An Ethics of Global Responsibility

Geopoliticus Child

2008-03-31T10:00:00.003-04:00

This painting by Salvador Dali, The Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, is my choice for an image to represent the main themes of this book. It depicts the birth struggle of a "New Man", a global citizen, who accepts responsibility for being the steward and guardian of the earth. The woman and child who look on represent the concepts of care and vulnerability which form the underpinning of the ethic of global responsibility which must come into being as the means to repair the world system. The image of the Geopoliticus Child, which Dali painted in 1943 during the Second World War, depicts the present world as "broken." The broken world cannot be repaired and made whole again until new men are born who act with a sense of global moral responsibility.

This book is an exercise in philosophical midwifery intended to assist the birth struggle of such new men.

Epigram - Tikkun Olam

2008-03-30T09:18:00.002-04:00

תיקון עולם

The Meaning of Tikkun Olam

The Hebrew words transliterated as "tikkun olam,"which mean to heal (or repair) the world, have become something of a buzzword in progressive Jewish thought in recent years. They have come to signify virtually any good deed or action that one thinks might be beneficial to the world in some way.

But this broad meaning, empty of specific moral and religious content, is troublesome because it does not adequately capture the historic meaning and origins of the term in Jewish thought. Rabbi Jill Jacobs has attempted to remedy this problem by proposing that the deeper meaning of this term weaves together four distinct historical strands of meaning. (Jacobs, Jill. "The History Of "Tikkun Olam"." Zeek, June 2007).

The first strand refers to the mystical idea from the Kabbalah of removing impurities from the world that impede the full manifestation of divine presence; the second implies the establishment of a sustainable physical world; the third argues for reforming untenable laws and structures of power that produce social injustices and oppressions, and the fourth draws on the Lurianic belief that a individual’s actions can affect the fate of the cosmos.

Drawing on these four strands of meaning, Jacobs proposes that “tikkun olam” means the process of fixing large social and environmental problems through the belief that our individual actions can have a positive effect on the material and the spiritual worlds. Large social problems that affect humanity include problems such as poverty, discrimination, social injustice, human rights abuses, and disease. The large environmental problems of the present time include those that affect the well-being of the physical world and that of other living things, such as global warming, deforestation, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, destruction of wilderness, and so on. The idea that ties these two together is the idea that human actions can affect these large scale issues in a positive way, and that by acting in this way, human beings can act so as to repair the world, even if the things they do are only a “small fix” to a much larger problem. By applying human thought, imagination, and caring to the world, we act as "co-creators" of the world. The idea of repairing the world reminds us of our shared social and environmental responsibilities. Tikkun olam signifies a universal moral responsibility borne by all moral agents to cooperate in sustaining and repairing the social and physical environments we all occupy.

Global Threats

2008-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

We live during times in which we are aware that hundreds of millions of persons suffer from conditions of severe poverty, economic deprivation and exploitation, political repression, social injustice, cultural exclusion, and other kinds of human rights abuse. We are also aware that this is a time when human civilization is facing an environmental crisis of historic proportions. We all have heard about global warming, deforestation, species extinction, depletion of natural resources, scarcity of water, toxic pollution, desertification and a variety of other environmental threats and risks. Many of us believe that if we do not act urgently in order to change our present unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption, and control the growth of the human population of the planet, our children and grandchildren who will live in the latter half of this century, will be facing an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, a crisis carrying potentially severe consequences not only for human beings but for the myriad other species with which we share the planet. While there is always a tension between our vision and aspirations for a better world and our perception of the present reality, the problems we find ourselves facing are qualitatively different than what we have ever faced before. Here is a brief catalog of some of these major global threats:

Population Growth – The human population of Earth is expected to reach approximately 10 billion by the middle of the century despite efforts to control and reduce the fertility rates. Almost all of the additional population growth will occur in less developed countries (LDCs), those least able to afford the burden of additional people to feed, clothe, house, and employ. The growth of the human population will place additional strains on natural and other resources that are already becoming critically depleted. In addition, population growth is an important factor in reinforcing other problems, for instance, rapid unplanned urbanization, the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and rising levels of internal and international migrations of people seeking better standards of living.

Chronic Poverty – While the one and a half billion people living in the world’s rich countries generally have fairly commodious lifestyles, collectively they consume more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources, while the other three-quarters of the Earth’s human population, mostly those living in LDCs, barely scrape by with the bare essentials of life, and half of all human beings live on less than $2 a day. Some of the consequences associated with this endemic poverty are that: 850 million adults remain illiterate. 2.7 billion people lack adequate basic sanitation. 1.3 billion do not have clean water for drinking and cooking. More than 1 billion live in extreme poverty barely subsisting on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. Almost all of these are malnourished and lack adequate housing.

Social Inequality – The gap between the rich and the poor both between nations and within nations is widening rather than decreasing. 1.2 billion people are unemployed or employed in exploitative labor situations. Poverty and social inequality is placing unprecedented stress of tradition family structures and familial breakdown is becoming commonplace. There is persistent gender bias against women in many countries. Conflicts and civil wars based on ethnic or racial identity and competition for control of increasingly scarce resources such as arable land and fresh water are increasing. Increasing demands for higher standards of living are often met by incompetence, indifference, or political repression. Failed and collapsed states are common and often become breeding grounds humanitarian catastrophes and terrorism.

Depleted Natural Resources – Fresh water is becoming scarce in many parts of the globe, and this trend is likely to continue if nothing is done to stabilize the atmosphere. Soil needed for growing crops is being eroded by run-off and development, or depleted by over-farming. Oceanic fisheries have been decimated and in some cases have collapsed. Rangeland is being overgrazed. Desertification is accelerating in many regions of the world that were formerly able to support human and other species. Deforestation for land and fuel is continuing and is eroding the Earth’s atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas.

Global Climate Change – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that by the end of the twenty-first century the Earth’s average temperature will rise by as much as 10 degrees F due to global warming, largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels such as gas, oil, and coal. The Arctic ice cap, and Greenland’s ice sheet are melting as are glaciers world-wide. This global increase in temperatures in predicted to cause changes in global weather patterns, increases in droughts and floods, violent storms, and sea-level rise.

Environmental Pollution - Nitrogen run-offs from crop fertilizers have altered the chemistry of rivers and streams. Dumping of human waste and the build-up of persistent toxic compounds has further damaged water quality. Atmospheric ozone is still being depleted despite measures undertaken to slow the process. Nuclear and other persistent toxic wastes make large quantities of land and water unusable for human needs. Burning of fossil fuels, such a coal, and the products of internal combustion engines create unhealthy atmospheric pollution in some cities, such as Bangkok, Beijing, and Mexico City.

Loss of Biodiversity – Due to deforestation, desertification, air and water pollution, and global climate change millions of species are at risk of extinction. There is an accelerating loss of habitat for wild species leading to a loss of biodiversity. Wetlands and coral reefs are threatened by development and pollution. At the same time, there are increasing numbers of bio-invasions of alien species into already weakened ecosystems, further disrupting these systems ability to avoid collapse.

Nuclear proliferation – Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia continue to maintain massive nuclear arsenals which are capable of destroying the Earth many times over. Attempts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons technology, and other lethal technologies of mass destruction, have proven largely ineffective as more states have joined the nuclear club or appear to have plans to do so. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, much of US security policy has been premised on the presumed importance of preventing “rogue states” and terrorist organizations from acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.

People who study these issues understand that these twin social and environmental crises of the twenty-first century are interlinked in various ways. We know, for instance, that the extreme poverty that afflicts roughly one third of humanity is one of the causes of environmental destruction of forest lands, endangered species, and fisheries, and is a major driver of the migration of millions of poor people from rural villages to urban slums. We also understand that the high-consumption life-styles of the roughly one billion people who live in the rich world are also contributing to the global environmental crisis. For instance, by continuing the profligate burning of fossil fuels we are adding to the burden of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, which if left unchecked, will produce a global rise in the sea level which will inundate many coastal and low-lying areas. If we switch from gasoline to biofuels like ethanol that is made from crops like corn or soybeans, we drive up the price of food which hurts poor people, and indirectly promote deforestation by means of the economic incentive to convert rainforest into cropland, and will produce a net increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

While we want to promote economic development that will lift people out of poverty we realize that it cannot follow the same pattern as was followed the Western economies developed during the last two centuries. Billions more people emulating our Western high-consumption lifestyles would imposed additional burdens would on the Earth’s resources and environment would be too great to bear.

There is a sense that human civilization has reached a critical inflection point in its history at which the traditional ways in which we think and act have to change in fundamental ways. But it seems that our current political institutions are just not up to the task of tackling these sorts of problems in an effective and timely fashion. While academic theorizing and campaigning by social activists and nongovernmental organizations have succeeded in keeping these issues on the radar screen of social awareness, and some progress is being made in addressing some of these problems, these efforts have not yet succeeded in bringing about progressive change on the scale that is required.

The gap between what we need to do in the twenty-first century to solve these global problems and our effective capacity to solve them through the mechanisms provided by our existing national and international institutions is called “the global governance gap”. Whether one blames the governance gap it on “short-term” thinking, the parochialism of our current political institutions, ideological blindness, cultural warfare, or other factors, the bottom line is that our current methods for solving global problems are too slow and largely ineffective. As former World Bank official J. F. Rischard puts it: “Quite simply, the current setup for solving global problems doesn’t work. We need a better one and fast” (2002, 60).

Characteristics of Global Threats

2008-03-28T00:50:00.000-04:00

These global threats are not the only ones that we face, but they form an important subset because they represent kinds of threats that differ in significant ways from traditional threats.

Traditional threats are ones that can be identified with the action or behavior of particular human agents, are local, are immediate or imminent, and are relatively simple to understand and respond to. For instance, common crimes are examples of standard threats. Threats of these kind cause harm through the deliberate actions of identifiable individual agents, and do so in an immediate and obvious fashion. One generally deals with these kinds of threats by attempting to deter them and by restraining or incapacitating the human agents that produce them. There are also various kinds of standard threats that do not arise from the actions of human agents, for instance, infectious diseases, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and so forth. These have sometimes been termed “natural evils,” and we have been living with them for all of our history as a species. In recent centuries we have been able to devise some effective technologies for containing and controlling these natural threats to human well-being, for instance, in the fields of public health and hygiene and medicine, but preventing many natural threats, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, remains largely beyond our control.

But the global threats we now face have distinctive qualitative and quantitative features that distinguish them from standard threats and also make them particularly difficult to solve.

First, they are global in their scope and potentially affect the well-being of every single person and indeed all living things on the planet. This feature concerns the scope of the problem and also by implication the scale of the changes that need to take place to solve it. Local problems can have local solutions, but global problems require global solutions and our current institutions for global governance are too weak to deal with them.

Second, rather than arising from a specific determinate cause or small set of causes, the etiologies of these global threats are complex and their causes are diffuse. In most cases, the problems mentioned arise as the result of the aggregated behavior of large numbers of independent actors, individual human beings, individual corporations, or individual states. The individual actions that produce the unwanted consequences, e.g. driving ones car to work, producing electricity by means of burning coal, or converting rainforests into grazing land, may not by themselves be very harmful, but when aggregated in massive numbers, they can produce catastrophic consequences that threaten the well-being of the planet and its living inhabitants.

Third, because the harms and risks produced by these threat are the result of aggregated individual actions, the agents who are responsible for causing them cannot (in most cases) be said to have acted with malice of forethought or with the intention to do harm to others. Global threats are unintentional and no one is in particular to blame for having caused them. Because they result from the aggregation of large number of actions it may be pointless to attempt to assign responsibility in the sense of blame or liability for many of them.

Fourth, unlike traditional agent-centered threats, these global threats are slow rather than fast; the costs and harms that results are deferred into the future, and the harms they produce are merely probable rather than immediately discernable in their effects on particular persons.

Fifth, the global threats humankind is currently facing are complex and dynamic. There are complex interdependencies and causal loops connecting the various problems we are facing: for instance, population growth leads to greater demands for resources such as land and water, which produces more pressure to cut down forests, which in turn accelerates soil erosion and water pollution and exacerbates the problem of global warming. One cannot hope to understand these sorts of problem using linear causal reasoning. Their complexity, interactivity, and dynamism require that we adopt a systems theoretic approach to understanding and dealing with these kinds of threats.

The sixth important feature of global threats is they are to one degree or another the result of the human use of modern technology. Many of these problems have arisen in part because of new powers given to us by technological progress, powers which we have not learned to use wisely and responsibly. Part of the problem is that technology has been allowed to assume control of human affairs such that its widespread use has produced unexpected and unpleasant consequences. While there is a temptation to blame our current problems on science and technology, ridding ourselves of modern technologies and returning to some pristine state of nature is not the solution to our problems. If our use of technology is part of the problem, it must also be part of the solution. The problem is not in our having technological power, but in our inability to use it responsibly.

The seventh feature of these threats is that their existence indicates that we are running up against the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacity for a human population, which is currently at about 6.6 billion and is expected to rise to between 10 and 11 billion by mid-century. The patterns of economic development that powered the Industrial Revolution and which produced many of these threats are clearly unsustainable. In the past when human groups despoiled their environments they could usually simply move on to another place. But there are no more places left to move -- the Earth is now fully occupied. While some people continue to dream of space colonies as the last frontier for human exploration, those of us in the reality-based community have understood that the Earth, with its finite resources, is our only home in the Cosmos and we human beings finally have to learn to take responsibility for protecting it and preserving it.

Taking Responsibility

2008-03-27T13:23:00.002-04:00

If this narrative resonates at all with you, then the obvious question that presents itself is: “What am I to do?” Perhaps as individuals we accept some responsibility for addressing these twin social and environmental crises of the twenty-first century. Maybe we ride our bikes to work rather drive our cars; maybe we decide to become vegetarians, plant gardens in our back yards, or buy only locally grown organic foods and shop for fair-traded or fairly made goods. Maybe we donate money to various charities and nongovernmental organizations that work in the fields of human rights, humanitarian relief, development, or to environmental organizations working to prevent the destruction of the rainforest, protect endangered species, preserve the wilderness, and so forth. We may do these things partly out of a sense of guilt (because we have so much while so many others have so little), or perhaps out of a sense of gratitude (also because we have so much while so many others have so little).

But some of us do these kinds of things because we believe that it is our social responsibility to do so. Those of us who think in this way choose to “take responsibility” for solving some of these big problems, for repairing the world, even though we do so with the knowledge that the little bit we can do in our own lives, with our own homes and families, and in the institutions and organizations in which we work, is really insignificant and will hardly make a dent on the enormous challenges human civilization is facing. Yet we do these things anyway, not because (in most cases) the law tells us that we must do them, but because our reason and our consciences tell us that we ought to.

Some people take their commitment to an ethics of social responsibility a step further by working for an nongovernmental organization (NGO) or a civil society organization (CSO) whose mission is specifically directed toward addressing some aspects of the twin crises. We understand that as individuals we cannot be very effective, so we combine our talents and energies and work in organizations that are trying to address one or more of the many aspects of the twin crises of the twenty-first century. Many of these organizations try to get governments and corporations, both of which are more powerful and better resourced organizations than NGOs and CSOs, to do less harm and do more good, both in the developing world and in our own societies.

Those of us who work in these kinds of organizations fire up our computers every morning and hunt and gather information that we think might be useful in finding solutions to these problems, and put those gems we have gathered into articles, reports, and books, hoping that someone will read them who can make a difference. We fly in jet planes around the planet to meetings and conferences trading memes with other people who share our sense of social responsibility in the belief that if we gather enough committed, like-minded people, we can create a broad-based global social movement, and through it the major institutions of society, government and business, may reach a tipping point from which real change can begin.

But in the back of our minds, perhaps, is the doubt that any of this activity is really making a difference. We may have good intentions, and go to bed each night with a clear conscience that assures us that we are doing our part to address these global problems, but we worry that all that we are doing may turn out to be too little too late.

Many thoughtful people have a sense of helplessness and powerlessness when thinking about these kinds of problems. In large measure this reaction is due not only to the enormity of the problems which we face, but to the nature of these problems. There are basically two ways in which people react to these threats. One group sees in this a portent of doom about which they can do nothing, and so they decide to retreat into individualist ego satisfactions, a comfortable life for themselves and their dear ones, but not much involvement in the problems of society, since, they rationalize, such activity is a waste of time. Another group of people come to the conclusion that this retreat from public issues into the satisfactions of private life is part of the problem, and that society can no longer afford not to be oriented towards the collective, long term interests of humanity. They suggest that in order to preserve the world we all share, we must also attempt build into our political and economic systems a concern for the common interests of humanity, for future generations, and for other living things.

