Kant behauptet, daß wir nur indirekte Pflichten haben können, von Grausamkeiten und Gewalt gegen Tiere abzusehen. Pflichten dieser Art seien direkte Pflichten gegen uns selbst, um unseren moralischen Charakter nicht zu verderben, aber könnten nicht direkte Pflichten gegenüber den Tieren sein, weil Tiere keine rationalen Wesen sind. Diese Sichtweise erscheint unbefriedigend, da die Tiere die Opfer einer solchen Mißhandlung sind, wenn sie stattfindet, und die Vorstellung, daß wir keine direkten Pflichten ihnen gegenüber haben sollen, erscheint merkwürdig. Ich plädiere dafür, daß (...) Kant, durchaus in Übereinstimmung mit seiner allgemeinen Moralphilosophie, hätte ein Konzept von direkten Pflichten gegenüber Tieren entwickeln können. Ein solches Konzept wäre weitaus plausibler und hätte Kant geholfen, mit allfälligen Problemen umzugehen, die sich im Hinblick auf die Behandlung von zurechnungsunfähigen Personen ergeben, die ebenfalls keine rationalen Wesen sind, sondern allenfalls potentiell. Zwar kann Kant durchaus plausibel machen, daß es die von ihm behaupteten indirekten Pflichten im Hinblick auf Tiere gibt, aber nicht, daß unsere Pflichten gegenüber Tieren auf derartige indirekte Pflichten beschränkt sind. Kant claimed that we could only have indirect duties to abstain from cruelty and violence to animals; such duties were directly duties to ourselves not to degrade our moral character, but could not be direct duties to animals because animals are not rational beings. This view seems unsatisfactory because animals are the victims of such mistreatment when it occurs, and the idea that we have no direct obligations to them seems odd. I urge that Kant, consistent with his general moral philosophy, could have developed a view of DIRECT duties to animals. Such a view would have been more plausible and would also have helped him deal with lurking problems concerning the treatment of incompetent humans, some of whom are also not rational beings, even potentially. Kant can plausibly claim that there are such indirect duties to animals, but not that our duties to them are limited to such indirect duties. (shrink)

Healthcare systems around the world are struggling to maintain a sufficient workforce to provide adequate care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Staffing problems have been exacerbated by healthcare workers (HCWs) refusing to work out of concern for their families. I sketch a deontological framework for assessing when it is morally permissible for HCWs to abstain from work to protect their families from infection and when it is a dereliction of duty to patients. I argue that it is morally permissible (...) for HCWs to abstain from work when their duty to treat is outweighed by the combined risks and burdens of that work. For HCWs who live with their families, the obligation to protect one’s family from infection contributes significantly to those burdens. There are, however, a range of complicating factors including the strength of duty to treat which varies according to the HCW’s role, the vulnerability of family members to the disease, the willingness of family members to risk infection and the resources available to the HCW to protect their family. In many cases, HCWs in ‘frontline’ roles with a weak duty to treat and families at home will be morally permitted to abstain from work given the risks posed by COVID-19; therefore, society should provide additional incentives to maintain sufficient staff in these roles. (shrink)

Many philosophers have objected to Kant’s account of duties regarding non-human nature, arguing that it does not ground adequate moral concern for non-human natural entities. However, the traditional interpretation of Kant on this issue is mistaken, because it takes him to be arguing merely that humans should abstain from animal cruelty and wanton destruction of flora solely because such actions could make one more likely to violate one’s duties to human beings. Instead, I argue, Kant’s account of duties regarding (...) nature grounds much stronger limitations on how humans may treat non-human animals and flora, since such duties are rooted in the imperfect duty to increase one’s own moral perfection. This duty proscribes actions affecting non-human nature that decrease one’s moral perfection, such as those that cause organisms unnecessary harm. Moreover, the duty to moral perfection prescribes (but does not strictly require) actions affecting non-human nature that increase one’s moral perfection, such as those that benefit organisms. Given this interpretation, I show that, contrary to a widely held view, Kant’s moral philosophy can ground a coherent and robust approach to environmental ethics. (shrink)

Jason Brennan argues that people are morally obligated not to vote badly, where voting badly is voting “without sufficient reason” for harmful or unjust policies or candidates. His argument is: (1) One has an obligation not to engage in collectively harmful activities when refraining from such activities does not impose significant personal costs. (2) Voting badly is to engage in a collectively harmful activity, while abstaining imposes low personal costs. (3) Therefore, one should not vote badly. This paper shows that (...) Brennan never adequately clarifies (1) and that, on every plausible clarification, (2) is false. (shrink)

