morally (...) responsible for easing the disproportionate global disease burden. The third section explains that these arguments regarding pharmaceutical companies’ duty to assist are going too far on the one hand by downplaying other non-pharmacological contributors to the slow response, but are also not going far enough on the other hand in upholding reciprocity-based duties. As the international community and researchers battle the reemergence of Ebola in Africa, the fourth section explores how lessons from the HIV/AIDS situation can help to address what pharmaceutical companies may subsequently owe patients in this region and how the international community should respond to ongoing unequal disease burden. (shrink)

When considering our own death, we normally weigh its impact on the people we love and care about, as well as worrying about the way in which our life might end, hoping that not too much suffering precedes it. However, such view, despite necessary, is a passive understanding of death, interpreted as something that merely happens to us, where we would have some control over timing if physician-assisted dying were legal in our countries. But what if our relation to death (...) would not end there? What if special medical needs, such as the emergency situation resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, could have a direct impact on us creating a moral duty to end our lives? That is the thesis that will be advocated for in this paper: a moral duty to die will arise in some people to save resources that will help others get through Covid-19. It is important to indicate that the duty to die is personally acknowledged and self-imposed, thus nobody can be coerced to carry it out; for autonomy would be lost and such action should be considered an instance of incitement to die, therefore being morally blameworthy. (shrink)

This article reviews recent arguments in contemporary political philosophy on victims' duties to resist their oppression. It begins by presenting two approaches to these duties. First, that victims' duties are self‐regarding duties that victims owe to their self‐respect or to their well‐being, and second, that victims' duties are other‐regarding duties that arise from victims' duties of justice or of assistance. The second part elaborates on what resistance consists in. The article then considers and (...) responds to two prominent objections to arguments for victims' duties: that they are too demanding, and that they are unfair and exploitative. It concludes by gesturing towards future areas of engagement, in particular, theorising the agents and mechanisms of oppression, and more explicitly engaging with methodological debates about non‐ideal theory. (shrink)

When Richard Lamm made the statement that old people have a duty to die, it was generally shouted down or ridiculed. The whole idea is just too preposterous to entertain. Or too threatening. In fact, a fairly common argument against legalizing physician-assisted suicide is that if it were legal, some people might somehow get the idea that they have a duty to die. These people could only be the victims of twisted moral reasoning or vicious social pressure. It goes without (...) saying that there is no duty to die. (shrink)

Herein I engage with the very difficult question of whether the duty to aid (sometimes called a duty of assistance or a duty of beneficence) extends so far as to justify harming persons, perhaps even lethally, in order to protect wild animals. I argue that this question is not nearly as settled as our intuitions may suggest and that Shelly Kagan’s arguments on Defending Animals, contained in his book How to Count Animals, More or Less, provide a rich substrate in (...) which to cultivate ideas on this subject (2019, pp. 248–279). My intuition is that killing a person, even one ‘guilty’ of trying to kill an animal for sport or leisure, is far beyond what a duty to aid can command, though admittedly I find my own intuition somewhat morally dumbfounding. I argue further that Tom Regan’s ‘worse-off principle’ may ease the ever-uncomfortable sense of moral dumbfounding by providing a surer foundation for the intuitive sense that we cannot ethically go so far as to threaten a person with lethal force in defense of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

The paper considers arguments concerning the obligation to assist strangers. It analyzes the problem of specifying obligations, which the inhabitants of the world have toward one another. The considerations focus on two closely connected questions: what is the obligation to assist and what is its source? what is the scope of the obligation to assist? The author considers the assumptions that are to be made if we take the obligation to assist distant strangers to be a (...) duty of justice. The paper concentrates on the most frequent assumptions, which are of two kinds: institutional and universal; axiological and particular. It is pointed out, given various examples of international dilemmas, how these two types of arguments may justify a hierarchy of mutual obligations. (shrink)

This paper argues that economic agents, including corporations, have the duty to further justice, not just a duty merely to comply with laws and do their share. The duty to further justice is the requirement to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist in society. The paper is grounded in liberal theory and draws heavily on one liberal theorist, Kant. We show that the duty to further justice must be interpreted as a duty of (...) virtue that is owed. This means that the duty is not enforceable but that violating this duty is still wrong and not merely non-virtuous. Our analysis has consequences for the morality of commercial life. It is often suggested that the morality of the market is a special, restricted morality that is leaner than the morality that agents must acknowledge outside the market. If our analysis is correct, the duty to further justice cannot be exempted from market morality, even if it is agreed that this must be leaner than the morality outside commercial life. Our analysis also has direct consequences for John Ruggie’s view on the responsibilities of businesses. Ruggie has never explicitly acknowledged a duty on the part of business enterprises to further justice. If our analysis is correct, his view is contradictory in that it presupposes the normative validity of free market enterprise yet shrinks from taking into account the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the risks that can be involved in healthcare work. In this paper, we explore the issue of staff safety in clinical work using the example of personal protective equipment in the COVID-19 crisis. We articulate some of the specific ethical challenges around PPE currently being faced by front-line clinicians, and develop an approach to staff safety that involves balancing duty to care and personal well-being. We describe each of these values, and present a decision-making framework (...) that integrates the two. The aim of the framework is to guide the process of balancing these two values when staff safety is at stake, by facilitating ethical reflection and/or decision-making that is systematic, specific and transparent. It provides a structure for individual reflection, collaborative staff discussion, and decision-making by those responsible for teams, departments and other groups of healthcare staff. Overall the framework guides the decision maker to characterise the degree of risk to staff, articulate feasible options for staff protection in that specific setting and identify the option that ensures any decrease in patient care is proportionate to the increase in staff well-being. It applies specifically to issues of PPE in COVID-19, and also has potential to assist decision makers in other situations involving protection of healthcare staff. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Is it wrong to bring new children into existence when there are so many existing children in need of parental care? Several philosophers have defended the view that prospective parents have a pro tanto​ duty to adopt rather than procreate as a means of fulfilling their interest in parenting. The most prominent argument for this view in the existing literature is the rescue-based argument, which derives an individual duty to adopt rather than procreate from a more general duty to rescue (...) or assist those in need. In this paper, I critically examine the rescue-based argument and explain why it fails. First, I argue that we do not necessarily have a duty to rescue in cases that resemble the global orphan crisis, where one’s intervention is merely sufficient to prevent serious harm to a potential victim. Second, I argue that even if we had such a duty, it would not necessarily generate a duty to adopt rather than procreate given the significant financial, emotional, and agency-related costs of adoption, particularly in current, non-ideal conditions. The upshot of these arguments is that the rescue-based argument can only generate a duty to adopt rather than procreate with respect to a relatively small constituency of orphaned children, many of whom are likely to be adopted anyway by willing volunteers. In the vast majority of cases, then, the rescue-based argument does not entail that it is wrong to create new children when there are already existing children in need of parental care. (shrink)