Given their urgency, seriousness, and complexity, these global threats are of concern to many people working in diverse disciplines who are actively studying these problems from a variety of different theoretical and practical perspectives. Engineers, economists, ecologists, atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, oceanographers, urban planners, sociologists, political scientists, policy makers, and many other specific scientific specialties can provide useful information and perspectives, and perhaps solutions, to these problems. Human rights activists, environmental campaigners, humanitarian workers, and many others are actively campaigning to find and implement practical solutions to these kinds of problems. And many well-informed individuals are taking steps in their own lives to respond to these kinds of global problems.

Being a philosopher, the kinds of questions that I ask about this constellation of problems and issues concerns the ethical framework we should use when attempting to address and solve them. What should be our ethical response to these kinds of global threats? How do threats of these kinds affect our moral values and the moral norms we live by? Do these kinds of threats raise questions and problems that cannot be adequately handled by our traditional ethics, or are they amenable to being understood and appropriately responded to within the framework of conventional ethical theory? In short, what kind of ethical framework is needed in order to address and solve these kinds of global problems? By providing answers to these kinds of questions perhaps moral philosophers can also make a contribution towards solving them.

The Concept of a Global Ethics

2008-03-26T13:03:00.003-04:00

The general thesis I will argue for in this book is that in order to solve these global problems a significant portion of humanity ought to adopt a global ethics.

Our present, conventional ethical ideas and values are largely incapable of dealing with the kinds of global threats we are facing. Global threats represent moral challenges of a kind that we have not experienced before in human history and they require an innovative ethical response. Indeed, dealing with these threats will require a revaluing of our values, a rethinking and reinventing of our ethical frameworks. I will argue that we need to have a new understanding of some basic assumptions we make about human rights and social responsibilities, and about the nature and scope of the moral community, if we are to develop an ethical framework that will enable us to more effectively address and solve the problems that humanity is facing. In short, I will argue that we need to develop a global ethics. This book explores the possibility of constructing a global ethics based on the concepts of human rights and social responsibilities.

A global ethics can be understood in contrast to conventional ethics. Within our conventional ethical framework most people regard themselves as having certain rights and responsibilities. Conventionally speaking, there are individual rights which persons can claim against other members of their own societies and which their own governments are supposed to enforce and protect. Additionally according to the conventional ethics most people accept, individual competent moral agents also have moral responsibilities to take care of themselves, to care for their families and loved ones, and to respect the civil rights of their co-nationals. But one’s moral responsibilities are generally thought to stop at national borders. On the conventional moral view, worrying about protecting the rights and well-being of people in other countries is their job, not ours.

Moreover, under conventional ethics we do not really have any serious moral responsibilities towards non-human life forms, e.g., animals, insects, plants, microorganisms, and to the complex ecosystems that support them. The non-human parts of the biological world are just not considered to be proper objects of moral concern and do not have any more moral standing than mere things.

Finally, under our conventional moral outlook, most people think we have significant moral responsibilities to care for our own children while they are young, and see to it that they grow up to become competent and responsible adults. Perhaps we also acknowledge a moral duty to ensure that our children and grandchildren will enjoy at least as good lives as we have had. But few people think that our moral responsibilities extend much further than the next one or two generations.

These ethical assumptions are, I believe, no longer viable in the global age we have now entered -- the Anthropocene Era.

The Anthropocene

2008-03-26T12:00:00.004-04:00

We are living in the Anthropocene era, the age of the Earth in which human civilization is changing the very condition of the planet through the impact of its socio-technological practices on the land, the sea, and the atmosphere.

The term 'Anthropocene' was coined by geologists Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000. According to their reckoning the Anthropocene era began in the late 18th century, because “during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases", in particular C02 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1784” (2000, 17-18).[i] William Ruddiman has argued that human beings became the dominate influence on the earth's atmosphere long before the Industrial Revolution. According to his reckoning, the Anthropocene began with the Agricultural Revolution approximately 10,000 years ago when humans began clearing land for agriculture and causing deforestation. It is also the first time at which humans began domesticating wild grains and animal species, and breeding these species so as to select variants that better fit human needs.

While hominids have been evolving for millions of years, modern human beings like us, that is, homo sapiens (wise humans), have only been around for about 200,000 years. During most of our evolutionary history we lived as hunter-gatherers in small nomadic clans, and we had little impact on the ecology of the Earth. But due to our talent for technological innovation we have moved rapidly from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (New Stone Age, circa 8500 BC) in which farming began in the Levant, to the use of metal tools in Copper, Bronze and Iron ages, and then in the 1750s onto the Industrial Revolution. While humans have been altering their natural environment in significant ways for about 10,000 years through farming and the domestication of wild plants and animals, only in the last several centuries has the scale and scope of our activities begun to pose a threat to our survival as a species.

In the twentieth century we acquired the capacity to destroy the Earth many times over with our nuclear weapons; with the advent of genetic engineering we have now learned how to alter life itself at the genetic level; and our current fossil-fuel dependent modes of industry and commerce are disrupting the atmosphere by pumping greenhouse gases into at an ever-increasing rate, risking major climate disruption.

In each of the earlier periods in which technological changes have made it possible for humans to alter their environments human cultures have adapted their ethics to the new kinds of social realities that their increasingly technological modes of living created. It was Karl Marx who proposed the general thesis that the technological base of society embodied in its dominant modes of production determines its cultural superstructure, including its dominant ethical outlook: “The handmill gives you society with feudal lords; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist;” and Peter Singer has suggested adding, “The jet plane, the telephone, and the Internet give you a global society with the transnational corporation and the World Economic Forum” (Singer 2002, 10).

In the Anthropocene epoch the technologies of globalization are creating new kinds of social relations and new kinds of interdependence among peoples, and also new kinds of global threats. Consequently, we must revise our ethics in order to adapt them to the conditions of a planetary civilization in which human action is the most significant force in shaping the future of the Earth.

Philosophers have long believed that ethics, the theories we have of moral goodness, duty, rightness, and virtue, cannot be directly derived from any set facts about human nature. To attempt to derive moral judgments directly on facts concerning natural human characteristics and dispositions is to commit the "naturalistic fallacy." However, in recent years there has also been a recognition that ethical theories should be developed in some sense empirically, within the context of our best current biological, anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories. In ethics we must alter our received ethical theories in order to better take account of our characteristics as natural and as social beings.

Traditional ethics has tended to abstract from the historical conditions of human existence, and has tried to frame theories which apply to all "rational beings." In doing so moral philosophers have sacrificed specificity to the existing human condition. We have failed, by and large, to take into account features of morality which vary according to the stages of the life cycle and have made exceptions of children, the sick, the mentally incapable, and the elderly. Through this abstraction we have made it appear that human beings pop into the world fully capable with a functional capacity for rational decision‑making and fully in command of their faculties and behavior. We have ignored the obvious fact that human beings come into the world in a state of utter dependency and vulnerability, that they attain maturity embedded within a network of interpersonal relationships involving parents, families, friends, teachers, and significant others, and that these relationship condition our existence as moral agents in fundamental ways.

We have also ignored the fact that human beings are related by history to their distant ancestors and to their future progeny, by commonalities of development within their communities and cultures, and that these networks of social relationships must be taken into account in our ethics. Above all, traditional ethics has been anthropocentric: we have regarded humans as separate from nature, and as the only parts of nature which have moral value and moral standing, and so have treated other species of living beings, as mere "things." While a preference for our own kind is perhaps predictable and in some sense natural for us, it cannot be defended on these grounds.

This book is an attempt to correct for these biases of traditional ethical theory. A naturalized ethics is one that takes seriously the idea that humans are natural biological beings who bear special moral relationships to other persons and to other members of the biological world. My approach to global ethics is also secular and nonconsequentialist but draws elements from various other ethical traditions.

I am not particularly interested in arguing against some other approaches that have attempted to develop a global ethics by reinterpreting traditional religious doctrines or applying utilitarian theory. My approach to global ethics is pluralistic, but draws heavily on the work of philosophers such as Hans Jonas (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Robert E. Goodin (1985). Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Virginia Held (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. New York: Oxford University Press, each of whom have developed ethical theories based on the conceptions of responsibility, vulnerability, and care, notions that I believe are particularly well-suited to addressing the global problems we are facing.

My approach to developing a global ethics also builds upon the existence of the contemporary human rights paradigm, which is, in my view, the closest thing we currently have to the kind of global ethics that I envision. Both the responsibility-based approach and the rights-based approaches to ethical theory are going to be needed in order to construct a comprehensive global ethics, and my specific object here is to integrate them by means of an unorthodox theory of human rights that derives them from social responsibilities.

[i] (See William F. Ruddiman. (2007) Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. My own preference would be to place the beginning of the Anthropocene Era around 1968 when the Apollo 8 spacecraft sent back the now iconic image of the Earth rising above the surface of the moon. This date is also close to the first time a human being set foot on the moon, July 20, 1969, and the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970. I prefer this date because it marks the beginning of "conscious evolution" -- the point at which humans realized that we are responsible for the future evolution of life on Earth.

Extending the Boundaries of the Moral Community

2008-03-25T14:02:00.002-04:00

Conventional accounts of human rights tend to view them as “natural” or “God-given”, and see them as providing the grounds for responsibilities, mainly responsibilities borne by states. On my theory, social responsibilities that we owe towards other members of the human moral community to protect the vulnerable provide the grounds for creating rights. Persons have rights because they are valuable, and vulnerable, and other members of the moral community have the capacity and power to affect their vital interests for good or for ill. Human rights, on this view, are moral constructs which are designed to protect persons from the most commons forms of systematic or institutionalized oppression. While the primary responsibilities for observing and protecting human rights are ascribed to governments, states are only one among several kinds of institutions to which we ascribe the responsibility for observing, protecting, and fulfilling human rights. The shared social responsibility to protect the vulnerable among us is the basis for the moral obligation to oppose and prevent oppression and hence for the construction of human rights norms and their associated implementing institutions.

This inversion of the conventional view of the relationship between rights and responsibilities clears the way for subsuming the ethics of human rights within a more comprehensive ethics of social responsibility which extends the vulnerability/care principle to other kinds of moral relationships, in particular, to non-human species and the environments they depend upon, and to future generations of human beings, relationships that are not currently adequately addressed by the human rights framework. The ethical framework that results places moral responsibilities in the foreground without diminishing the importance of human rights. But it also leads away from our present anthropocentric understanding of the moral community and towards a conception of a global moral community that encompasses nonhuman nature and future generations.

Global ethics involves a radical extension of the boundaries of the moral community assumed by our conventional ethics. This expansion of the boundaries of the moral community entails a radical extension of our social responsibilities into three dimensions. First, we need a cosmopolitan ethics that describes the moral relations among human individuals (persons) who belong to different particular political communities, that is, people of different, ethnicities, nationalities, and citizenships. In a cosmopolitan ethical framework one regards all living persons as citizens of the same country and as members of a single extended moral community in which all of us have certain moral rights and also certain social responsibilities which we owe to others members of this extended moral community. The ethos of international solidarity is already part of the ethics of human rights and it is not very controversial because of the progress of the global human rights movement in the last sixty years. I will argue that we possess significant moral responsibilities towards our fellow human beings who have the same moral status as we do within this cosmopolitan moral community, and that the scope of these moral responsibilities is wider and the responsibilities they entail are stronger than we generally think.

The particular version of a global ethics developed here is thus highly inflationary in terms of our moral responsibilities. I argue that we adult human beings living at the dawn of the Third Millennium and (those who come after us) will have to accept moral responsibilities to other members of the global moral community that we rarely even acknowledge as having and even more rarely effectively fulfill. In particular, as members of a global moral community, nation states, corporations and other organizations, as well as individuals, have non-optional, and non-voluntary moral responsibilities to observe, promote, and protect the enjoyment of internationally recognized human rights for all living persons. A primary message of this book is that we must now acknowledge and accept these responsibilities and devise more effective global institutions as the means for implementing and discharging them.

In order to do this we must analyze the implicit division of moral labor assumed by our conventional ethics, and construct a new one based up an ethics of global social responsibility. Doing this requires that we revise our traditional interactional and personal view of moral responsibility in which individual persons are thought to be personally responsible for shouldering the burdens of solving the big problems of the world, and take an “institutional turn” under which our primary responsibility as individuals is to support the creation of new kinds of political, economic and social governance institutions at the local, national, and global level, that will more effectively fulfill these shared collective responsibilities on our behalves. Governments, transnational corporations and other business enterprises, and nongovernmental and civil society organizations must all shoulder some of the responsibility for managing our planetary civilization. While individuals must also assume the kinds of social responsibilities that fall within their own spheres of competence and capacity, the principal tasks in the new division of moral labor will be carried by institutions and organizations. Because the concept of organizational responsibility is relatively newly and largely unexplored, I will spend a good deal of time discussing this topic.

But, as I conceive it, a global ethics does not end with moral cosmopolitanism. It must also to extend the boundaries of the moral community into a second dimension -- to an intergenerational ethic that describes the moral responsibilities that living persons have towards both near and distant generations of human beings. The intergenerational ethics extends the moral community both backwards and forwards in time, from the present generations who are now alive back in time to our ancestors and forward to those who will come after us. I will argue that an ethics of global responsibility based on the concepts of vulnerability and care also provides a way of understanding these kinds of moral relationships, and indeed that it provides guidance and insight that a rights-only ethical framework cannot match.

Finally, a global ethics also requires the expansion of the moral community into a third dimension -- a biocentric ethics-- that describes the moral relations between human beings and members of other biological species and the elements of the natural world on which they depend. A biocentric ethics ascribes to living beings a moral standing different than mere “things”, which makes them the proper objects of moral concern and therefore of human moral responsibilities. Unlike many other approaches to environmental ethics, my approach employs a multicriterial theory of moral status, similar to that developed by Mary Anne Warren (1997), that creates several plateaus of moral status based upon the different of intrinsic and relational values of different kinds of creatures.

To summarize, as I will use the term, a global ethics is one that attempts to describe an ethical framework for a global moral community -- a community that includes all living persons irrespective national, racial, religious, ethnic, gender or other differences; previous generations of human beings as well as near and distant future generations, and all of those classes of organisms which possess some degree of moral standing and whose well-being, freedom, and survival are deserving of moral consideration by human moral agents. This third extension overturns the dominant anthropocentric character of most previous ethical systems by subsuming human ethics within the broader conception of a biocentric ethics. I believe that this fundamental change in our moral consciousness is now required by conditions of our present evolutionary stage – the Anthropocene Era – the age of the Earth in which human civilization is the dominant causal factor shaping the future of the planet.

Moral Constructivism

2008-02-27T10:28:00.000-05:00

Any attempt to construct a system of ethics must issue from a particular ideological and political standpoint, as well as from a particular historical and cultural point of view. In the past, ethical theories have often been presented as absolute and eternal truths that describe an unchanging objective moral reality. I do not believe that ethics should be regarded as body of eternal truths, rather the point of view adopted here is that ethical ideas are products of human intelligence and have evolved and must continue to change in response to the changing conditions of human existence.

My attempt to describe a global ethics is not being put forward as a master narrative that will stand for all time, or for all conceivable human cultures. Instead my goal is to describe a historically-situated, and indeed, provisional ethical theory, one that I believe roughly approximates the kinds of ethical system that will be needed in order to govern the global community of human beings living on Earth in the twenty-first century and beyond. In other words, the sense of the word "ethics” as it is used here is not the eternal or transcendent sense of an objectively true body of norms laid down by divine command or grasped through a pure rational intuition. Thus, while the present work is a good deal less ambitious than some earlier ethical theories produced by philosophers, e.g., those of Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant who attempted to attain a philosophical standpoint that transcended history and culture, it is nevertheless quite ambitious.

The metaethical position from which the current work proceeds is moral constructivism, the metaethical view which sees morality, ethics, and law as social technologies that we invent in order to regulate human behavior. While the ethical framework I am describing aspires to universality, it is proposed as universal here only in the pragmatic sense that it attempts to provide a description of a global moral community based upon the ideas of universal human rights and corresponding social responsibilities that ought to be included in the ethical culture of human civilization in the twenty-first century. In order for any ethical theory to become universal in this sense, it needs to be effectively communicated and scaled up, so that a significant number of opinion-makers and other persons of influence take it up and employ it.