According to indirect duty views, human beings lack direct moral duties to non-human organisms, but our direct duties to ourselves and other humans give rise to indirect duties regarding non-humans. On the orthodox interpretation of Kant’s account of indirect duties, one should abstain from treating organisms in ways that render one more likely to violate direct duties to humans. This indirect duty view is subject to several damaging objections, such as that it misidentifies the moral reasons we (...) have to treat non-humans in certain ways and that it sanctions only weak obligations vis-à-vis organisms. I develop an alternative indirect duty view: given a direct duty to oneself to cultivate virtuous dispositions, one has an indirect duty to abstain from treating organisms in ways that erode one’s virtues or develop vices. I argue that this indirect duty view strictly proscribes knowingly causing unnecessary harm to organisms, and I show that it is not subject to the damaging objections directed against the indirect duty view attributed to Kant by the orthodox interpretation. This suggests that indirect duty views are more worthy of consideration than is often supposed. (shrink)

Over 60% of all epidemics have a zoonotic origin, that is, they result from the transmission of infectious diseases from animals to humans. The spill-over of diseases often happens because humans exploit and use animals. In this article, I outline the four most common interfaces that favour the emergence and spread of zoonotic infectious diseases: wildlife hunting, small-scale farming, industrialised farming practices and live animal markets. I analyse which practices serve human food security – and thus have a non-trivial purpose (...) – and which predominantly have an economic purpose or serve as a symbol of wealth. I conclude that many practices that increase the risk for zoonotic infectious disease outbreaks actually do not contribute to the survival and food security of humans. I make two arguments in turn. First, I argue that in cases where the consumption and use of animal products does not contribute to the food security of a population, then this population has a duty to abstain from them, since they impose a grave and avoidable risk to themselves as well as to innocent third-parties. However, some communities must sometimes rely on practices that increase the risk of emergence and transmission of zoonotic infectious diseases, because they have no healthy alternatives. That is, the food security of the local population depends on the consumption and use of risky animal products. The second argument I advance is that, in such scenarios, the international community has a duty to provide the communities concerned with alternative food options, as well as economic and educational opportunities and technologies, in order to reduce the spill-over risk of infectious diseases. Given that abstention from such practices contributes signifcantly to the public good and benefits the international community, the latter has a corresponding duty to provide local communities which abandon such practices with alternatives. (shrink)

In “Evictionism and Libertarianism,” published in this journal, Walter Block defends the view that, although the fetus is a human being with all the rights to its body, it may nonetheless be evicted from the woman’s body as a trespasser, provided the pregnancy is unwanted. We argue that this view is untenable: the statement that the unwanted fetus is a trespasser does not follow from the premises that the fetus uninvitedly resides in the woman’s body and that the woman is (...) a full self-owner. For this statement to follow, one more statement would have to be true; namely, the woman would have to hold her self-ownership rights specifically against the fetus, and for this to be the case, the fetus would have to have a correlative duty to the woman to abstain from interfering with her body. This statement, however, is false. (shrink)

Opponents of euthanasia sometimes argue that it is incompatible with the purpose of medicine, since physicians have an unconditional duty never to intentionally cause death. But it is not clear how such a duty could ever actually be unconditional, if due consideration is given to the moral weight of countervailing duties equally fundamental to medicine. Whether physicians' moral duties are understood as correlative with patients' moral rights or construed noncorrelatively, a doctor's obligation to abstain from intentional killing (...) cannot be more than a defeasible duty. (shrink)

J. L. A. Garcia holds that my defense of voluntary euthanasia in an earlier paper amounts to an "assault on traditional common sense" about what medical ethics permits physicians to do, particularly insofar as I hold that a physician's duty to abstain from intentionally killing is only a defeasible duty, not an unconditional one. But I argue here that it is Garcia's views that are more at odds with common sense, and that voluntary euthanasia is in fact (...) a humane alternative that respects patient autonomy and is consistent with the most fundamental moral duties of physicians. Among these is a duty to relieve suffering, which can sometimes outweigh the fundamental duty to conserve life. (shrink)

The present argument focuses on part of Augustine’s defense of Christianity in The City of God. There Augustine argues that the Christian religion did not cause the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 CE. Augustine revised the definitions of a ‘people’ and ‘republic’ found in Cicero’s De Republica in light of the impossibility of true justice in a world corrupted by sin. If one returns these definitions to their original context, and accounts for Cicero’s own political teachings, one (...) finds that Augustine follows Cicero’s republicanism on several key points. First, civil rule differs from mastery over slaves. Second, political life is indeterminate, so a republic could be any regime suitable for governing free human beings. Third, the prudent man may not abstain from public service. For Augustine the duty to public service is connected to his tragic portrayal of life and suffering in society after ‘the fall’. Augustine’s contribution to the republican tradition is not to be found in the concept of a natural order, but in an explanation of why that order fails. (shrink)