On 19 July 2016, three medical organisations filed a federal lawsuit against representatives from several Vermont agencies over the Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. The law is similar to aid-in-dying laws in four other US states, but the lawsuit hinges on a distinctive aspect of Vermont's law pertaining to patients' rights to information. The lawsuit raises questions about whether, and under what circumstances, there is an ethical obligation to inform terminally ill patients about AID as an (...) end-of-life option. Much of the literature on clinical communication about AID addresses how physicians should respond to patient requests for assisted dying, but neglects the question of how physicians should approach patients who may not know enough about AID to request it. In this article, I examine the possibility of an affirmative duty to inform terminally ill patients about AID in light of ethical concerns about professional responsibilities to patients and the maintenance of the patient–provider relationship. I suggest that we should not take for granted that communication about AID ought to be patient-initiated, and that there may be circumstances in which physicians have good reasons to introduce the topic themselves. By identifying ethical considerations that ought to inform such discussions, I aim to set an agenda for future bioethical research that adopts a broader perspective on clinical communication about AID. (shrink)

As of 2019, ten jurisdictions in the United States—Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Maine—have authorized physicians to...

Human beings have a moral duty to intervene to prevent or to mitigate the suffering of free-living animals. This article focuses on that duty, particularly as it exists when an animal asks for help and when animals who need help are within the zone of a person’s ability and willingness to help. As such, people should be free to help if they choose to do so, unencumbered by legal restrictions that outlaw such conduct. However, federal and state laws in the (...) United States remain an obstacle, because they designate some activities that are necessary to help free-living animals as unlawful. Laws should not interfere with human beings’ benign interactions with nature and, in particular, people should be legally permitted to help free-living animals. People should actually assist the individual animals who want or need help, rather than trading individual assistance in favor of ecosystem “management,” policy concerns that favor expediency and budget limitations, or any other tangential issues. (shrink)

This article challenges the orthodox view of international law, according to which states have no legal duty to cooperate. It argues for this legal duty in the context of COVID-19, based on the ethical principles of solidarity, stewardship, and subsidiarity. More specifically, the article argues that states have a legal duty to cooperate during a pandemic (as solidarity requires); and while this duty entails an extraterritorial responsibility to care for and assist other nations (as stewardship requires), the legal duty (...) to cooperate still allows states to attend first to the basic needs of those under their own jurisdiction—namely, fellow nationals and residents (as subsidiarity requires). The article provides a definition and philosophical justifications for this legal duty that are lacking in the literature by examining its application to a current COVID-19 controversy: namely, states’ responsibility to assist other countries in greater need by, inter alia, exporting at a discount or donating scarce COVID-19 treatments (including vaccines). In providing a principled tripartite account of pandemic governance, this conceptual and normative article offers a new lens for debating the potential international treaty for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response that has now been drafted and is under negotiation at the World Health Assembly, by responding to the recent backlash against multilateralism by substantiating global co-responsibilities in times of pandemics and beyond. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Rawls’s duty of assistance offers an incomplete picture of our international social and economic responsibilities. I will start by presenting the two main interpretations of the ‘Rawlsian circumstances of egalitarian distributive justice’ – the first requiring the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of cooperation, the second the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of interaction with the will – and then show that none of them rules out the applicability of international principles of egalitarian (...) distributive justice. My argument will draw on societies’ participation in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). So, in the second section I will show that even though this organization is not endowed with a centralized coercive authority, its participants are asked to accept significant constraints on their behaviour and are therefore owed a special justification for these constraints. I will also suggest that the alleged voluntariness of this organization may not only be contested (especially when developing societies are involved), but may also not be sufficient to rule out requirements of distributive equality. In the third section, I will show that, as any system of cooperation, the WTO gives rise to requirements of fairness and that, given the purpose it claims to serve, not all inequalities that can be traced back to so-called ‘domestic’ factors can be considered justified. More specifically, I will argue that the fairness of the WTO requires that all its participants be given a fair chance of benefiting from global market competitions, and that this is likely to entail significant egalitarian distributive duties among societies. (shrink)