My approach to ethics is Nietzschean in that I assume that human values are at bottom products of the will -- we construct ethics and morality -- it is not something present in nature itself apart from the human will, nor is it divinely dictated. I believe that we can derive the concept of moral responsibility from the fact that we do, in fact, will certain ends, such as the end of human flourishing, or the end of the preservation and flourishing of life on earth. To say that moral values and imperatives are phenomena of the will, however, is not necessarily to agree that the moral will is arbitrary, subjective or that it must be irrational. The will can be brought under the sway of intelligence, imagination, and reason. Reason's counsel is the one which ought to be heeded if we hope to promote the good of humankind overall, for reason instructs us concerning the relations of means and ends, and so shows us whether the means which we choose are adapted to the ends which we will to promote. Reason can also help us to evaluate ends themselves by providing a theory of the human good, which, while fallible and subject to revision, offers the best available basis for belief concerning what ends we ought to will.

The mistake of the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment was not in seeking a rational basis for morality, but in assuming that rationality had to yield an ethical theory that was unified, unchallengable, apodictic, and a priori. In place of this conception of a rationality, I substitute a pluralistic, fallible, revisable search for an adequate ethical theory which can guide our weak and inconstant wills. The moral ends, laws, and virtues which define our societies are social products. This is to say that we create them, and can change them, improve them, or destroy them. Nietzsche was right in thinking that morality is ultimately phenomenon of the will, but he was wrong in thinking that it is the creation of the individual will; rather it is the product of the collective will of society in particular cultures at particular times.

The dominant ethos of human societies is more like Rousseau's idea of the general will. Given its collective character, the dominant ethos is created out of "We-intentions", that is, out of shared moral values and norms which become social realities by their being generally intended. The general moral will rarely be unified, but instead will represent a mosaic of various and sometimes conflicting wills which coexist in uneasy tension. Politics is the process whereby this divided and inconstant collective will, this set of partially overlapping "We-intentions" is translated into decisions concerning collective policies and action. Individuals can affect the general will only as a political actors. The individual, to the extent to which he is socially isolated, betrays his own will by condemning it to ineffectuality.

Thus, it follows, that in order to create a new table of values and a new conception of moral responsibility -- a global ethics -- one must engage an audience who will internalize this conception and promote it as forming a part of the dominant ethos. This is why I have decided to publish this book on the Internet as a philosophical blog. In doing so I am hoping to reach my intended audience, what Paul H. Ray has called "cultural creatives."

Cultural Creatives and the Cosmopolitan Class

2008-02-25T11:18:00.000-05:00

I labor under no illusions, however, about how likely it is that the philosophical musings of a college professor will have world-changing implications. No one pays much attention to philosophers anymore. Thomas Nagel (another philosophy professor) has written that, “philosophy, when it has an impact on the world, affects the world only indirectly, through gradual penetration, usually over generations, of questions and arguments from abstruse theoretical writings into the consciousness and habits of thought of educated persons, and from there into political and legal argument, and eventually into the structure of alternatives among which political and practical choices are actually made” (quoted in Alterman, The Nation, 2002), 10). Given the urgency and seriousness of the global threats we are now facing this is hardly good enough. Philosophical ideas need to put on a faster track and made more politically relevant. In an age of instantaneous global communication philosophers need to give careful consideration to the question of how they are communicating their messages and to the audiences they are addressing. Writing for the audience of professional philosophers may be a good way to earn tenure and the respect of one’s professional peers, but it fails as a method for getting one’s ideas into mainstream social consciousness. For this to happen, the important theses and conclusions derived from philosophical analysis and reflection need to be taken up by social movements that will disseminate them to audiences who are in a position to do something about them.

This is the reason why I have chosen to address this book to what have been called "cultural creatives", or to members of what I call the “cosmopolitan class”. Paul Ray, who coined the term, says that,

Cultural Creatives tend to reject the hedonism, materialism, and cynicism generally associated with one-sided elite globalization. They are less concerned with making a lot of money, although most live comfortably. The also tend to walk their talk, three-fourths being involved in volunteer activities. On the deepest level, they are powerfully attuned to global issues and whole systems. Their icon is a photograph of the earth as a blue pearl hanging in black space. (Ray, P.H. Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books, 2000)

Another interesting discussion about this group of people, has been published by Paul Hawken who describes a social movement of "global citizens" consisting of (roughly) 100 million people and 2 million civil society organizations. (Hawken, Paul. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking, 2007). This movement has no leader, no headquarters, and no unified agenda. However, what unites the various individuals and groups who identify with this movement is the perception that human civilization is reaching a critical inflection point in the current century, and that a major course correction will be needed if we are to avoid a global catastrophe.

While there have always been a few people who had this kind of cosmopolitan outlook, recent changes in communication and transportation technologies are creating a global civil society, and within that society there is emerging a significant class of people who are, I believe, in the best position to take up and enact the kind of ethical framework I develop in this book. This cosmopolitan class is composed of people from all nationalities and religious faiths, all racial and ethnic groups, and from many particular walks of life. It includes scientists and scholars, politicians and statesmen, business men and women, social activists and social entrepreneurs, and others who are involved in progressive social movements. Cosmopolitans tend better travelled, speak more languages, and are more conversant with international affairs than many of their compatriots. To be sure there are some professional philosophers and other academics that belong to the cosmopolitan class; but this book is not addressed only to them. Rather, the audience I have in mind for my moral philosophy are members of progressive social movements, and the leaders of socially responsible corporations, and nongovernmental organizations, who can give these philosophical ideas and theories the legs they will need in order to inspire the mass movement of cultural creatives, the members of the cosmopolitan class who are changing the world.

I hope that the audience of culturally creative cosmopolitans to whom this book is addressed will not find it odd to be counseled by a professional philosopher about an ethical theory for thinking about the global threats of the twenty-first century. There is in fact a great deal of recent philosophy that is highly relevant to addressing and solving these big problems of the world, but little of it manages to get outside of the ambit of peer-reviewed specialty journals and academic books. In the current age of mass media, pundits and spin-doctors get a lot more air time than philosophers, whose voices barely manage into penetrate public discourse. My hope is that by publishing this book as an Internet blog its fate will be different, and that it will serve as a means of making the insights of moral and political philosophers available to a wider audience of committed social activists who can translate the ethical ideas discussed here into practical solutions to the global problems of the twenty-first century.

Is a Global Ethics Even Possible?

2008-02-24T13:16:00.000-05:00

But before we begin to elaborate our conception of a global ethics it might be useful to ask the question: “Is a global ethics of the kind described here even possible?” At the end of the book I will offer a cautiously optimistic answer to this question. But at the outset it should be noted that there are several good reasons for thinking that a global ethics of the kind outlined here might not be possible.

Basic facts about the innate human moral sense that is the evolutionary product of millions of years of hunter-gather existence, set limits on how far we can project our empathy and with what constancy we can maintain it. History and tradition, as well social and political facts pertaining to the nature and powers in our present global economic system will also be significant obstacles towards achieving any large scale revaluation of values of the kind that I think is needed. Significant kinds of social and economic inequalities both within and among our present human societies will also make it difficult for all people to take up this kind of ethical framework at the same rate or to the same degree.

Large-scale changes in ethical beliefs and values do not happen overnight. Rather they begin with a small number of individuals who embrace them and then they are spread by means of social movements. They are taken up piecemeal, by different people at different rates, and they undergo changes in the process of social diffusion.

However, one basis for an initial cautious affirmation of the possibility of a global ethics is an existence proof: there are, in fact, some individuals, those people who are among the 'cultural creatives' or 'global citizens' who are presently living in accordance with the basic values that a global ethics would dictate.

Some years ago I came across a website on which there appeared a “Declaration of Interdependence” which said that,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all people are evolved equal; that they are endowed by their existence with certain undeniable responsibilities; that among these are respect for all life forms; stewardship of the biosphere, and the pursuit of a joyful and intelligent exploration of the Earth and the universe."

The kind of global perspective that inspired whoever wrote these words is becoming more widespread. One can find echoes of it in the lives of contemporary people who, through their personal choices, actions and lifestyles, demonstrate the kind of responsibility for themselves and for others that a global ethics requires. Such persons care about the international protection of human rights for all people, and strive to protect and sustain the natural environments they occupy. They also have a lively moral concern about what kind of world they will be leaving to their children and grandchildren, and to future generations to come. Since there are already some people who are enacting the model of global citizenship that I am attempting to describe here, there are grounds for hoping that the seeds of the future that are already present can be nurtured and spread.

Conditions for Success of a Global Ethics

2008-02-23T13:34:00.001-05:00

In order for this philosophical theory to have any practical impact, the ethics of global responsibility needs to be scaled up. The fundamental practical question about the ethical framework described in this book is whether it can achieve sufficient scale of acceptance within the global community to make a difference in how a significantly large number of people think about the moral condition of humanity in the twenty-first century. How successfully this ethical theory can be scaled up depends upon a number of factors. Let me mention a few of the criteria that can be used to determine how potentially scalable a global ethics that requires a radical expansion of human responsibilities might be.

In order to achieve widespread acceptance and become internalized as part of the dominant ethos an account of a global ethics should:

· Provide a coherent account of the nature, scope, and limitations of the moral responsibilities which moral agents have towards co-nationals, citizens of other states, future generations, and non-human species and the ecosystems on which they depend.

· Allocate the burdens of fulfilling these responsibilities in ways that are practically feasible given the limitations imposed by our nature, our powers and capacities, and our existing traditions.

· Be sustainable and enable future generations to elaborate it and improve it in useful and appropriate ways.

· Be teachable and be understandable by ordinary people, and not so complex and abstract that its implications for practical action cannot be apprehended..

· Be capable of achieving widespread adherence across diverse political, cultural, and economic systems and ideologies.

· Support and provide guidance concerning effective and feasible public policies for addressing global threats and provide practical guidance for policy-makers in dealing with these kinds of issues.

· Provide guidance in resolving conflicts involving different values, rights, and duties and between different fundamental ethical principles.

· Be able to withstand criticism, and demonstrate fruitfulness in solving new problems within the range of issues the overall framework is supposed to address.

There can be no prior assurance that any, let alone all, of these conditions can be satisfied. There is no way to prove that a global ethics is possible before we try to construct and deploy it. In other words, embarking on this project requires that one be willing to “risk the impossible” and to attempt to bring into being something that perhaps cannot be. I am willing to take that risk.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reflective Equilibrium

2008-02-22T14:12:00.003-05:00

The methodology I will employ is a version of the method that John Rawls employed in his Theory of Justice (1971) in which he attempted to attain "reflective equilibrium" between commonsense moral intuitions and more abstract ethical principles. One can use this approach in either at "top-down" fashion beginning with an abstract ethical principle and using it to predict and guide moral conclusions about a range of cases calling for moral judgment. Or, on can begin by describing a range of cases which evoke moral intuitions, and then attempt to frame a more abstract ethical principle which would account for that pattern of intuitions. This is the "bottom-up" approach. In either case, the goal of research is to try to bring our moral intuitions in line with our ethical principles so that they align with one another.

One can do this either by revising the moral principles when they conflict with strong moral intuitions about cases, or by setting aside certain of our moral intuitions when they conflict with what our ethical principles predict should be regarded as the morally correct judgment. One must approach this task with an open mind and be willing to regard at least some of one pre-analytic moral intuitions as fallible or illusory, and also be willing to revise or even abandon
one's proposed ethical principles when they are incapable of being squared with our robust moral intuitions. There is, of course, no reason why one cannot employ both top-down and bottom-up kinds of reasoning in this kind of endeavor and this is the way in which I shall proceed.

My aim in the next chapter is to present a moral principle, which I will call the Vulnerability-Care Principle (VCP) and to try to make the case that it is a plausible candidate for the status of a fundamental ethical principle. For the moment I only wish to convince my readers that the VCP is plausibly thought to be capable of accounting for a wide range of standard moral intuitions which normally conscientious moral observers have about a wide range of moral cases. If I am successful in this, it will not show that the VCP is true in any interesting sense. In order to gain further justification for accepting the VCP as a fundamental principle of ethics one needs also to supply a general rationale for why there should be such a principle of ethics, to show how accepting the VCP as basic helps to illuminate and explain certain moral issues for which we normally think that other ethical principles are more appropriate, and how it helps us to resolve conflicts and solve problems in ethical theory and applied ethics.

Like scientific theories, ethical theories can gain credence by demonstrating they are competitively supported by the available evidence and that they cohere with our considered beliefs in related domains of inquiry. So, for example, the theory of evolution in biology that assumes that extant species evolved over very long periods of time until they reached their present states, must cohere with theories in geology concerning the age of the earth. If the earth were in fact very much younger than is now generally believed, it would imply that either biological evolution would have to work much more quickly than is usually assumed, or that the theory of evolution is false or at least incomplete.

Normative ethical theories about our rights and responsibilities will ultimately have to cohere with theories in the social sciences and in psychology about the nature of social relations and human motivation. If the ethical theory that features the VCP or something like it turns out for one reason or another not to cohere with facts and reliable theories about these matters, then it would count against its feasibility as a fundamental principle of ethics.

So the attainment of a reflective equilibrium between ones ethical theory and a range of moral intuitions is only the first step in providing a rational justification for believing that the VCP, or any ethical principle, is indeed a fundamental principle in ethics. I am not suggesting that can provide such a justification at the present time, but am only attempting to present the VCP as a plausible candidate for this status.

Fortunately, there have been other thinkers who have explored much of the territory I plan to cover and whose guidance I will be relying on for much of what I will have to say about the VCP. In particular, Robert Goodin and Virginia Held have pioneered this approach to ethical theory, and, as will become obvious, I am greatly in their debt as concerns the task of demonstrating the plausibility of the VCP.

My specific contribution will be to attempt to go further than either of these authors and to show that, when properly understood, the VCP is able to provide an account of what we normally think of as the social responsibilities derived from human rights. If I am successful in showing how this is the case, then we will be in a theoretical position in which becomes possible to connect the discourse of human rights with the discourse of social responsibility, and to show how human rights are derived from social responsibilities rather than the other way around, as is normally assumed.

Having made the connection between social responsibilities and human rights, we will then be in a position to argue that the range of our social responsibilities is wider than only those that ground human rights, and extend the VCP to the bio-centric and intergenerational realms. If this is successful, then I believe that I will have succeeded in making the case that the VCP is a plausible candidate for a fundamental principle of ethics, one which when properly understood, can provide a common normative framework for a global ethics of the kind I envision.

A Meta-Ethical Digression: Moral Pluralism

2008-02-21T09:52:00.003-05:00

Meta-ethics is a set of theories about doing ethics. Ethics, considered broadly, is a normative theory about the nature of the moral life or the moral realm, that is, the realm in which we talk about things like values, duties, rights, virtues, responsibility, blame, guilt, and a variety of other moral concepts. Normative ethics is that branch of ethics that attempts to explain morality, that is, roughly, to give an account of what it is moral agents owe to one another as members of a moral community. I say roughly, because as I will define the notion of a moral community, it will include as members moral patients who are not also moral agents to whom (or to which) moral agents owe moral responsibilities. Morality concerns what it is we should do, and normative ethical theory attempts to give a systematic answer to this question.

In meta-ethics there is a theoretical dispute between the partisans of a monistic approach, and those of a pluralistic approach. Monists hope to find a single, comprehensive ethical principle which is capable of explaining all of our considered moral judgments about moral matters.

The leading candidate for this status is the principle of utility, particularly that version championed by John Stuart Mill, known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. According to this theory, what is morally right for moral agents to do is to act so as to maximize that happiness (or well-being) of all of those (sentient) individuals who are affected by our actions in the long term counting each individuals interest in happiness as equal. This is sometimes referred to as the ethics of universal benevolence. The principle of utility has many variants and many defenders, so many, that I do not have time to review them here. I want to focus only on that group of utilitarians who join this principle of normative ethics to the assumption of theoretical monism, that is, the idea that there is only one fundamental principle of ethics. It is this idea that I want to reject.

In my view, the duty to maximize utility is an ordinary standing moral responsibility like the duty to prevent harm, to protect and care for the vulnerable, the duty to do justice, or the duty to respect another person's autonomy. The mistake that some utilitarians make is that they try to portray the maximization of utility as a kind of "master principle" that encapsulates all other moral considerations. But from a pluralistic, deontological point of view, like the one I prefer, utility maximization is only one normative principle among many others with which it may agree or conflict. While it would be theoretically "sweet" to have a "master principle" in ethics, just as it would be theoretically sweet to have a grand unified field theory in physics, I do not believe that any such theory is in the offing, at least as far as normative ethics is concerned.