In response to widespread voter ignorance, Jason Brennan argues for a voting ethics that can be summarized as one negative duty: do not vote badly. The implication that abstaining is always permissible entails no incentive for citizens to become competent voters or to vote once competent. Following the Condorcet Jury Theorem, this can lead to suboptimal outcomes, suggesting that voter turnout should concern instrumentalist epistemic accounts of democratic legitimacy. This could be addressed by adding two positive voting duties: to (...) make an effort to become a competent voter; and, once competent, to vote. (shrink)

Opponents of compulsory voting often allege that it violates a ‘right not to vote’. This paper seeks to clarify and defend such a right against its critics. First, I propose that this right must be understood as a Hohfeldian claim against being compelled to vote, rather than as a mere privilege to abstain. So construed, the right not to vote is compatible with a duty to vote, so arguments for a duty to vote do not refute the (...) existence of such a right. The right against compulsion is most easily defended within a liberal framework, hence its critics often appeal instead to a republican conception of freedom. In the latter part of the paper, I argue that even these republican arguments are inconclusive. Even non-dominating interference still conditions freedom, which may require justification. Further, citizens can live up to republican ideals, so long as they are vigilant; they need not actually vote. Thus, republican arguments fail to refute a right not to vote. (shrink)

In an earlier paper entitled _Harm is all you need?_, I used an analysis of English law to claim that the harm threshold was an unsuitable mediator of the best interests test when deciding if parental decisions should be overruled. In this paper I respond to a number of commentaries of that paper, and extend my discussion to consider the claim that the harm threshold gives appropriate normative weight to the interests of parents. While I accept that parents have some (...) rights over their children, I argue these are dependent on parents’ duties to benefit their children. While many such benefits are understood pluralistically, and are thus within parents’ ambit to decide, I claim that health benefits are ordinally different, because they play a foundational role in the flourishing of an individual. In the light of this, clinicians have the moral authority to override parental refusals, although in some cases abstaining from exercising this authority may be a pragmatic way to maintain parental engagement and ensure our ability to benefit the child in future. (shrink)

In this provocative book, Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental assumptions about voting, revealing why it is not a duty for most citizens--in fact, he ...

English title: Kant and the Right to Vote The article is a contribution to the ongoing debate in NFT about the moral responsibility of voters. Kristian Skagen Ekeli has argued that politically ignorant citizens have a duty to abstain from voting. He argues that such a duty fol- lows from Kant’s duty to respect other persons. I analyze Ekeli’s proposed duties by considering how they might fit into Kant’s system of duties. I conclude, contra Ekeli, that (...) the Kantian duty to respect persons does not give rise to a duty for politically ignorant voters to abstain from voting. -/- Denne artikkelen er et bidrag til debatten om velgeres moralske ansvar. Kristian Skagen Ekeli har i to artikler argu- mentert for at uvitende borgere har en plikt til ikke å stemme, noe han begrunner ut fra en kantiansk pliktetikk. Det er imidlertid uklart hvordan en uvitende borgers plikt til å avstå fra å stemme skulle følge av Kants plikt til å respek- tere personer, noe Cornelius og Herman Cappelen kort antyder i sin kommentar til Ekeli. I denne artikkelen foretar jeg en analyse av de pliktene som Ekeli tar til orde for, og undersøker hvordan disse eventuelt kunne passe inn i Kants system av plikttyper. Jeg konkluderer motsatt av Ekeli, med at den kantianske plikten til å respektere personer ikke gir grunnlag for en plikt for uvitende borgere til å avstå fra å stemme i valg. (shrink)

Reportedly ever since Pythagoras, but possibly much earlier, humans have been concerned about the way non human animals (henceforward “animals” for convenience) should be treated. By late antiquity all main traditions with regard to this issue had already been established and consolidated, and were only slightly modified during the centuries that followed. Until the nineteenth century philosophers tended to focus primarily on the ontological status of animals, to wit on whether – and to what degree – animals are actually rational (...) beings; accordingly they allowed – or denied – them some kind of moral standing. This modus operandi was for the first time seriously questioned by Jeremy Bentham, who put the issue on a different track. If the question, as Bentham suggested, is not if animals can think or speak, but if they can suffer1, then it seems plausible that moral agents ought to abstain from inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals; in other words, humans might have at least one – even limited – moral duty towards animals. And if this, in turn, is true, then animals should arguably be allowed the commensurate moral right, namely the right not to be inflicted unnecessary pain. Then, if animals possess this right, they could probably possess others, as well. This is how grosso modo the issue of animal rights became a pivotal part of the discussion concerning animal ethics. Bentham himself, of course, wouldn’t have gone that far; to him even the idea of human rights sounded like “simple… rhetorical nonsense upon stilts”.2 It was mostly due to his views, however, that the debate was moved from the way things actually are to the way things should ideally be – thus merging into what, in my view, should always have been: one primarily concerning ethics. (shrink)