Instead, on my view, there will be a plurality of fundamental principles of normative ethics that together describe and explain the moral intuitions that normal, morally sensitive individuals have over a wide range of cases and contexts. In some cases and in some contexts, utility provides a useful moral guide to what conscientious moral agents ought to do. But it is not the only guide to normative rightness and must give way in certain kinds of cases to moral considerations deriving from other fundamental moral principles.
One can appreciate the pluralism of normative ethical principles by focusing on the nature of the arguments that are commonly employed against utilitarianism when it is cast in the role of the master principle of ethics. One finds counter-intuitive examples in which considerations of utility conflict with those of justice, for instance, in the case of the drifter who can be framed for a crime he did not commit. Or arguments involving conflicts between the duty to maximize impartial utility and duties of care that arise because of special interpersonal relationships. Or cases in which the duty to respect personal autonomy runs up against a attempt to do what ones knows to be in another person's best interests. In all of these kinds of arguments the basic structure consists in noticing that the duty to maximize utility conflicts with some other kinds of moral obligations derived from some other moral principle.

But this problem is not unique to the theory of utility or other consequentialist theories in ethics. The same kind of argument can be used to draw attention to conflicts between justice and care or between justice and autonomy or between autonomy and care, and so on. The conclusion that one should draw then is that there is simply no master principle of morality that can be used to guide moral decision-making and evaluation in all cases. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has put it, "Anyone looking for decision procedures, a way of ranking values or a set of rules for choosing among them, such be warned that 'naturalized ethics' is never going to get us there. This isn't because of any crevasse between 'is' and 'ought'; it is because there's no there there. Normative theories, if they are sensible, do not offer algorithms for action." (Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 193).

The meta-ethical stance known as moral pluralism supposes that rather than a single table of values and a single master principle of morality, what we have is a plurality of values and a plurality of fundamental ethical principles. The standard objection to this view is that it lacks theoretical simplicity and offers no means by which to decide which duties shall take precedence when duties derived from independent principles conflict with one another in practical cases. But while theoretical simplicity may be an important value in the empirical sciences, its value in the moral sciences is overrated.

The reason for this is that in normative ethics what we are aiming for, in part, is a social consensus about what kinds of actions and policies ought to be generally accepted as morally right. In order to justify any particular proposed normative policy to a lot of moral agents one needs to find what John Rawls called a overlapping consensus, that is, everyone may not agree to endorse a particular course of action or policy for the same reason, but if there is enough convergence among everybody's own reasons, then we can say that the policy has strong support, even though everybody's back story about why they endorse the policy may be a different one. Most favored policies and practices are those that are supported by the convergence of a variety of independent reasons deriving from various sorts of moral and non-moral considerations. They have what in science is termed "consilience", that is, support from a number of independent lines of evidence or argument. Having a plurality of fundamental moral principles and values is what makes such multiple, independent but sometimes intersecting kinds of justifications possible, and thus it is what allows us to achieve a broad-based social consensus.

The current global consensus on human rights is a good example of this kind of "many-legged" justificatory strategy. Human rights norms and values are justified by a variety of different sorts of moral and practical considerations deriving from considerations of justice, utility, nonmalefiecence, vulnerability, dignity, equality, convention, as well as by religious or metaphysical and metaphysical beliefs. There is no such thing as the justification for human rights. Rather there are a set of partially adequate overlapping justifications for various particular rights as well as a general set of philosophical and political rationales for holding that certain rights should be regarded as belonging to persons as such, irrespective of their particular identities. (See Morton Winston, "Human Rights as Moral Rebellion and Social Construction." Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 6, No. 3 2007: 279-305. for a fuller account).

A plurality of principles also enables us to achieve a better fit between our principles and our moral intuitions over a wide variety of kinds of situations and issues calling for moral reflection and decision. No single moral principle can do the job of describing our actual patterns of moral judgment as well as a set of multiple moral principles. It is not just that normative ethics is just a "messy" field of inquiry that has not yet achieved its true paradigm -- the moral life is just too complex to be reduced to a single over-arching theory of what makes actions morally right, what makes some things morally valuable, and what the good life for human beings consists of.

To borrow some terms from linguistic theory, ethical theories must strive to attain both descriptive and explanatory adequacy. To attain descriptive adequacy they must provide a plausible account of why people's moral intuitions about cases or situations calling for moral judgment or evaluation are as they are. In order to achieve this, it is often necessary to hypothesize the existence of a variety of moral rules and higher-level ethical principles, a moral grammar, that correctly predicts how ordinary competent moral observers will respond to cases calling for moral evaluation. However, there are likely to be many descriptively adequate ethical theories in this sense. Theory choice in ethics, as in other sciences, is underdetermined by the empirical evidence. So one needs to find other considerations to motivate the choice among competing normative theories. One then resorts to looking as theoretical parsimony, explanatory power, fruitfulness, coherence with theories in related domains of inquiry, and so forth, in order to find additional factors that can be used to help determine the choice of theories. But theoretical parsimony or simplicity should not be traded off against descriptive adequacy, in general, but especially in ethics. Because normative rules and principles are developed in order to guide the ordinary moral decision-making of typical moral agents, it is better that they be practical and accurate.

So, then, by advancing the Vulnerability-Care Principle as a fundamental principle of normative ethics I am not suggesting it is a "master principle" that supplants other fundamental principles of ethics. Nor should my narrative about vulnerability, dependence, care, and responsibility be construed taking the place of a much richer moral vocabulary that also talks about rights, justice, virtue, utility, and other matters relevant to the moral life. As in the case of other fundamental moral principles found in normative ethics, the VCP must compete with and often conflict with the demands of other moral principles, and when it does so, its victory is not assured in advance.
But because the VCP is a relatively under-studied principle of ethics, one whose theoretical value and importance is not widely understood or appreciated, I think it worth emphasizing it in order to reveal its potential. In my view the VCP is not just as a normative principle that can be used in the private sphere of the family, where it finds it most natural home, but also in the public sphere whether it is often considered not to apply at all or to apply in only limited ways.

The burden of my argument will be to make a plausible case that the VCP is indeed a fundamental principle of normative ethics, not to claim that it is the only or the most important one. But I do wish to claim that the VCP and the associated concept of social responsibility derived from it do helps to account for a wide range of moral intuitions we have about our moral responsibilities, and that looking at some problems in normative ethics from the perspective of vulnerability and responsibility reveals some interesting insights about the relationship of the VCP to other moral concepts, in particular, the concept of human rights.

The Vulnerability Principle

2008-02-20T17:00:00.002-05:00

In one of the most under appreciated books in moral philosophy to come out in the past few decades, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) , Robert Goodin argued that moral responsibilities, though diverse in many ways, all derive from a common underlying moral principle, which he called the Vulnerability Principle (VP):

(VP): Moral agents acquire special responsibilities to protect the interests of others to the extent that those others are specially vulnerable or in some way dependent on their choices and actions.

According to Goodin, when we analyze many commonsense moral intuitions about our moral responsibilities towards others we recognize that what is crucial to them, "is that others are depending on us. They are particularly vulnerable to our actions and choices. That, I argue, is the true source of all the standard special responsibilities that we so readily acknowledge. The same considerations of vulnerability that make our obligations to our families, friends, clients, and compatriots especially strong can also give rise to similar responsibilities toward a much larger group of people who stand in none of the standard relationships to us" (Goodin 1985, 11). He says that this will use the VP to "ratchet up" from our intuitions about special role-related responsibilities to argue that what we normally think of as general moral duties "derive from fundamentally the same sorts of moral considerations" (11). Before summarizing key aspects of Goodin's argument, it might be helpful to define what is meant by vulnerability.

The concept of vulnerability is, essentially, the state of affairs in which a moral patient is in some way susceptible to injury or harm. The most vulnerable people in the world are, for example, refugees who have lost everything; they are without food, shelter. or clean water; children who have lost their parents and are without schools or caregivers; those stricken with natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods; those who are sick without access to medical care; those who are captives and are at the mercy of others, and in general, anyone who lacks the ability to protect their own most basic interests. The vulnerability principle (VP), calls upon competent and capable moral agents to act so as to avoid placing vulnerable people at risk, and to prevent harm or injury from befalling those who are at risk or are specially vulnerable in some way.

A quote from Goodin serves to clarify this idea further: "It makes perfectly good sense to speak of someone's being vulnerable either to manmade threats or natural ones. Likewise, it makes perfectly good sense to speak of someone's being vulnerable either to harms that come about through others' omissions or neglect or to harms that come about through others' positive actions" (110). His notion of vulnerability is further explained the same page: "This point emerges particularly in relation to such cognate notions as 'helplessness' and 'dependence.' The former is defined as the state of being 'unable to help oneself'; the latter as 'depending upon, being conditioned or subordinate or subject; living at another's cost; reliance, confident trust.' In both these situations, the vulnerability in view is to harms that come about through other people's inactions rather than their actions" (110, note 3). Vulnerability is a dispositional property of things. To be vulnerable is to be susceptible to being harmed. But harmed in what way, and by whom, and under what circumstances?

Philosophers who have analyzed the concept of a disposition have distinguished dispositions that are intrinsic to things from those that extrinsic. An example of an extrinsic disposition is the property of my front door key to unlock my front door. My key has the dispositional property of unlocking only the lock on my door; it does not have the disposition to unlock other doors. Similarly, other dispositional properties such as weight, visibility, recognizability, solubility, and many others are relational in that a complete description requires at least two variables, usually more than two.

We can understand vulnerability, in a general sense, as susceptibility to being harmed. To be harmed is to be made worse off than one was at an earlier time. Moral patients can be harmed either by the direct acts of another or by the omissions of others who fail to intervene so as to protect them from threats that they themselves do not create but which they can prevent or thwart. In both cases, a moral agent who possesses some capacity to affect a vulnerable other's well being acts or refrains from acting so as to bring it about that the vulnerable moral patient who is the object of his moral responsibilities is not made worse off because of the agent's acts or omissions. Moral responsibilities to protect the vulnerable, then, are moral obligations that require moral agents to avoid causing harm and to act so as to prevent harm from coming to moral patients whose well-being they have to power to affect. It is important to see that the idea of vulnerability that Goodin is using is a relational one: "Vulnerability implies that there is some agent (actual or metaphorical) capable of exercising some effective choice...over whether to cause or to avert threatened harm" (112). Similarly for the notion of dependency, "one depends upon someone for something." Goodin explain this as follows:

References to vulnerability imply two other references. One is to what the persons or things are vulnerable. Where do their weaknesses lie? What mechanisms are capable of inflicting harm on them? The other is to whom the persons or things are vulnerable. Who can inflict harms on me? Who can protect me against them? One is alway vulnerable to particular agents with respect to particular sorts of threats....Like the notions of power and freedom, that of vulnerability is inherent object and agent relative. (112)

Rather than a three-place relation, I think it is preferable to think of vulnerability as a four place relationship. The vulnerability relation can be presented in general as having the following four-variable form:

The Vulnerability Relation: A is vulnerable to B because of C with respect to D.

In this formula (A) stands for a moral patient who is the object of a moral agent's (B) moral responsibility. (B) is the subject or bearer of a moral responsibility towards (A). (C) represents some aspect of A's good, well-being, or interest that is at risk or is threatened by B's acts or omissions. (D) stands for some power or capacity that B possesses that allows B to affect A's good, well-being, or interest. (C) is the condition or circumstance that makes A specially vulnerable, and (D) refers to a feature of B's power, capacity, or ability to affect C. I will clarify what is meant by special vulnerability at a later time (See Special Vulnerability).

In thinking of vulnerability as a dispositional and relational notion, Goodin theory resembles the feminist ethics of care developed by philosophers such as Virginia Held who notes that, "It is characteristic of the ethics of care to view persons as relational and as interdependent" (The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 46). Both the ethics of care and the ethics of vulnerability differ from traditional deontological and consequentialist ethical theories which regard moral agents as independent and equal autonomous individuals, and which sees them as competing with other independent individuals for resources and advantages. In contrast, the ethics of care, "conceptualizes persons as deeply affected by, and involved in, relations with others;…it does not assume that relations relevant for morality have been entered into voluntarily by free and equal individuals, as do dominant moral theories. It appreciates as well the values of care between persons of unequal power in unchosen relations such as those between parents and children and between members of social groups of various kinds" (Held, 46).

Goodin's vulnerability principles and Held's ethic of care share more than just this basic similarity, and are in fact, I shall argue, complementary accounts of the kinds of moral responsibilities that arise as the result of relationships characterized by vulnerability and dependence. The apprehension of the vulnerability of others induces the moral response of care in socially responsible moral agents. Held tends to see the vulnerability relationship from the point of view of the caregiver who responds to the vulnerability of others, while Goodin tends sees it from the point of view of the vulnerable others who deserves to be cared for. But it is possible, and indeed necessary, to see it both ways.
I think it possible to combine Goodin's VP and Held's ethics of care into a general approach to normative ethical theory that I will sometimes refer to as the Ethics of Vulnerability and Care. At a later stage in my argument I shall suggest some important modifications in the way Goodin's Vulnerability Principle (VP) is framed and combine it with some insights Held and others into a single general ethical principle, what I will call the Vulnerability-Care Principle (VCP).

Goodin's version of the VP has certain theoretical limitations; it is designed to explain what are called "special obligations" or "special responsibilities", but I want to use it as the basis of a general theory of moral responsibilities and as a fundamental principle of a global ethics. In order to extend the VP in this way I will need to clarify what is meant by the notion of moral responsibility. I will also need to define and explain the concept of moral status, which will be used to specify what sorts of things can count as moral agents and moral patients within the vulnerability relationship.

But before turning to these tasks I need to say more about the notions of care and vulnerability.

Special Vulnerability

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It is necessary now to clarify what is meant by the notion of special vulnerability. Moral patients are, in general, always vulnerable in the sense that they can be harmed. However, there are certain kinds of circumstances or conditions in which moral patients are actually under threat of being harmed; in these cases we can say that they are specially vulnerable.

Many of the standard ethical thought experiments that philosophers use to elicit strong moral intuitions are ones that employ some kind of threat that makes the moral patient seems specially vulnerable. For instance, in the ever popular trolley examples, the scenario always involves some people who are tied to trolley tracks and are in danger of being run over by a trolley. Individuals who are tied to trolley tracks are unable to flee to avoid the on-rushing trolley and so are specially vulnerable to being harmed or killed. It is the present danger that makes this kind of case so compelling as an example for the duty to rescue. One has a completely different response if the stipulation that they are tied to the tracks is omitted. Suppose that there are five people who are merely standing in the path of the trolley, but who are perfectly capable of moving off the tracks as the trolley approaches. Suppose on the other track there is a person who is lying unconscious across the track. In this case, I would not suppose that many people would opt for directing the trolley towards the one who is specially vulnerable -- the unconscious one. It would be assumed that the five others can protect themselves from the trolley by merely stepping to one side of the tracks, and so the moral agent should send the trolley toward them on the assumption that it would be preferable to risk hitting five people who can avoid being hit than it would be to surely kill the one specially vulnerable individual. The special vulnerability of the people on the tracks is a feature of this familiar case that is rarely remarked upon by commentators.

Or consider Peter Singer's famous case of the small child drowning in a shallow lake. The child in this scenario is specially vulnerable in the way in which, for instance, another child walking quietly on the shore beside the lake is not. One would not, I expect, be inclined to think that one has a special responsibility to rush over to the later child and warn him not to go into the lake where he might drown. He might well be equally vulnerable to drowning, in the general sense, but because he is not immediately threatened with drowning the special responsibility to protect the vulnerable is not triggered where it would be in the case of the child who is actually floundering helplessly in the water. Again, the scenario works to evoke the moral intuition that bystanders have a special responsibility to rescue the floundering child precisely because she is in a circumstance which makes her specially vulnerable.

There are other famous philosophical arguments that trade on the special vulnerability of a moral patient. Hobbes, for instance, in describing the "state of nature" makes it abundantly clear that persons in the state of nature are vulnerable to a great many harms, such as being killed in their sleep. But in discussing the right to life, he stipulates that it comes into play in cases where one's own life is actually being threatened. In such cases, he argued, we have a right of self-defense that allows us to act so as to protect our own lives, even if this means killing an aggressor. Indeed, for Hobbes, the right to life is the most fundamental and the only natural right we have, and we do not lose it even when we enter into civil society and live under the rule of a sovereign monarch; we would still in his view have the natural right to defend our own lives when mortally threatened by the King.

As Goodin explains it:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, something is "vulnerable" if it "may be wounded," either literally or figuratively; it is "susceptible of injury, not proof against weapon, criticism, etc." Essentially, then the principle of protecting the vulnerable amounts to an injunction to prevent harms from befalling people. Conceptually, "vulnerability" is essentially a matter of being under threat of harm; therefore, protecting the vulnerable is primarily a matter of forestalling threatened harms. (Goodin, 1985, p. 110, italics added)

In the Vulnerability Relation, the C term, is the condition or circumstance that constitutes the threat which makes a moral patient specially vulnerable. Goodin mentions infants and young children as classes of moral patients who are specially vulnerable (p .33). Also the mentally and physically handicapped, the poor, the aged and infirm (p. 34), terminally-ill cancer patients (38), American Indian tribes (40), refugees and stateless persons (168), and he suggests in passing, animals and future generations (169). I will develop and defend this suggestion at a later stage of the argument, but for the time being, it should be clear that when I use the term "vulnerability" I will mean actually being under threat of harm, rather than just the abstract possibility of being harmed.

Given this meaning of vulnerability we should be able to say things like: members of an endangered species a vulnerable, while those of a non-endangered species are not. Prisoners as a class are vulnerable, while those not imprisoned are not. What makes prisoners specially vulnerable is the fact that their condition of incarceration removes the possibility of their defending themselves from threats by fleeing. This is one of the feature that make the practice of torture so morally horrendous -- the person who is being tortured is typically a captive who has no means of escape nor any means of defending himself from assaults upon his person. It is the deliberate infliction of pain upon a person who is specially vulnerable that make torture so appalling. As we shall see, many of the things that we call "human rights" are designed to forestall threats of just this kind, that is, threats upon persons who are, for some reason or another, specially vulnerable. Indeed, oppressed persons generally are an important class of specially vulnerable moral patients. If oppressed persons, as a class of moral patients, are specially vulnerable, and if the VP is a fundamental principle of ethics, then it follows that those moral agents who have the ability to protect the oppressed and prevent them from being harmed, have the moral responsibility to do so.

Under the VP moral agents who have some ability D to forestall or prevent oppressed persons from being harmed have a special responsibility towards them. This is, I believe, the ethical basis of the responsibility to protect that has recently been developed to articulate the requirement to aid those peoples threatened with genocide or ethnic cleansing. Bystander nations have the special responsibility to protect this class of specially vulnerable moral patients. As Goodin, insists, "What the vulnerability model emphasizes is not just their special need, ... but also your special ability to help. That is the crucial factor in imposing the duty upon you in particular" (p .34). This special ability to help is the D factor in the Vulnerability Relation. Moral agents who are incapable of helping the vulnerable can be excused from their moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable, other things being equal. But those who are able to help, and who have no other legitimate excuse, acquire an actual moral obligation to act so as to protect the vulnerable.

We can say that members of the class of moral agents who possess D occupy the role of a potential rescuers. To illustrate this notion, suppose that a fellow airplane passenger suddenly stops breathing while in flight. The persons who are that individual's potential rescuers include those trained in CPR or who have special medical knowledge that might enable them to render assistance. Another passenger, for instance, a philosopher who does not know how to perform CPR, does not have the relevant D factor in this case. The responsibility to attempt to resuscitate the stricken passenger falls more heavily on those who have the relevant D, than it would on someone who lacks that critical skill. The class of potential rescuers might contain the flight attendants, a physician or nurse who is on the plane, or another bystander who has been trained in CPR. While the incompetent philosopher also has a prima facie moral responsibility to rescue the stricken passenger, he may be excused from actually trying to help on grounds of his incompetence, particularly, if there are other, competent moral agents present who rightfully can fulfill the role of potential rescuers because of some special training, skill, or ability they possess.

Some people might find it odd to speak about roles in this context. We normally think of roles as being defined by social conventions, e.g., the roles of doctor, lawyer, teacher, parent, and so on. However, as Goodin suggests, and I will later argue, not all roles are conventionally defined; there are some moral obligations that are brought into being between moral patients and moral agents because of the Vulnerability Relation itself -- that is, because of their special vulnerability and your special ability to help. It is possible to think of these sorts of moral obligations as natural duties, where the term "natural" here should be understood as opposed to "conventional." The responsibility to protect the vulnerable, in cases where one has the ability to forestall an actual threat to their survival, well-being, or freedom, is an example of such a natural duty.

If there is such a natural duty to protect the vulnerable, then the vulnerable have the basis of a moral claim to social protection, that is, they have a right to it. In this way, natural rights (or entitlements) can be derived from natural duties. The VP and the Vulnerability Relation, then, might plausibly provide an account of rights that does not depend on seeing them as either transcendental "God-given" moral properties, nor as mere social conventions. Natural rights, on this view, are derived from the natural responsibility of the able to protect the vulnerable.

The notion of a natural duty here is meant to indicate that the Vulnerability Relation and the Vulnerability Principle express a kind of theoretically primitive notion of moral obligation, primitive in the sense that it is not derived from any other moral fundamental moral notions or principles. It expresses a moral axiom that can be used as the basis for developing an ethics of global responsibility.

The Ethics of Care

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Virginia Held is one of several feminist philosophers who have elaborated an “ethics of care” as a promising alternative to traditional ethical theories such as deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. As she presents it, “the ethics of care stresses the moral force of the responsibility to respond to the needs of the dependent” (2006, 10). Care is understood as both a value and a practice. It values moral emotions such as “sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness,” and even “anger may be a component of the moral indignation that should be felt when people are treated unjustly or inhumanely.”

But the ethics of care does not rely on transient emotions alone to guide moral judgment and behavior, rather, it emphasizes that caring involves practices through which the caregiver responds to the claims of actual individuals with whom she shares an actual relationship. For Held, “care is a practice involving the work of care-giving and the standards by which the practices of care can be evaluated” (36). Traditional ethical theories tend to be individualistic, the ethics of care, like that ethics of responsibility, “sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically” (13); Held understands care primarily not in terms of emotions but as “caring relations” (36).

Thus, like the ethics of vulnerability, the care ethic is fundamental relational rather than individualistic. Individualism “obscures the innumerable ways persons and groups are interdependent in the modern world”, while the ethics of care is “hospitable to the relatedness of persons,” and it sees “our responsibilities as not freely entered into but presented to us by the accidents of our embeddedness in familial and social and historical contexts” (2006, 14).

There is little question that the ethics of care has a great deal to say about moral relationships in what is generally regarded as the private sphere of family and personal friends. The interesting theoretical question is whether this approach to ethics can also be used to understand moral relationships in the public sphere, that is, among individuals who are essentially strangers to one another and who may not have any kind of direct personal relationship.

Like some other theorists working in feminist ethics. I think that it can. Joan Tronto has argued that care should play a role not only in private, but also in public ethics, and that considerations of care and vulnerability are involved in assessments of moral responsibility in the social and political realms as well as in the private realm of the family (Tronto, 1993). Fiona Robinson has argued that care ethics is relevant to the global context:

We can use the ethics of care as the basis for rethinking the normative priorities of our societies and our world. Care must be seen not simply as a moral orientation, but as the basis for the political achievement of a good society, or, I would add, a morally decent world. By using the ethics of care as a starting point, we can fundamentally revise our understandings of the nature of our moral relations with others in the global context. ("The Limits of a Rights-based Approach to Global Ethics." In Tony Evans (Ed.). Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 69.)

The ethics of care offers a distinct approach to ethical theory, one that complements an ethics of justice that emphasizes the concepts of fairness and rights, but does not reduce to it. In Held’s view an “adequate, comprehensive moral theory will have to include the insights of both the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, among other insights….Equitable caring is not necessarily better caring, it is fairer caring. And humane justice is not necessarily better justice, it is more caring justice” (16). Her suggestion for integrating the two ethics is to “keep these concepts conceptually distinct and to delineate the domains in which they should have priority.” This approach agrees with my own preference for moral pluralism in normative ethics, that is, for the idea that there are several distinct fundamental ethical principles that are needed in order to provide a descriptively and explanatorily adequate account of the moral realm.

In the realm of law, for instance, the notions of justice and rights have traditionally held priority, although considerations of care are also relevant, as I will later argue. In the realm of the family and among friends, priority has generally been given to considerations of care, though the basic requirements of justice surely should also be met -- this is obvious to anyone who, like me, has had more than one child. As Held says, "these are the clearest cases; others will contain moral combine moral urgencies. Universal human rights (including the social and economic ones as well as the political and civil) should certainly be respected, but promoting care across continents may be a more promising way to achieve this than mere rational recognition (2006, 17).

My own view is that certain fundamental features of the concept of universal human rights can be grounded in the ethics of care and the concept of social responsibility. Human rights, on my view, have been socially constructed in order to give concrete expression to the social responsibility to protect people against oppression. I will develop this argument in later sections, as a part of the cosmopolitan dimension of my global ethics. Held’s view and mine are not that far apart since I agree with her that “care is probably the most deeply fundamental value” (17), and also that “social relations of persons caring enough about one another to respect them as fellow members of a community are normatively prior to individuals being valued as holders of individual rights, or to citizenship in a liberal state, and the like” (102).

The social responsibility to care for the vulnerable and the oppressed is one ethical root of human rights. Rights, including human rights, are moral constructs which serve to focus social responsibilities on certain classes of beneficiaries and to ascribe responsibilities to protect them in various ways to certain classes of moral agents. The specification of the classes of beneficiaries and the bearers of the specific responsibilities to care for and protect them are socially negotiated and legitimated. So in order to understand how rights grow from responsibilities to protect the vulnerable, we must join the ethics of care and vulnerability to a discourse ethics of the kind developed by Jürgen Habermas.

As Held notes, this is kind of theoretical alliance is quite possible since “the ethics of care is hospitable to the methods of discourse ethics, though with an emphasis on actual dialogue that empowers its participants to express themselves rather than on discourse so ideal that actual differences of viewpoint fall away” (20). The historical and cultural embeddedness of this kind of discourse ethics presents a contrast to the idealized social bargaining of Rawls’ conception of the original position in which the parties negotiate behind a veil of ignorance that denies them knowledge of their particular stations and roles in society. Since concrete knowledge of one’s particular social relationships, and the actual distribution of powers and vulnerabilities is crucial to the vulnerability-care approach to ethics, this idealized decision-making procedure cannot explain how the specific rights and responsibilities which human moral agents have developed. As Held writes, “differences of actual power are inevitable in public as well as personal contexts, and we do well to recognize them rather than mask them behind liberal fictions of equality,” but when we focus on social relations, “we can come to see how to shape good caring relations so that differences in power will not be pernicious and so that the vulnerable are empowered” (56).

Rights functions as means for empowering those who are vulnerable to being oppressed; they provide a platform from which to advance moral and legal claims that society protect them from forces that would harm them or deny them secure access to goods and liberties necessary for a decent and dignified human existence. Human rights, in particular, function as a means of restraining the powerful from abusing the vulnerable, and for mobilizing social resources to protect the vulnerable against forces that would harm them. While human rights begin as moral responses to historically experienced forms of oppression, in order to become operational they must be developed into institutional mechanisms that function effectively to mobilize social resources to protect the vulnerable. The ethics of care, thus, forms one of the principal bases of the ethics of human rights.

Vulnerability vs. Voluntarism

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Goodin begins his account of the Vulnerability Principle by asserting that many of our special role-related moral responsibilities are shaped and governed by the particular kinds of vulnerability that pertain to the parties to a social relationship (10). He applies the VP to a set of standard kinds of special relationships, such as, those found within the family, business relationships, professional relationships, and to cases involving promises and contracts, where the special moral responsibilities involved are normally understood to be voluntarily assumed on the model of promises and contracts.

The main rival to the vulnerability model, its theoretical foil, is the voluntaristic notion of special responsibilities according to which, "special responsibilities derive their moral force from the fact that they have been voluntarily self‑assumed" (13). If voluntarism is the correct account of the origin and basis of special moral responsibilities, then a moral agent's voluntary and uncoerced consent is a necessary condition for the acquisition of such responsibilities, and, therefore, individual moral agents cannot have any special moral responsibilities without first giving their consent to undertake them. According to the voluntaristic model, it is the agent’s consent, rather than vulnerability and dependency of the moral patients to the moral agents that gives moral force to these special moral responsibilities.

The vulnerability model, on the other hand, assumes that at least some special responsibilities can arise without the agent's consent, and that consent even in cases where it is present does not explain the content nor the moral force of these obligations. As Goodin explains it, “If one party is in a position of particular vulnerability to or dependency on another, the other has strong responsibilities to protect the dependent party. These responsibilities both precede and constrain any bargain between the parties over what rights and duties they may voluntarily assume. Thus, it is vulnerability rather than some voluntary act of will which gives rise to special responsibilities of the most basic kind” (39).

The voluntaristic model assimilates special responsibilities to promises and contracts by assuming that the source of the moral obligations associated with these responsibilities is the agent's voluntary consent. Goodin argues that "it is wrong to suppose that all special responsibilities are necessarily self‑assumed" (30). The voluntaristic model does not adequately explain many types of special responsibilities which we commonly acknowledge in which the voluntary consent of the agent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the creation nor ascription of these special responsibilities.

As Goodin notes, by explaining all special responsibilities as deriving from promises and similar forms of self‑assumed obligations, the voluntaristic model gives both too strong and too weak an account of special responsibilities. It is too strong since: "[d]ischarging our special responsibilities, especially insofar as these responsibilities are seen to have been voluntarily self‑assumed, is ordinarily regarded as a matter of justice" (16). If I promise to do a thing for you, then I have established an obligation which entails a reciprocal right of the promisee to demand the fulfillment of my obligation. Promises, like other types of consensual obligations between moral agents, entail correlative rights which create moral claims or entitlements. As H. L.A. Hart has put it, "By promising to do or not to do something, we voluntarily incur obligations and create or confer rights on those to whom we promise; we alter the existing moral independence of the parties' freedom of choice in relation to some action and create of moral relationship between them" [quoted by Goodin 1985, 30‑31].

However many special responsibilities do not create correlative rights on the part of their beneficiaries; only those in which both the object and the addressee of the responsibility is a moral agent or person do so. Thus the voluntaristic model is too strong in this respect. On the vulnerability model, B can have a moral responsibility towards A without it being the case that A has a right against B, in cases where B is a moral patient for whose own sake one is acting, or where B is a moral agent who is the object or beneficiary of a responsibility, but not also its addressee. The vulnerability model predicts that moral agents can acquire special moral responsibilities even in cases where the moral patients concerned do not have the status of right-holders, and indeed, may not even be the sorts of things to which it is possible to ascribe rights.

The voluntaristic model, on the other hand, assumes that special obligations can only arise once the agent has volunteered to undertake them, and have given their consent to other moral agents to whom these responsibilities are owed. Since can only meaningfully give one’s consent to other moral agents, the voluntaristic model is too weak to explain our moral intuitions about many kinds of special moral responsibilities, for instance, those for the welfare of nonhuman animals. While I believe that Goodin is correct in denying Hart's thesis that all special duties arise from previous voluntary actions, it does not follow from this that none do. In fact, many special responsibilities contain voluntaristic aspects and well as other aspects, such as vulnerability and reciprocity which are needed to explain the precise character of these special moral relationships. It is important in analyzing real cases to distinguish between the specific content of the obligations that flow from the responsibility, for instance, what sort of benefits are to be bestowed, from the grounds for ascribing the responsibility to a particular bearer, on the one hand, and directing it towards particular objects or beneficiaries, on the other. Different ethical principles may be involved in each of these separate conditions: the vulnerability model, might account only for the direction of a particular substantive responsibility upon a certain class of beneficiaries, but not also for its being directed towards a specific individual member of that class, nor for its being ascribed to a particular member of the class of potential benefactors.

Thus, perhaps Goodin overstates his case by suggesting that the vulnerability model alone can provide a single, coherent account for all special responsibilities, any more than the voluntaristic model can provide such an account. Rather it may be that the precise character of special moral responsibilities in various contexts of moral action can only be accounted for by a "mixed" or pluralistic account of the origins and scope of these responsibilities, and that only one of the elements of such mixed accounts derives from considerations of vulnerability. In ethics, as in many other domains of inquiry into human action, there may be no single explanatory principle which will account for all of the relevant features of the data. But before we conclude that this is the case, we should examine some examples of special moral responsibilities in various domains and show how Goodin develops the vulnerability model for each of them, and how this approach helps to explain their characteristics.