Kant's ethics is used by some as a defence of the exploitation of animals and is criticised by others for not recognising any moral relevance of the plight of animals. These appeals overlook the broad applicability of Kant's principles. In this article, I argue that Kant's ethics implies a duty to abstain from most meat and some other animal products derived from farming. I argue that there is a Kantian principle not to choose goods that have been derived (...) from wrongdoing, with certain qualifications. This principle isolates the wrong of using others to commit wrongdoing on one's behalf. As has been argued by others, Kant's ethics implies that animal farming as we know it in our society almost universally involves wrongdoing and the slaughter of animals is especially tied to wrongdoing. I argue for a broad sense in which these ideas together imply that choosing farmed meat, and probably other animal products, is treating animal industry workers as mere means. Thus, we have a Kantian duty to abstain from these products. (shrink)

Martial metaphors shape the practice of medicine. Bioethicists who disagree participate in culture wars; public health officials who advocate declare wars on cancer and drugs; surgeons who operate map theaters and fields; physicians who enter graduate training become housestaff officers; nurses who act clinically follow doctor's orders; patients who become ill wage battles against disease. But when we figure medicine as warfare, clinicians become either dutiful combatants or conscientious objectors. Clinicians who serve the mission of medicine are described as loyal, (...) while those who abstain are characterized as disloyal. Disagreement is figured as treason and is punishable by exit from the... (shrink)

Kant's "supreme principle of morality," which he calls the "categorical imperative," is often applied by him to specific cases to reach conclusions about particular moral duties, e.g., to abstain from suicide, to not make lying promises, to render assistance to others. There are a number of such applications in the first part of his Metaphysik der Sitten , entitled the Rechtslehre, that have had less attention paid to them. In the Rechtslehre Kant is concerned with state-created laws enforced by (...) punishment, that will serve to guarantee the rights of citizens. This makes the application process somewhat different from the more familiar examples from Kant's earlier Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, which are concerned with the agent's inner decision process and the self-constraint of moral motivation. The present essay examines in some detail Kant's argument to show that there should be no such thing as an hereditary aristocracy, and compares it with the argument against making a lying promise in the Grundlegung. There are significant similarities and differences, and there are also significant connections to the ideas of John Rawls in A Theory of Justice . More briefly discussed are Kant's arguments in the Rechtslehre concerning punishment and the right of property. The whole discussion is intended as an introduction to the issues concerning the application of the categorical imperative in contexts where the result is external state-enforced laws, rather than an internal morally motivated moral decision. The issue in the former is said to be what persons abstractly considered could give their consent to in advance, where Kant makes a key distinction between a priori considerations having to do with agent liberty which lead to a moral decision concerning citizen rights, and empirical considerations having to do with happiness, which do not lead to conclusions concerning citizen rights. (shrink)

It appears to be a feature of our ordinary understanding of morality that we ought not to act in certain ways at all. We ought not to kill, torture, deceive, break our promises (say)—exceptional circumstances apart. Many moral duties are thought of in this way. Killing another person would be wrong even if it achieved a great good, and even if it led to preventing the deaths of several others. This feature of moral thinking is at the core of deontological (...) ethics. But while it is also part and parcel of ordinary moral thought, it seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating the duty she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. If the explanation of the duty not to kill were that it preserves human life it would be hard to understand why killing is not morally permitted when it leads to preserving a greater number of lives. Moreover, why should we not violate a restriction if doing so leads to fewer violations of that very restriction? There are two questions here. (1) Why not violate a restriction whose point it is to preserve lives, if doing so leads to preserving a greater number of lives? (2) Why not violate a restriction if doing so minimizes the violation of that very restriction? The latter question concerns what is sometimes called ‘the paradox of deontology’ or the problem of ‘minimizing violations’. The former may concern the so-called trolley cases, for instance. After all, a trolley hurtling towards a number of innocent people is not about to violate the moral restriction on killing innocent people, as it is not the kind of thing that can be subject to such a restriction. In this paper I am concerned only with (2): the paradox of deontology. To put it in Nozick’s terms: ‘How can a concern for the nonviolation of C [i.e. some deontological constraint] lead to refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C? -/- Samuel Scheffler, puzzled by the same idea, put it in terms of ‘agent-centred restrictions’ (ACR), because the restriction requires an agent (not) to act in certain ways, contrasting thereby with a requirement that certain actions not be done. The restriction is thus an agent-relative rather than an agent-neutral one. Scheffler ended up rejecting the idea of agent-centred restrictions, as even on close investigation the puzzle would not dissolve. Scheffler maintains that ACRs have ‘an air of paradox’ to them, as they violate what he calls maximizing rationality. ACRs appear to clash with the idea of maximizing rationality, because they require an agent to choose the option that worse achieves her goal of not harming people. I call this, following common parlance, the paradox of deontology, even though it is not strictly speaking a paradox. Exploring whether there is really a problem here, and how it might be solved, is the main objective of this paper. I begin by explaining the puzzlement about agent-centred restrictions in more detail. I then discuss promising as an example of a kind of action which is thought to be subject to agent-centred restrictions. It turns out that they are surprisingly easy to explain. The difficult case is killing—and that should put us on guard. I argue that the problem is not with the very idea of deontological restrictions, but with puzzling aspects of the ethics of killing. (shrink)

Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI) is to be taken as a necessary and sufficient condition for any action that is permissible, i. e. not prohibited. The class of permissible actions contains actions which are allowed as well as those which are morally required. If to perform an action and to abstain from this action can be taken to be ‘practical opposites’, then an action that is morally required for, a duty, is an action whose practical opposite is prohibited, and (...) vice versa. The class of actions which are merely allowed (neither prohibited nor morally required for) contains all and only those actions who together with their practical opposites belong to the class of permissible (not prohibited) actions. The paper then adduces passages from Kant’s ethical writings on the CI supporting these distinctions. (shrink)

The Swiss expert report suggests thatthe inherent dignity of a living being be identifiedwith its inherent value. But the phrase ``inherentvalue of a living being'' seems to connote two conceptsof inherent value. One has a morally obligatingcharacter but is counterintuitive because of itsegalitarianism. The other is one of non-moral value.It is more compatible with considered intuitions butinsufficient for substantiating the expert report'sclaim that human beings have moral duties towardsanimals and plants. The paper discusses theseconcepts. Consideration is then given to the (...) problemof how discursive support can be generated for theexpert report's claim that human beings have the moralduty to abstain from impairing those functions andabilities of a nonuman being that members of itsspecies as a rule can practice. (shrink)

I argue that voting abstention may be obligatory under certain non-trivial conditions. Following recent work on voting ethics, I argue that the obligation to abstain under certain conditions follows from a duty not to vote badly. Whether one votes badly, however, turns on more than one's reasons for wanting a particular candidate elected or policy implemented. On my account, one's reasons for voting at all also matter, and one can be in a position where there is no way (...) to exercise one's right to vote well. Seriously unfair electoral processes may put one in such a position. Such processes arguably hold in some contemporary western democracies, including the US. (shrink)

An ethical conflict arises when we must perform research in the interest of future patients, but that this may occasionally injure the interests of today''s patients. In the case of cognitively impaired persons, the question arises whether it is compatible with humane healthcare not only to treat, but also to use these patients for research purposes. Some bioethicists and theologians have formulated a general duty of solidarity, also pertaining to cognitively impaired persons, as a justification for research on these (...) persons. If one examines this thesis from the theory of justice according to John Rawls, it is revealed that such a duty of solidarity cannot necessarily be extrapolated from Rawls' conception of justice. This is at least true of Rawls' difference principle, because accordingto the difference principle only those measures are justifiable which serve the interest of the respective least well off. Those measures which would engender additional injury for the least well off could not be balanced by any utility according to Rawls. However, John Rawls' difference principle is subordinate to the first principle, which is that each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with the same liberty for others. These primary goods are determined by the freedom and integrity of the person. This integrity of decisionally impaired persons would be in danger if one would abstain from research and thus forego the increase in knowledge related to their disease. Thus one could conclude, at least from Rawls' first principle, that society must take on a duty to guarantee the degrees of freedom for cognitively impaired persons and thus also support the efforts for their healing. (shrink)

Duties to oneself are allegedly incoherent: if we had duties to ourselves, we would be able to opt out of them. I argue that there is a constraint on one’s ability to release oneself from duties to oneself. The release must be autonomous in order to be normatively transformative. First, I show that the view that combines the division of the self with the second-personal characterization of morality is problematic. Second, I advance a fundamental solution to the problem of the (...) incoherence of duties to oneself, one that does not rely on any division of the self, temporal or otherwise. I build upon the prevalent idea that, in releasing others from duties, we exercise the power of consent. The transformative force of consent partly derives from our autonomy. Invoking a plausible characterization of autonomy, I argue that release from duties requires the right kind of mental state. (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)

A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should be Uncivil, by DelmasCandice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp vii + 295.

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 (...) class='Hi'>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)

Trust is a complex attitude that has emotional, cognitive and moral dimensions. A difficulty to reduce trust to a simple emotional attitude is that trust raises normative pressures: if someone asks you to be trusted you feel the normative pressure of not letting him or her down, and if someone trusts you, you feel the normative pressure of honoring his or her trust. These normative pressures seem to have an irreducibly social character: pressures are effective insofar as they may raise (...) emotions of shame in those who violate the norm of trust and resentment and contempt in those who are victim of the violation. In this paper I will investigate the relation between the affective dimension of these normative pressures and their moral dimension by arguing that an important moral asymmetry exists between the duty to trust and the duty to be trustful. (shrink)