Parental Responsibility

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Undoubtedly, the paradigm case for the vulnerability model is parental responsibility towards infants and young children. The human child is dependent upon its parent(s) (or other adult caregivers) for all of the most basic necessities for survival, such as food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc.: "Indeed, biologists remark that the most salient feature of the human infant is its severe and protracted vulnerability. Man is more helpless for more of his life than virtually any other species. Somebody must be assigned the special responsibility of looking after the young. Who that is will, of course, be a matter for social determination; typically it will be the biological parents, at least in the first instance; but sometime it will not.

Whoever is picked out, however, the more basic point remains that those special responsibilities flow fundamentally from the child's special vulnerabilities" (Goodin 1985, 33). Here, the idea of vulnerability seems to be extremely appealing, both in terms of the generation of moral responsibilities on the part of parents towards their children as well as the specific contents of the moral duties that follow from them. Human infants and young children, as a particular class of moral patients, are particularly vulnerable to various kinds of neglect and abuse. They can be harmed by the failure of caregivers to provide them with adequate nourishment, shelter, and protection from various sorts of risks and threats, which is why responsible parents "child-proof" their homes.

Young children can also be improved in various ways, for instance, by providing them with educational opportunities, training, and privileges of various kinds through which they can develop their capacities and talents. Their parental or other caregivers are normally believed to have strong moral responsibilities to protect them from harm and to do many things which directly or indirectly benefit those children who are under their care. In this respect it is important to note that the ethics of care extends Goodin's VP by adding to it duties to benefit or improve the subjects of care, rather than only to protect them from harm. The VCP differs from the VP in this important respect. Under the VCP the responsible parties to the vulnerability-care relationship have specific moral duties to benefit the objects of their responsibilities in specific ways. The VCP combines what are commonly thought of duties of beneficence with those of nonmalefience, where both sorts of duties are understood as applying to both acts and omissions.

Duties of nonmaleficence are often thought of as stronger than duties of beneficence, and duties to avoid directly causing others to be at risk of harm are generally thought to be stronger than duties to prevent risks and threats that one did not directly cause. It is a curious fact that the English language seems to lack a specific term that corresponds to "vulnerable" but which means susceptibility to be benefited or made better off than one is.

One might suggest that the term whose meaning is closest to this sense is "corrigible"; to be corrigible is to be susceptible to improvement or benefit, or at least, that is the sense in which I shall employ that term here. So we can also posit a parallel moral relationship of corrigibility:

The Corrigibility Relation: A is corrigible to B with respect to C because of D.

The notion of corrigibility will be useful for discussing what are commonly thought of as duties of beneficence. Given this these terminological stipulations, we can describe in general terms four classes of moral responsibilities to avoid or prevent harm to the vulnerable or to help the corrigible that moral agents can have:

(I) Responsibilities to avoid harming others.

(II) Responsibilities to prevent harm coming to others.

(III) Responsibilities to benefit others.

(IV) Responsibilities to avoid preventing benefits coming to others.

In (I) if B acts in certain ways B would make some moral patient A worse off than they would otherwise have been. In (II) if B refrains from acting in certain ways A would be made worse off than if B had acted in those ways. In (III), by acting B makes A better off than he would have been had B not acted, and in (IV) B would make some moral patient better off than they would otherwise be by not acting. It is also worth noting that in (I) and (III) the agent is the direct cause of the harm or benefit in question, while in (II) and (IV) they are the intervening or indirect cause of the benefit or harm.

Parental responsibilities being the paradigm case for the ethics of care and vulnerability combine all of these kinds of special duties. Parents, can of course, delegate or assign some of their responsibilities to care for their young children to others, e.g. teachers, family members, or day-care workers. It is important to note that responsibilities can in general be delegated or reassigned in this way, which is one reason why I prefer to use the term 'moral responsibility' rather than 'duty'. When a parent delegates or reassigns his or her parental responsibilities, say to a baby-sitter or teacher, the parent or primary caregiver retains a supervisory responsibility to see to it that her designees are capable of adequately discharging the kinds of responsibilities appropriate for those placed under their care.

That the vulnerability of human infants should play a role in shaping the ethical responsibilities of parents or other caregivers carries strong intuitive appeal. The Christian icon of the mother and child is universally understood as representing the special moral relationship of care and vulnerability that exists between mothers and their children. The VCP has a dominant role in understanding and explaining the sorts of special moral responsibilities that mothers and fathers, and perhaps other family members, have toward a certain class of moral patients, infants and young children, who because of their immaturity are specially vulnerable and dependent on others for their care and protection.

But perhaps this not so clear when we consider other types of family relationships. Goodin argues it is implausible to analyze parental responsibilities on the model of promises and contracts where the agent comes to acquire a particular responsibility as the result of his or her own voluntary choices. One generally does not choose ones children in the way one chooses friends, business associates, or others we deal with on a daily basis. But, of course, this does happen sometimes when children are adopted. Other cases in family relations, however, are far from obviously associated with the vulnerability-care model. So let's examine some more of Goodin's arguments for extending the VCP to other kinds of special moral relationships.

Marital Responsibilities

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Marriage seems at first to be a counterexample to the VP and a clear case in which the associated role-related moral responsibilities are voluntarily assumed . But when we look more closely we see evidence to the contrary. When we try to describe marriage merely in terms of a contract, we encounter difficulties; provisions, penalties, terms and many other aspects of a contract are either completely absent or not strictly defined. While it is true that a marriage often looks like, can be acted out as, and can be terminated like, a contract, what must be acknowledged are the mutual dependencies that characterize marriages, whether they are officially recognized by means of marriage licenses or not.

Of course, Goodin says, one should not overlook that, usually, such relations are voluntarily assumed but this more accurately points to how special obligations arise in marriage, and not what their specific content is. Many of the responsibilities which cohabiting partners have towards one another seem to reflect more the fact that they have placed themselves in one another's power emotionally, financially, and physically. Cohabiting spouses, whether they have been legally married or not, have made themselves vulnerable to each other by extending trust to their partners, and it is this mutual vulnerability that accounts for the moral responsibilities and special obligations between spousal partners, rather than any explicit contractual agreements they may have made.

The marriage ceremony and the marriage license, the exchanging of matrimonial vows, only ratify and publicize an interpersonal relationship characterized by intimacy and trust between two persons in which each is made vulnerable in numerous ways to the actions and decisions of their partner. Cohabiting spouses have strong moral responsibilities to care for one another due to these pre-existing relationships of dependency and vulnerability whether or not they have explicitly agreed to abide by a marriage contract or performed a public ceremony of some kind in which they have explicitly exchanged marriage vows.

In a marriage, or other close intimate relationship, the parties to the relationship are mutually vulnerable to one another in many specific ways, and each is depending on the other not to betray their trust. In this sense, marriage partners are specially vulnerable to one another in ways in which they are not vulnerable to other people with whom they have no intimate relationship. To have a relationship based on trust and intimacy is to give another person a certain kind of power over you, a power that they can deploy responsibly or not. Not all aspects of this kind of moral responsibility can be delegated to others; it is often important that one's own partner be the one who cares and not anyone else.

Using parental responsibilities and marital responsibilities as paradigm cases, Goodin attempts to generalize the VP to other kinds of interpersonal relationships: "What seems true for children in particular also seems true for other kin, neighbors, countrymen, and contractors. To some greater or lesser extent, they are all dependent on you to do something for them; and your varying responsibilities toward each of them seem roughly proportional to the degree to which they are, in fact, dependent upon you (and you alone) to perform certain services" (33-34).The moral intuitions upon which this argument rests are strengthened considerably by the qualification inserted parenthetically, that the bearers of the responsibility in question is uniquely able to assume and discharge the responsibility in question towards the beneficiary. This is not always the case, and we must broaden Goodin's account to include shared and collective responsibilities of various kinds. But, as Goodin points out, "[w]hat the vulnerability model emphasizes is not just their special need, however, but also your special ability to help. That is the crucial factor in imposing the duty upon you in particular" (34).

I will take up this suggestion in greater detail at a later stage in the argument, and discuss the forms of power, knowledge, special competences or skills, resources, and positional considerations, which need to be taken into account in order to account for the ascription of special moral responsibilities to particular agents. But for the moment suffice it to note that the existence of a special responsibilities of care generated by a relationship of vulnerability depends both upon the characteristics of the subjects or bearers of those responsibilities as well as those of the beneficiaries or objects of those responsibilities, the C and D arguments in the vulnerability and corrigibility relationships.

In some other kinds of familial relationships we find that individuals have entered roles which they might not have, or at least only partially, chosen. Where this is the case, the inherent responsibilities of that role being voluntarily assumed might be a slightly inaccurate characterization. As was indicated above, where such roles have been self-assumed, it seems that the voluntary nature of assuming such responsibilities answers the specific question as to why we have certain responsibilities to family members, but not, necessarily what these responsibilities include. In such cases, Goodin asserts the vulnerability model as superior in terms of both explaining why we have such responsibilities and what they those responsibilities are and entail. One of the bits of evidence for this assertion is that actions in accordance with self-assumed contractual obligations have the character of narrow reciprocity. Debts are incurred and discharged after which, the parties stand again in the same relation as before the debt was incurred (89). But such a characterization for the special moral relationships that exist among family members, he notes, seems to be "out of place in family relationships" (90). But let's test this by looking at some other familial relationships.

Filial Responsibilities

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One might have a filial responsibility derived from one's role as adult child to care for one's aged and infirm parents, and to do things for them like help them do their shopping. Such filial responsibilities create moral obligations which exist whether or not the agent has explicitly made a promise to the parent to, say, take her shopping on a particular day. These sorts of special responsibilities, filial obligations, are associated with the role occupied by the agent, being someone’s adult child, and one does not choose to enter this role.

An adult child with an aged and vulnerable mother may, of course, also explicitly promise to take their morther shopping on such and such a day. Here in the act of making a promise one has both explicitly acknowledged one's special moral responsibility, which pre‑existed the act of promising, and creates a right on the part of the parent under which she can demand that you fulfill what you have promised to do. The act of promising, in this case, also functions as an ascription of responsibility to a particular agent at a particular time, and this might be needed, for instance, in cases where there is more than one child who shares a filial responsibility towards the parent. The voluntaristic aspect in such cases concerns only the ascription of responsibility (i.e. volunteering to assume a shared responsibility on a particular occasion), and the creation of a correlative right. However, the content of the responsibility itself, the filial obligation to render assistance and care to aged parent who is in need of it, derives not from the promise, but from the vulnerability of the parent and the child's capacity to satisfy her needs, and perhaps also in this case from the notion of gratitude and reciprocity, (one can legitimately question whether an adult who was abused by his parent as a child owes that parent any special filial obligations).

The moral claim of the parent on the child's assistance pre‑exists the act of promising, so that act does not create the obligation, but only acknowledges and specifies it. If I make a promise to my mother to take her shopping, then if I fail to do so, I have both wronged her and have acted wrongly. However, I may still act wrongly if I fail to do this for her, even though I have not explicitly promised her that I would. I may act wrongly towards her if I understand that she is vulnerable to being stranded in her apartment because she is fearful of going out alone, and that she has no one else to turn to who will escort her to the department store. Under such circumstances, the adult child of an aged and infirm parent would have a filial responsibility towards her mother, even when she does not explicitly consent to it. The act of explicitly making a promise discursively legitimizes the underlying moral responsibility, but it does not create it.

Promises and Contracts

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Promises and contracts and other types of explicit agreements provide the paradigm cases for the voluntaristic model of self-assumed moral obligations. Promissory obligations arise exclusively from voluntary acts of consent, as can be seen from the fact that coerced contracts are almost universally unenforceable (43). But, against the dominant view, Goodin argues that promises are nothing more than a way to coordinate behavior by reducing the uncertainty that would prevail in the realm of human action without them. Promises are made so as to allow others to make firm plans of their own by being able to anticipate what it is that a particular agent is going to do.

By making a promise the promisor allows the promisee to behave and plan accordingly; “What makes promises special is not so much that they represent a voluntary act of will on your part, but rather that the expectations about your behavior thereby engendered form crucial components in the plans of others” (44). By inducing such expectations, however, one also makes the other party vulnerable to betrayal. After the words “I promise” are uttered, the promisee is now depending on the promisor to do what has been promised, and when that expectation is not fulfilled he has been betrayed and his trust violated.

In other words, Goodin is arguing that the moral force of special obligations deriving from promises and contracts depends less on the volitional aspect of the act of promise-making than the vulnerability it engenders in the promisee by his reliance on the promisor’s intention to do what had been promised. As Goodin writes, “Special obligations do arise out of our voluntary [self-assumed] commitments. But what makes those obligations morally binding, I argue, is the vulnerabilities that those commitments engender; and those vulnerabilities are only one of many forms of vulnerability to which we should morally respond. Thus, the vulnerability model is a more general one, capable of subsuming and transcending the model of self-assumed obligations” (36).

Although volitional acts of promise-making are often the catalyst in generating such obligations, the vulnerability engendered in promises and contracts is far more important in terms of deriving the content and force of these obligations. Goodin argues for the primacy of the vulnerability concern in our conventional thinking about contracts by making reference to the legal notion of reliance. There can be obligations in the sphere of promises and contracts that are based merely upon one’s reliance (without an explicit contract or promise) upon another. Here Goodin notes that, “When one realizes that another is or may come under a misapprehension as to the authority of his agent or the ownership of his property - a misapprehension for which he is not at fault his duty to give information is a duty of care.”

That reasonable reliance on the intentions of another creates an implied obligation reinforces the idea that what is of primary importance concerning contracts and promises is the fact that an agent has rendered himself vulnerable to the actions of another by forming the conviction that that agent will make good on his expressed intentions.

Most often, this is the result of a specific promise or contract. But, it can also result from expressed intentions, intentions that induce others to act upon them where the agent has made no effort to qualify his intentions (i.e. asserting that it is very likely that he will not do what he has indicated in passing, etc.) We can see in such instances that the voluntaristic model cannot account for this common sense notion of moral responsibility, unless one relies on some notion like that of a tacit promise. Clearly, we generally ascribe a type of responsibility to a moral agent B who allows another moral agent A to believe and plan according to intentions that have been expressed by B. On the self-assumed voluntaristic model such considerations can be defended only with some difficulty due to the fact that there seems to have been no voluntarily assumed obligation on the agent’s part, yet B is responsible to A nonetheless because A is vulnerable and is depending on B to do that which he is relying on him to do.

The idea of contracts as fundamental elements of ethical and political theories should be familiar to most of us. The Enlightenment philosophers thought of government as being founded on a “social contract” and contractarianism is still an important feature of contemporary accounts of justice, such as that of John Rawls. Contracts are also regarded as the very foundation of business relationships, and some authors even think of corporations and other nonhuman social and economic agents as nothing more than an “nexus of contracts.”

But, Goodin argues that when we look beneath the surface we can see that there are a number of constraints placed upon contractual dealings that reveal that they depend upon the notion of vulnerability. For instance, in business relationships the legal codes that express duties of employers to employees reflects the relative vulnerability of employees in these relationships. We can see the same considerations within the law constraining the relationship between businesses and their customers. Although no explicit contractual obligations exist between business organizations and consumer, the law does place a heavy burden on business to protect certain interests of vulnerable stakeholders such as consumers. One such example is the special liability of a seller of products for the physical harm to users or customers. Sellers of goods to the public have special responsibilities towards consumers of their products to take reasonable steps to ensure that those products are safe and will not harm the health of their customers. Business enterprises, and those who work for them, have a variety of other kinds of social responsibilities which are not derived from contractual relationships nor imposed by legal requirements. This is a topic which we will explore in some detail when we discuss the notion of corporate social responsibility.

If Goodin's account of the moral force of promises and contracts is correct, or at least partly so, then it represents a major insight about the nature of moral responsibilities. It implies that many of the sorts of moral obligations which we normally understand to be based on contractual arrangements are in fact really based on the vulnerability-care relationship. If this is true, then the VCP begins to emerge as a plausible candidate for the status of a fundamental principle of normative ethics, one capable of bridging the private realm of the family and friends, with the public realm of social and political relationships among strangers.

Professional Responsibilities

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Goodin also defends the vulnerability model in the case of those special responsibilities found in professional relationships. We can look at the relationships between professionals, e.g., doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., and their clients as being shaped by the relative vulnerability of those clients to the actions and choices of the persons occupying the professional role.

Professionals generally speaking have strong duties to protect the interests of their clients, and these responsibilities often entail both duties of nonmaleficence and duties of beneficence. There are three factors Goodin sees as pointing to the fact that the specific duties of this type of special relationship are governed by vulnerability. First, if the relationship were merely contractual, it could not fully explain the fact that contracts drawn between the two parties are fixed to standard form. There is very little permission to negotiate terms between the involved parties themselves alone. Second, while professionals are free to serve whomever they choose, they must respond to any request for assistance in an emergency. Third, terminating a contract is more difficult for a professional; for instance, in a therapeutic relationship significant notice must be given to client, no neglect can occur, and extended time must be given for the client to secure an alternative.

These factors point directly to the unequal relationship between professional and client. This inequality, Goodin claims, stems from the high degree of specialized knowledge possessed by the professional, and the fact that the client is attempting to secure a basic need (health, legal status, education, etc.) whereas the professional is not, Further, it is usually easier for a professional to find other clients whereas the same may not be true for the client in finding other professionals. Goodin states it most clearly in saying that "clients are and must necessarily be relying upon professionals to protect them in crucial ways" (66). This, once again, points to the vulnerability model's ability to better explain such responsibilities. Goodin states that it is trust rather than mere contract that shapes these kinds of relationships (67). In essence, the client, who is usually the weaker party to the relationship, depends upon the professional in ways that the latter does not depend on the former. The patient must trust her doctor to do what his professional responsibilities require whether or not he has given her an explicit promise to do so.

Relationships between professionals of various kinds and their patients or clients exhibit the general characteristics of the vulnerability-care relationship: they are asymmetrical in that the parties to these relationships are unequal in power to affect one another's interests; one party has special knowledge or skills that can affect the well-being of the more vulnerable party for good or for ill; and the vulnerable party is in some way specially dependent on the professionals' exercise of responsible care in order to secure some aspect of his or her interest or well-being that she cannot secure by self-help alone. In cases such as these, the VCP predicts that the dominant or stronger party to the relationship has special moral responsibilities to protect the interests of those who are vulnerable and are depending upon them for their care. This kind of moral responsibility arises because of the name of the relationship between the parties, and does not depend upon there being explicit or assumed consent.

The Stranger Ethic

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It might be objected at this point that in all of the examples given thus far there has been some kind of pre-existing interpersonal relationship among the parties to the vulnerability relationship. But what about strangers? Does the VP help us to understand the kinds of special moral responsibilities involved in helping strangers who are urgently in need of assistance, with whom we are in no special pre-existing social relationship?

Goodin considers the case suggested by Flathman (1972, 214) in which "the seriously injured A instructs B (a perfect stranger, but the only person about) to call an ambulance for him; neither the legitimacy of A's request nor B's obligation to comply with it depends on B's consent" (34). Goodin argues that "under such conditions, B has special responsibilities to which he did not consent and which are not self-assumed in any sense of that term….It is dependency and vulnerability rather than voluntary acts of will which give rise to these, our most fundamental moral duties."

He also notes that the moral responsibility that arises for B on account of A's vulnerability and dependence depends upon conditions generally assumed to be the case within the particular moral community to which they both belong. In many ancient societies, there arose a "stranger ethic" that attached particular moral importance to hospitality; the Bible, for instance, instructs us not to oppress the strangers among us.

Goodin explain this as deriving from the fact that in ancient times travel was a very dangerous activity and there were not then in existence rest stops, restaurants, and motels that catered to the needs of the traveler by extending hospitality to them for a price. Rather, travelers were by and large dependent on the hospitality of strangers. But that has changed and "traveler are now less vulnerable to the ravages of nature and less dependent upon random hosts for shelter" (35). As a result, we no longer feel it is so important to extend our hospitality to traveling strangers, although in some cases, that older ethos can be revived when travelers are stranded or in some special conditions of need of vulnerability as in the case of the injured party in Flathman's example, or in the case of refugees who are fleeing their homes to avoid violent conflict or natural disasters. The Good Samaritan helps those in need of assistance who are depending on them without there being any prior act of voluntary consent, because he or she understands that doing so derives from their social responsibility as members of a moral community. This insight provide the beginnings of an account of how social responsibilities to protect the vulnerable can be understood within the vulnerability-care framework.

Although Goodin goes on to analyze the moral responsibilities involved in other kinds of special relationships, such as those of friendship, as being better accounted for by the vulnerability model of responsibility, I will suspend further discussion of his examples and arguments at this time. I trust that this preliminary discussion has served the end of making the VCP at least plausible as an account of the origin and basis of many special moral responsibilities.

The VCP is subject to a variety of potent criticisms which I have not yet discussed. For instance, it can, it seems, lead to a overly paternalistic or patronizing attitude towards certain social relationships. Moreover, it is not at all clear how considerations of vulnerability relate to questions of justice. Neither is it obvious how the VP can help us decide among conflicting moral obligations. I want to postpone consideration of these and other objections to a later stage in the argument.

Theoretical Significance of the VCP

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Before moving on I would like to briefly discuss the potential philosophical significance of the vulnerability-care model as presented thus far. The ethics of vulnerability and care and the VCP is theoretically attractive because it suggest that many of our commonly-held beliefs about special moral obligations in the spheres of the family, regarding contracts/promises, and business and professional relationships can be viewed as derived from considerations of the vulnerability and dependence of the objects of these responsibilities, and the practice and value of care on the parts of their bearers. In other words, many types of special moral responsibilities that we commonly accept and act in accordance with on a daily basis can be explained at least in part by the fact that there is a moral patient is vulnerable and is dependent on others for their care. If this insight is correct it seems that we can posit stronger evaluative reasons, if not motivational ones as well, for elevating the importance of the social responsibilities we might have regarding ill, impoverished, or persecuted people living in other countries, future persons who are temporally distant from us, and threatened nonhuman species and the ecosystems on which their survival and well-being depends.

The VCP might, for instance, help to explain and justify the widely held moral intuition behind the project of global humanitarian relief. Is it appropriate to believe that people living relatively comfortable, affluent, and secure lives have special moral responsibilities to come to the aid of other people, far away, whose homes and livelihoods have been suddenly destroyed by a cyclone, an earthquake, flood, or tsunami? Many people do in fact respond morally to such natural catastrophes with generosity and compassion. Why should they? They have made no promises or entered into any voluntary agreements to aid those in need. Rather, they respond conscientiously because they feel the pull of a social responsibility to protect the vulnerable and understand that while they are not uniquely placed to help those in need, they can contribute something of value to ameliorate and remedy a situation of helplessness and vulnerability which they did not create. This moral response, the caring response, is a fundamental feature of the moral life, and is rightly considered a moral virtue which should be cultivated as supported. Caring, in this context, is part of an emerging cosmopolitan ethic in which national borders, ethnic, religious, or linguistic differences among individuals do not matter. What does matter is that we regard all living human beings on the planet as members of a single moral community.

In light of the vulnerability-care model, we might also view it as wrong to appropriate the world's nonrenewable resources for our exclusive use knowing that future generations will be disadvantaged if we do so. Morally speaking, many people believe we should not take advantage of the fact that future generations cannot voice objections to any of our current practices because they do not yet exist and cannot know that we are making their position disadvantageous. Future persons are vulnerable to us in ways in which we are not vulnerable to them. We might see it as morally wrong to be aware of the fact that, without our moral concern, future generations will suffer various sorts of harms, such as for instance are predicted to result from global warming, and fail to prevent them (even though we are the only ones in a position to do so), even when the cost to us would not be grave. The vulnerability-care principle would seem to indicate that we can have in such cases a social responsibility to protect those who are particularly vulnerable and dependent on our choices and actions, even when they cannot reciprocate. In this case, distance in time, not only in space, appears to make no difference in the nature of our moral responsibilities towards future generations. We the living can have moral responsibilities towards those who will come after us, not because we agreed to accept them, or because we have a social contract between us and persons who do not now (and may never) exist, but because, whomever comes after us is now in a position of relative vulnerability to us since they cannot affect our well-being while we can affect theirs.

Vulnerability seems to be one of those ethical principles which carries both justificatory weight as well as motivational strength. However, the most significant problem with this sort of motivation as applied to concern for future generations is the difficulty in assessing how and to what extent future generations are vulnerable to our present actions. Truly, there can be little argument that they depend upon us for the world that they will inherit, but the question remains is how far can such a motivation go in terms of distance into the future and perceived need of those living in it, as well as the extent to which members of the current generation should sacrifice their own well-being in light of such considerations.

But if we think that we, as member of society, do have some special moral responsibilities towards members of future generations of human beings, these responsibilities cannot it seems be accounted for on the voluntaristic model. Future people, because they do not yet exist, cannot be parties to a contract or a promise. If we owe them anything, morally speaking, it must be for some other reason.

Similar considerations arise with respect to the relationship between human beings and other biological organisms. Because of our technological prowess we humans have become the masters of the earth, and to a significant extent, the well-being and survival of other living species now depends upon our choices and actions. That other species are vulnerable to us and dependent on our choices and actions, might provide a moral reason for our taking steps to ensure that their habitats are protected, and that they can continue to flourish in whatever ways are appropriate to their natures. According to the vulnerability principle we can acquire special moral responsibilities towards non-human species to protect their interests and well-being, even though, like infants, the mentally impaired and infirm, and members of future generations, they cannot function as parties to contractual agreements. Contracts and promises can be made between moral agents who enjoy equal moral status and they engender rights and reciprocal responsibilities.

But some moral responsibilities arise as well between moral agents and moral patients who are unequal in moral status and in which the moral responsibilities generated are asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. If we are to provide an account for the intuitions that many people have that such moral responsibilities do exist, then the vulnerability-care principle provides at least a plausible theory of how we can think about these kinds of moral responsibilities.

From Responsibilities to Rights

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Before moving on to refine and develop the theoretical framework that I have only sketched up to this point, I want to mention one other potentially interesting point about the theoretical significance of the VCP.

Thus far we have been looking at the VCP from the point of view of a moral agent who is a position to care for and protect others who are vulnerable and dependent upon them. In such cases, the VCP predicts that the more powerful agent(s) should acquire special moral responsibilities to protect the interests of the weaker and more vulnerable parties to the relationship, particularly when those vulnerable others cannot protect their own interests and are in some ways dependent on others for their care and protection. But what happens when we turn this situation around and look at the matter from the point of view of oneself being the vulnerable party?

In this case, the VCP prescribes that one should regard oneself as entitled to certain kinds of care and protection from others. If one finds oneself in a position of relative vulnerability and dependence, then according to the VCP, one has a moral claim to the care and protection of others. In some cases, these sorts of claims can be addressed to specific others who are in special relationships with oneself, such as ones parents, doctors, teachers, and so forth, while in other cases the moral claims generated by the VCP can be addressed to society at large. If I am specially vulnerable and am depending on others, then I can claim that society has a responsibility to organize some form of care and protection that benefits me.

This insight I believe, suggest a way in which rights can arise from responsibilities. Rights are, at least in part, moral claims that persons advance against other members of society that invoke the responsibility to protect and care for vulnerable others. Thinking that the moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable precedes the existence of a right to claim social protection against some standard threats to ones liberty or well-being, then, offers an explanation for human rights that does not rely on either God or nature nor merely on social conventions. Rights, on this view, derive from the moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable.

If there is a fundamental moral responsibility to protect vulnerable members of one's moral community, then the right to be protected and to claim protection as one's moral right is logically prior to the existence of any social contract among members of society which serves to legitimize these moral relationships. There do indeed come to be moral and legal conventions that we agree upon that recognize specific rights and responsibilities, but from the perspective of the ethics of responsibility, rights derive from considerations of relative power and vulnerability. This turns on its head the standard view of rights in which rights are regarded as theoretically fundamental and are seen as providing the moral and/or legal basis for various kinds of social responsibilities.

The idea that a having a right gives its holder the moral basis to make a claim to social protection against certain kinds of threats can then be seen as the flipside of the social responsibility to protect the vulnerable. In cases in which the right-holder is vulnerable to harm and is depending on other members of society to come to his aid when he is under various kinds of threat, the VCP predicts that other members of his moral community have a standing moral responsibility to protect him. If there is such a standing moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable members of the moral community, particularly when their survival, well-being or freedom is threatened in a serious way, then when I am threatened I can claim social protection. So my right to social protection derives from the social responsibility to protect the vulnerable borne by other members of my moral community.

The human rights violations and abuses that are considered to be 'standard threats' to human freedom and well-being represent lessons learned from historical experiences of oppression in which large numbers of persons have in fact been deprived of these goods and few if any other members of society attempted to protect them. Vulnerability to human rights abuses must then be understood in a particular rather than in a general and abstract sense to refer to specific kinds of harms that persons have been subjected to in our historical experience, for instance, the threat of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, the threat of torture, the threat of religious persecution, the threat of economic deprivation, the threat of disenfranchisement, and so forth.

Human rights are designed to afford individuals some degree of social protection against these specific kinds of standard threats, particularly when the threats originate because of acts or omissions by governments. But rights are effective normative instruments only to the extent that other members of society respond to the moral claims made in their name. It is the regularity and reliability of the social response to the moral and legal claims that rights provide that determines whether or not human rights are operative or only aspirational.

In other words, without a set of institutions that discharges the social responsibility to protect the vulnerable, human rights provide only the moral basis for claims to social protection, not the protection itself. A menu is not the same thing as a meal. Which is why the most important challenge for the global human rights movement in the twenty-first century is to create and support rights-implementing institutions and thereby make human rights operational for all the people of the earth. In order for this to happen, more people must be made aware of their social responsibilities to protect others against human rights violations and abuses.

Drilling Down

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At this stage in the argument it is necessary to begin to develop and refine the theoretical framework I have only sketched thus far. In order to do this we must, as philosophers like to say, "drill down" into certain issues and ideas that I have used to construct the preceding narrative about the relationship among vulnerability, responsibility, rights, and a global ethics.

Drilling down requires that we sharpen our conceptual and linguistic tools and provide more precise analyses of key theoretical concepts such as "moral agents", "moral patients", "responsibilities", "rights", and other notions that will play important theoretical roles as I refine and extend the Vulnerability-Care framework further.

It will also be necessary to make some forays into the realm of metaethics in order to better understand how the kind of account I am developing relates to other approaches to ethical theory, and also how it relates to various topics and issues in applied or practical ethics.

So in the next set of posts I am going to be doing some philosophical sharpening and drilling. I want to begin with a discussion of the key concept of "responsibility" as this is central to the entire philosophical project I am engaged with here in attempting to describe an ethics of global responsibility.

The Meanings of 'Responsibility'

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The concept of responsibility is one of the most important yet also one of the most complex notions in the moral idiom. An analysis of the many ways in which the term "responsibility" is used reveals many partially overlapping but distinct senses of the term.

We speak of persons as "being responsible" for their actions, meaning that they can be held accountable for them, can be the proper objects of moral praise or blame, and may become liable for punishment or to pay compensation. Persons can also be said to "accept responsibility" for the effects of their actions, as when they acknowledge their guilt for having caused some harm or broken a moral rule. We also speak of persons as "having responsibilities" related to their interpersonal roles, such as those of parents or lovers, and also having responsibilities related to their jobs, occupations, professions, and other their other roles in society such as those of citizens.

People are sometime said to "take responsibility" for either themselves or for others, meaning that they enter a particular role in which they attempt to bring about certain outcomes. We also use the term to describe a character trait as when we call someone a "responsible" person and mean that they possess certain kinds of virtues, e.g., trustworthiness or conscientiousness. In this sense responsibility is a kind of virtue: a responsible person can be relied upon to do what is called for and what is right.

We also speak of people as being "responsible to" others, such as those in positions of authority over them, and "responsible for" the performance of certain tasks or accomplishing certain goals. People often complain of being burdened with too many responsibilities and often view responsibilities as limiting their freedom. Yet sometimes people seek greater responsibility because by accepting responsibility one can also sometimes gain greater power and authority.

Judging from this brief survey of some common uses of the term "responsibility," it appears that there, in fact, may be no single core meaning of "responsibility" to provide conceptual unity for an "ethics of global responsibility." There no such thing as the problem of responsibility; there are various problems about responsibility connected with various meanings and uses of the term.