That we owe duties to others is a commonplace, the subject of countless philosophical treatises and monographs. Morality is interpersonal and other-directed, many claim. But what of what we owe ourselves? In Duty to Self, Paul Schofield flips the paradigm of interpersonal morality by arguing that there are moral duties we owe ourselves, and that in light of this, philosophers need to significantly rethink many of their views about practical reason, moral psychology, politics, and moral emotions. -/- Among these (...) views is the idea that divisions within a person's life enable her to relate to herself second-personally--that is, as though she were relating to a distinct other person--in the way required by morality. Further, there exist political duties owed to the self, which the state may coerce persons to perform. This amounts to a novel argument for paternalistic law, which appeals to considerations of right, justice, and freedom in order to justify coercing a person for their own sake--a liberal justification for an idea typically thought to be deeply at odds with liberalism. -/- Schofield untangles how this view would impact various issues in applied ethics and political philosophy, for example, financial prudence and risk, the pursuit of the good life, and medical ethics. Duty to Self is essential for anyone working in moral and political philosophy or political theory. (shrink)

In 'The duty to miscegenate', I harness John Stuart Mill's 19th century theory of social freedom to explain and to dismantle contemporary racialised and gendered injustice. In the first chapter—Social stigmatisation: 'a social tyranny'—I argue that persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women were, in the past, unjustly stigmatised by legal penalties against 'miscegenation' and are still, today, unjustly stigmatised by white male avoidance of cross-racial marriage and companionship. In the second chapter—Encounters that count: 'a foundation for solid friendship'—I argue that we can dismantle (...) this stigmatisation, by engaging in regular and frequent cross-racial commensality with persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women. In the third chapter—White right: 'a right to avoid'—I argue that, although we have a right to avoid commensal encounters with others, we do not have a right to avoid persons we racialise as black. On the contrary, we have a duty to encounter them, on terms of equality and intimacy. (shrink)

Christian Baatz argues that individuals have an imperfect duty to take reasonable steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and that governments should be working to implement st...

This paper addresses The Ends of Harm by Victor Tadros. In it, I attempted to explore some of the implications of Tadros’s theory of punishment, particularly those following from the uneasy relationship between punishment of the offender and D’s duty to protect the victim from future harm. Among my concerns were: the apparent underinclusiveness of Tadros’s theory of punishment; the vague and unpredictable scope of D’s liabilities; the taking away by the state of V’s right to be protected; and (...) the lack of inherent limitations on the appropriate forms and amounts of punishment. I also questioned the true meaning of the duty incurred by D as a result of D’s wrongdoing and suggested that protection of Vs from future harm may not be as essential to Tadros’s justification of punishment as he has argued. (shrink)

What is the significance of asserting that certain agents, be they individual or collective ones, have a duty to create just institutions at a global level? It might appear none. For many agree that there is no global authority to coordinate compliance with the duty. Hence, it is up to individual agents to decide how to comply. If this is the correct account of the duty to create just institutions, then one can say that significant global justice (...) projects depend on insignificant duty to realize them. The state’s duty is indeterminate, however, only on the supposition that authoritative institutions are necessary to secure coordination among different agents. The dissertation challenges this fundamental assumption in two steps. First, I investigate the practical relevance of conventions for solving coordination problems. By building on the works of Hume and Lewis, I show how individuals in the state of nature could have coordinated their actions by conventions up until a point when a government could have emerged. I argue that similar considerations apply to relations among states. I identify relevant similarities between conventions creating a government and international customary law. Moreover, I argue that international customary law is a global governing convention since it prescribes how rules that bind all states are to be made. The second step in my argument concerns the normative assessment of conventions. I argue that conventions are essential for the demands of justice as long as they enable compliance with the demands. Not all conventions, however, do so. I put forward the principle of salience to identify those practices that play such a role. The salient practices determine the state’s duty to create a just world order. Ceteris paribus, the duty is not indeterminate after all. Consequently, current coordination problems that arise among states should not be seen as a normal consequence of states’ rational and self-interested behavior in the absence of a global authority; instead, the coordination problems amount to the violation of the duty to create a just world order. The major implication of the argument is that we should replace the Hobbesian framework for thinking about the nature of states as well as how they relate to one another by the Humean one. Thus, instead of insisting on states’ consent and necessity of a centralized authority to coordinate actions, we should pay more attention to the habitual behavior of states as well as the role conventions play in solving coordination problems among them. Importantly, the relevance of conventions to compliance with moral demands does not make authoritative institutions obsolete. The argument of this dissertation is modest – it only asserts that conventions can coordinate actions in the process of transitioning toward more centralized forms of global authority. As opposed to the pessimistic outlook of the Hobbesian framework, the Humean one makes room for hope that the change of the present unjust conditions is possible. (shrink)

Kant claimed that we have a duty to seek peace, and encouraged a hope for peace to support that duty. To encourage that hope he argued that peace was reasonably likely. He thought that peace was reasonably likely because he believed that historical trends would create opportunities to implement his plan for peace. But authorities claim that globalization is undermining such opportunities. Consequently Kant's arguments can no longer sustain our hope for peace. We can sustain that hope by (...) devising a new plan for peace that globalization will give us opportunities to implement. But in order to devise such a plan we need to sustain our hope for peace. We can sustain such a hope by reflecting on the value of peace because hope is sustained not only by the belief that the object of hope is likely, but also by the conviction that it is valuable. In this way we can perhaps sustain a hope for peace that will support our duty to seek peace. But the fear of war and compassion for the victims of war may also support the duty to seek peace. Kant ignored these opportunities to support the duty to seek peace because they could support only the duty to avoid war. But Kant never showed that the duty to seek peace—as he saw it—outweighed the duty to avoid war. I conclude that Kant's arguments lead us to endless war rather than to peace. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of whether the arguments for a duty to die given by John Hardwig, the most prominent philosophical advocate of such a duty, are sound. Hardwig believes that the duty to die is relatively widespread among those with burdensome illnesses, dependencies, or medical conditions. I argue that although there are rare circumstances in which individuals have a duty to die, the situations Hardwig describes are not among these.After reconstructing Hardwig's argument for such (...) a duty, highlighting his central premise that ill, dependent, or aged individuals can impose unfair burdens upon others by continuing to live, I clarify precisely what Hardwig intends by his thesis that many of us have a duty to die. I then show that an important disanalogy exists between an uncontroversial example in which an individual has a duty to die and the situations in which Hardwig proposes individuals have a duty to die. More specifically, in situations where a duty to die exists, an individual's having a duty to die logically implies that those she burdens have a right to kill that individual in self-defense. I then suggest that the burdens that ill, dependent, or aged individuals impose on their families, loved ones, or caregivers do not constitute the kind of threat that warrants the latter killing the former in self-defense. Hence, the duty to die is much rarer than Hardwig supposes. (shrink)

There is much philosophical literature on the duty to rescue. Individuals who encounter and could save, at relatively little cost to themselves, a person at risk of losing life or limb are morally obligated to do so. Yet little has been said about the other side of the issue. There are cases in which the need for rescue could have been reasonably avoided by the rescuee. We argue for a duty to take rescue precautions, providing an account of (...) the circumstances in which it arises. This novel duty has important implications for public policy. We apply it to the situation of some of the uninsured in the United States. Given the US clinician's duty to provide emergency care to all people regardless of ability to pay, some of the uninsured have a moral duty to purchase health insurance. We defend the duty against objections, including the possibility that a right to rescue can be waived, thus undermining a duty to take rescue precautions, that the duty of many professionals is voluntarily incurred, and that a distinction between actively assumed and passively assumed risks matters morally. (shrink)

This paper outlines the moral contours of human relationships with companion animals. The paper details three sources of duties to and regarding companion animals: (1) from the animal’s status as property, (2) from the animal’s position in relationships of care, love, and dependency, and (3) from the animal’s status as a sentient being with a good of its own. These three sources of duties supplement one another and not only differentiate relationships with companion animals from wild animals and other categories (...) of domestic animals such as livestock, but they also overlap to provide moral agents with additional reasons for preventing and avoiding harm to companion animals. The paper concludes that not only do owners and bystanders have direct and indirect duties to protect companion animals from harm, but also that these duties have the potential, in some circumstances, to clash with duties owed to the state and fellow citizens. (shrink)

Because of the important benefits that biomedical research offers to humans, some have argued that people have a general moral obligation to participate in research. Although the defense of such a putative moral duty has raised controversy, few scholars, on either side of the debate, have attended to the social context in which research takes place and where such an obligation will be discharged. By reflecting on the social context in which a presumed duty to participate in research (...) will obtain, this article shows that decontextualized discussions of this putative moral obligation are problematic. (shrink)

KANT is the foremost philosopher to have argued at length for there being moral duties to oneself, and he puts forward the most extensive list of such duties to be found in philosophical writings. Kant's most detailed statement of his views concerning duties to oneself is to be found in his late work, the Tugendlehre or Doctrine of Virtue, which forms the second part of his Metaphysic of Morals, that work for which the much more famous Grundlegung was the foundational (...) study. I shall confine my consideration of Kant entirely to the Tugendlehre, for his views there, at least concerning duties to oneself, represent only an amplification of ideas that he had expressed in earlier writings. (shrink)

Debates on humanitarian intervention have focused on the permissibility question. In this paper, I ask whether intervention can be a moral duty, and if it is a moral duty, how this duty is to be distributed and assigned. With respect to the first question, I contemplate whether an intervention that has met the "permissibility" condition is also for this reason necessary and obligatory. If so, the gap between permission and obligation closes in the case of humanitarian intervention. (...) On the second question, I propose 'institutionalizing" the duty to intervene. In this way, an otherwise imperfect obligation to intervene can be made "perfect" and specific to some agent. (shrink)

One of the principal aims of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, especially of the Doctrine of Virtue, is to present a taxonomy of our duties as human beings. The basic division of duties is between juridical duties and ethical duties, which determines the division of the Metaphysics of Morals into the Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue. Juridical duties are duties that may be coercively enforced from outside the agent, as by the civil or criminal laws, or other social (...) pressures. Ethical duties must not be externally enforced (to do so violates the right of the person coerced). Instead, the subject herself, through her own reason and the feelings and motives arising a priori from her rational capacities -- the feelings of respect, conscience, moral feeling and love of other human beings, must constrain herself to follow them (MS 6:399-404).1 Among ethical duties, the fundamental division is between duties to oneself and duties to others. Within each of these two main divisions of ethical duty, there is a further division between duties that are strictly owed, requiring specific actions or omissions, and whose violation incurs moral blame, and duties that are wide or meritorious, the specific actions not strictly owed, but deserving of moral credit or merit. Kant treats these latter as ‘duties’ (eschewing any category such as ‘supererogation’) because the actions in question are conceived as fit objects of self-constraint – things we can make ourselves do through the exercise of reason and the moral feelings arising from the application of practical reason to our faculty of desire. Regarding duties to oneself, this division is between ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ duty; regarding duties to others, the strict or narrow... (shrink)

In 1998 Ghia Van Eeden was sexually assaulted by a serial rapist who had escaped from police custody due to the negligence of the South African police authorities. Claiming that the State owed a common law duty of care to potential victims to protect them from violent crimes, Van Eeden sought damages for the harm she had suffered. In a path-breaking decision, the Supreme Court of Appeal (S.C.A.) found that a duty of care did indeed exist and that (...) its execution had to be considered in line with the constitutional requirement to protect women's right to be free from violence and the constitutional obligation to develop the common law so as to promote the spirit, purport and objects of the South African Bill of Rights. Examining the Van Eeden decision in terms of its substantial development of the circumstances in which the State may be judged liable for a wrongful omission, this note positions the S.C.A.'s decision in the context of the evolving case law of the Constitutional Court on sexual violence and ultimately questions its practical significance for addressing the prevalent abuse of women in South Africa. (shrink)

This paper gives a review of the academic literature on the duty to care during epidemics and the question of how much risk has to be accepted by medical personnel during their work. It will then address ask to what extent military personnel have this duty in the same way as their civilian counterparts or whether military health care personnel might act under a different moral obligation – with more or less encompassing or at least different duties.

Although science and law employ different methods to gather and weigh evidence, their conclusions are remarkably convergent with regard to the effect that workplace stress has on the health of employees. Science, using the language of probability, affirms that certain stressors predict adverse health outcomes such as disabling anxiety and depression, cardiovascular disease, certain types of injury, and a variety of immune system disorders. Law, using the language of reasonable foreseeability, affirms that these adverse outcomes are predictable under certain conditions, (...) typically defined in relation to what a reasonable person should know. Society is arguably in a position to establish standards for the abatement of certain types of workplace stress. As part of this process, we need to conceptualize an ideal form of conduct that exemplifies the standards to which both law and science urge us to aspire. For this purpose, the concept of the neighbor at work is proposed. (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)

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because (...) the dead cannot experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression. (shrink)

This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue (...) that this applies no less in the case of the ‘morally ambiguous’ wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is often argued that, because she would always be in the position to waive it, a person cannot owe a duty to herself. In a recent AJP article, Janis David Schaab argues that a person can owe a duty to herself even if it can be waived, thus rendering unwarranted a scepticism about such duties, as well as efforts to show that they are unwaivable. Here I argue that, for all that Schaab says, waivability continues to (...) threaten the very possibility of duties to self. As such, scepticism about their existence remains justified, as do attempts to vindicate them by demonstrating that they cannot be waived. (shrink)

Why, morally speaking, ought we do more for our family and friends than for strangers? In other words, what is the justification of special duties? According to partialists, the answer to this question cannot be reduced to impartial moral principles. According to impartialists, it can. This paper briefly argues in favour of impartialism, before drawing out an implication of the impartialist view: in addition to justifying some currently recognised special duties, impartialism also generates new special duties that are not yet (...) widely recognised. Specifically, in certain situations, impartial principles generate duties to take actions and adopt attitudes in our personal lives that increase the chance of new or different special relationships being formed—new or different friendships, family-like relationships, relationships akin to co-nationality, and so on. In fact, even if one thinks partialism is the best justification of the duties we have once in special relationships, impartialist justifications for taking steps to form such relationships should have some sway. Moreover, a little reflection shows that these duties are not as demanding or counterintuitive as one might expect. (shrink)