I begin, therefore, with a brief survey of some of the main senses of "responsible," "responsible for," "responsible to," and "responsibility" in order to sharpen the linguistic tools needed for our inquiry. This survey is offered only as a descriptive analysis intended to mark the main ways in which the term is used in contemporary moral discourse. It does not purport to provide a theoretical analysis of the concept of responsibility, or to address questions of substance concerning how certain types of moral responsibilities arise or are ought to be understood, the topic that will be addressed once we have a clear idea of which concept of responsibility we are talking about.

The analysis of the meanings of “responsibility” offered here distinguishes the following main senses: (1) causal responsibility, (2) agent responsibility, (3) responsibility as accountability, (4) responsibility as liability or culpability, (5) responsibilities as moral obligations, (6) role‑related responsibilities, (7) social responsibilities, and (8) responsibility as a virtue. I will examine each of these senses of the term "responsibility," with the goal of explaining how these various meanings of "responsibility' relate to the the VCP and to the larger project of constructing an ethics of global responsibility.

Causal Responsibility

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Perhaps the root notion of responsibility concerns the sense in which we use the term to indicate mere causal efficacy as when we say things like, "The leaking value is responsible for the water in the basement," or "An infestation of locusts was responsible for poor crop production and starvation in Eastern Africa last year."

In these cases we attribute responsibility, in the sense of causal efficacy, without also imputing agency or intentionality to the cause. The causal sense of responsibility differs from the moral senses of the term in that it carries no implication of praise or blame. Responsibility in this sense has to do with mere happenings rather than with doings. Non-agentive causal factors can be said to be 'responsible' for producing effects in this basic sense of the term.

The locust infestation case represents agent causality. As living beings, locusts are agents, that is, they act autonomously and their actions evince a certain purpose that is, in this case, built into their biological program. Locusts, like other living things, need to take in energy from their environments in order to survive and reproduce. The locusts did not intend to cause human beings to starve; they only intended to feed themselves. While it is possible to impute agency and a kind of intentionality to things like locusts, we do not treat them as moral agents, that is, we do not hold them responsible for their actions in the moral sense of having liability and being subject to moral blame. The question of how far down the tree of life agency and intentionality go is a difficult and complex one. I will discuss it later on in the sections on agency and intrinsic value. But for the time being it suffices to note that non-human agents can be responsible in the causal sense but not also in the moral sense.

When applied to human beings attributions of responsibility can sometimes take this form, that is, agentive causal efficacy, as when we say an infant was responsible for spilling some milk on the rug. The infant did not spill the milk intentionally or deliberately, but the infant is responsible for spilling it nonetheless, but only in the causal sense. This is an example of agent causality but without any imputation of intentionality or purpose.

In law, the insanity defense rests on the possibility of distinguishing among cases in which the agent acted knowingly and intentionally, in which case they are held morally responsible for the consequences of their actions, from cases where the actions were unknowing, unintended, or compelled, even though the defendant may have been causally responsible for some harm.

Even fully competent moral agents may sometimes be causally responsible for producing effects though they did not intend them nor deliberately act to produce them, as when we accidentally knock over the coffee mug. The idea expressed by this sense of responsibility can also be applied in cases in which the subject of responsibility is a person, however, except for cases such as those noted above, when applied to persons there is normally also an attribution of intentionality and moral agency that goes along with the assertion of causal efficacy.

The assumption of intentionality and moral agency is generally held to be necessary to ground ascriptions of moral, as opposed to mere causal responsibility, and is seen as a necessary precondition for the further ascription of "responsibility" in the senses of "accountability", "culpability", or "liability."

However, it is important to note that not all attributions of responsibility in the senses of accountability or liability presuppose causal responsibility. We may, for instance, hold a military officer liable for the actions of a soldier under his command, even though the officer was not the cause of those actions himself. While responsibilities, in the moral sense, are limited by the range of our causal powers, that is, by the range of effects which we have produced or can causally influence, there is no necessary connection between an agent being the cause of some effect X and his being morally responsible for it.

Ascriptions of liability, culpability, and blame require the presumption of moral agency, which in turn requires the presumption of intentionality as well as further conditions such as whether the act was a voluntary one or done under duress, whether the actor did or should have foreseen the consequence, and assumptions about the agent’s moral competence. Moral agency is also a necessary condition of being the bearer of moral duties and obligations. But it is not a necessary condition of being the object of the moral duties and obligations of others. Things which can function as the direct objects of moral duties and obligations I call "moral patients." Moral agents can also be moral patients, but moral patients need not also be moral agents. I will drill down further into the meaning of these terms in other posts.

Liability Responsibility

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Moral responsibility, as opposed to mere causal responsibility, for actions is applied to agents only when several psychological conditions have been fulfilled.

The main conditions usually assayed for ascriptions of moral responsibility in the sense of liability are: (1) intentionality, (2) voluntariness, (3) being able to give an account of one's actions (4) being able to have done otherwise, (5) being able to tell right from wrong, (6) foreknowledge of probable consequences, and (7) causal efficacy. Moral agents may be excused from moral responsibility for their actions if one or another of these conditions are not present at the time of the act, e.g. if they did not in fact cause an effect, or if the consequences of their acts or omissions could not have reasonably been foreseen, or if they were at the time not able to do otherwise, or not able to distinguish right from wrong.

Moral responsibility applies only if an agent possesses certain normal psychological capacities of understanding, reasoning, and control over his own behavior, the possession of which is commonly held to be a precondition of the appropriateness of moral praise or blame. Ascriptions of liability responsibility are mainly retrospective; they function to ground moral evaluations of the past actions of presumptive moral agents.

Determining whether or not a moral agent is liable for a past action is related to the notion of accountability. Moral agents can be asked to give an account of why they have done or not done a certain thing. In some cases, the agent may be able to present an acceptable excuse or justification for their action which may have the effect of reducing or removing his moral liability to blame or punishment. Thus, one can be accountable for one's actions without also being liable for them. When an agent is found to be liable for some kind of moral wrong we say that she is culpable. Moral agents who are culpable for wrongful actions, however, may still not be punished or blamed, because they may be forgiven.

To be forgiven is not the same thing as to be excused. Forgiveness presupposes that the agent was iiable to be blamed and was in fact culpable for some wrong. To excuse someone from a moral obligation, on the other hand, means that there is some reason why the agent should not be held liable or culpable for not doing what they ought to have done. Many kinds of reasons can be exculpatory, for instance, the agent may have lacked the power to do what was morally required, or may have had other, stronger moral obligations to fulfill that prevented her from doing it. The ability to give an account of the reasons for one's actions, then, plays a crucial role in ascriptions of liability responsibility. When we use moral language in an evaluative, backward-looking way, then we want to know why an presumptive moral agent did or failed to do something that might ordinarily be considered something she ought or ought not do.

This is one reason why we do not generally ascribe liability responsibility to nonhuman animals, nor to human infants and young children -- they lack the ability to give an account of their actions. Some other categories of moral patients, for instance, those who are psychotic or in comas, also lack this capacity, and so are not held liable for their actions in the same way in which competent moral agents, generally speaking, human adults, are. Since most human adults are competent moral agents, we generally expect them to be able to give an account of why they have acted in the ways that they have, and those reasons are then factored into our moral evaluation of their behavior.

A great deal of the literature of moral philosophy and of law deals with understanding the precise contours of the notion of liability responsibility. The notion of liability responsibility is connected with metaphysical questions, for instance, the notion of free will, and is vital for understanding the legal notions such as culpability for harms or liability for damages produced by one's action on others.

The philosopher Iris Marion Young contrasts the notion of liability responsibility with a different idea of responsibility that she calls 'political responsibility' but which I prefer to call 'social responsibility'. In drawing this distinction she notes that, The most common model of assigning responsibility derives from legal reasoning and is used to find guilt or fault for harm.

Under the fault model, one assigns liability responsibility to particular moral agents whose actions can be shown as causally connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought The agent that produces harm can be a person or a collective agent, such as a corporation (Young 2004, 368).

Liability responsibility can be further divided into fault liability and strict liability. In the former case one assumes that the agent knowingly and voluntarily engaged in behaviors that caused harm to others, while on the strict liability interpretation a person or collective agent can be held to be liable for action that caused harm even if they did not specifically intend the harm.

Both the fault and strict notions of liability responsibility are essentially backward-looking. They function in moral discourse as a mean of assigning blame for past actions, and in judicial proceedings for determining punishment or compensation for past crimes or torts.

Furthermore, according to Young, liability responsibility “has the function of absolving other agents who might have been candidates for fault…. and usually implies that others who were accused are not guilty” (368). This feature of liability responsibility is not also a feature of the notion of social or political responsibilities which can be shared without diminishing the responsibility of other agents. For political, or what am calling social responsibility, my having these kinds of responsibilities does not diminish or excuse you of your similar but perhaps not identical social responsibilities.
While it is necessary to understand the notion of liability responsibility, is it only of marginal interest to us here. Rather, the primary sense in which I shall be using the term “responsibility” is in the forward-looking sense in which moral agents are said have certain "responsibilities", in the sense of moral obligations, that direct them to the attainment of certain ends concerning other moral agents and towards moral patients. This is the substantive and prospective sense of the term in which moral responsibilities guide the actions of competent moral agents towards the attainment of certain ends or direct them to perform certain duties.

While the conditions for competent moral agency used in the retrospective, evaluative sense of "responsibility" can also be employed as a criterion for who can qualify as a bearer of substantive moral responsibilities, moral agency alone does not tell us in particular what these obligations are, or to whom they are owed. Moral agency, which is the precondition of both liability responsibility and normative moral responsibility thus lacks substantive normative content since it does not specify the ends of moral action, nor its proper objects, nor how moral responsibilities are assigned to particular moral agents. All it tells us is that the agent in question can be presumed to be a moral agent, that is, the sort of thing to which moral obligations and duties, 'responsibilities' in the sense, can be meaningfully ascribed.

Moral Responsibilities and Duties

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A person may be causally responsible for a certain action although that action is not the subject of a moral evaluation. I may, for example, decide to dig a hole in my backyard in order to plant a bush, and in doing so satisfy all of the conditions for moral agency and liability responsibility, yet my action would still be morally neutral on account of its being neither required nor prohibited by any moral duty.

Generally speaking, we only inquire into an individual's moral agency and liability responsibility when his actions or their consequences become the subject of a moral evaluation, that is, when what he does or does not do something that a moral observer might consider as a subject for moral praise or blame. Thus while substantive moral responsibilities, responsibilities in the sense of moral obligations or duties, are distinct from ascriptions of liability responsibility, they inform judgments of the latter kind by specifying the general sorts of conditions under which we are concerned to make them.

These different senses of 'responsibility' are reflected in our use of the terms "not responsible" (or "nonresponsible") and "irresponsible." When we say that someone is "not responsible" it can mean either, they did not cause something, their are not liable for some kind of blame, or they lack moral competence. When we call someone "irresponsible", we are saying that they are not fulfilling a moral duty or obligation. Only those individuals who have substantive moral responsibilities can act irresponsibly. One has responsibilities, in this sense, when, "The well‑being, the interest, the fate of others has, by circumstance or agreement, come under my care, which means that my control over it involves at the same time my obligation for it. The exercise of the power with disregard of the obligation is, then, `irresponsible'" (Jonas 1984, 93).

Jonas illustrates this concept of responsibility with the example of a ship's captain being responsible for the well‑being and safety of the ship's passengers. The captain has responsibility for the safety of the passengers because of the office he occupies, and the powers that office gives him to affect his passengers’ well-being, creates for him a moral responsibility to protect them. The notion of moral responsibility used here is similar to the notions of duty and obligation, and many people employ these terms as synonyms. So, in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, try substituting the words “duty” and “obligation” for the word “responsibility.”

However, there are some nuances of meaning that are worth attending to among these terms. As Robert Goodin has noted, “Responsibilities are to consequentialistic ethics what duties are to deontological ones. Duties dictate actions. Responsibilities dictate results” ("Responsibilities." The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 36, No. 142, p.50). As he explains this idea, “Both duties and responsibilities are prescriptions of the general form: A ought to see to it that X, where A is some agent and X some state of affairs.” However, in the case of duties, the state of affairs, X, is some action of A’s own doing, while in the case of responsibilities the X clause need not refer to specific actions on the part of A. In the case of responsibilities, the agent A can delegate his or her responsibilities to others.

So, while the ship’s captain has the responsibility to steer the ship so as to avoid hitting icebergs, he can delegate this duty to his first officer. The captain’s responsibility includes seeing to it that the ship does not hit an iceberg, that is a particular state of affairs to be avoided, but he can fulfill his responsibility to bring about this state of affairs by delegating the actual steering to others. When he does so, Goodin says, the captain retains supervisory responsibility, in that he must see to it that those to whom he delegates his responsibility act in the appropriate ways. What matters for responsibilities is that a certain outcome or state of affairs be obtained, not who is doing what specific actions in order to obtain them.

This difference between the concepts of "duty" and "responsibility" bears on the choice of one’s fundamental ethical theory. The notion that morally right action consists in acting in accordance with duty is the central notion of traditional Kantian deontological ethics. Consequentialist theories in ethics, on the other hand, assume that the goal of moral action is to bring about certain outcomes in the world. The notion of responsibility, used as Goodin does, splits the difference between these traditional views by holding that moral agents have various kinds of moral responsibilities which require them to see to it that certain consequences obtain or are avoided or that certain actions are performed. The emphasis on duties of the individual only arises incidentally not essentially in moral action descriptions

The traditional notion of duty has acquired a certain puritanical flavor that tends to put some people off. When we speak of a person's duties we generally mean specific demands for action that are placed upon their wills by others or by external forces. Duty has come to suggest action in which the agent merely complies or in which he or she acts heteronomously, that is, in accordance with the will of another. Responsibilities, on the other hand, when understood in the normative sense, denote obligations which can be are often are self-assumed and which are highly discretionary. The moral agent is viewed as someone who "responds" in the morally appropriate ways through free decisions of her own, often without there being any external authority or sanction which would compel her to do so.

A responsible mother, for instance, takes care to ensure her child is furnished with a variety of goods that are necessary to his well-being and development. No one is commanding to perform particular actions; she is acting responsibility in her maternal role by doing things for her child that a reasonable person would expect would be beneficial and healthy. Her aim is to bring about certain states of the world in which her child is protected from harm and is in fact benefited in various ways. While moral attitudes of care and love are the typical motives for such behavior, what matters to our moral evaluation of her actions is not her intentions nor her mental states, but whether or not a reasonable person would regard something that she has done as likely to bring about certain kinds of effects in the world, effects that should be sought or avoided.

For instance, a mother who leaves her infant locked in a car in his car seat while she goes into a beauty shop to have her nails done, would normally be thought of as irresponsible, in the moral sense, and might become liable for blame or punishment even if no actual harm befalls her child. She would certainly be asked to give an account of why she had done such a stupid thing, and for this purpose, her mental state at the time and her intentions might be relevant. But for a moral observer who is judging her action, what matters is whether what she did would be considered by a reasonable person as having placed her child at risk of serious harm. Children are specially vulnerable, and the VCP ascribes to their caregivers, and in fact all other moral agents, the responsibility to protect children from harm.

While the difference between duty and responsibility is perhaps not uniformly reflected in the way ordinary people use these terms, it does mark what I shall take to be a significant moral difference. It is the difference between saying, for instance, "Obeying the law is a civic duty." and saying, "Voting is a civic responsibility." In the former case, society arranges for there to be authorities, police, judges, and so forth, who will enforce obedience to the laws, so that whenever someone does obey the law it is never clear whether they do so because of fear of social sanction, or because they freely chose to do so. But with respect to voting, where no law (at least in the United States) compels one to register and to vote, there is not this same ambiguity.

While individuals have the moral discretion to choose whether or not to vote, there is also a clear sense in which people ought to choose to vote. When someone does vote, we feel that the reason they did so was because they freely chose to exercise that right and assumed the responsibility that goes with it for making an informed choice. There is, thus, an element of voluntarism and discretion in the notion of responsible action which often seems lacking in the notion of acting on a duty.

While the distinction between these two concepts is not always clear in the way in which we use these terms in ordinary language, as I shall use these terms, responsibilities provide grounds for duties. Both duties and responsibilities are kinds of moral obligations, but the notion of responsibility is the more basic. Duties are actions that are chosen because they fulfill or help to discharge a moral agent’s responsibilities. So, in the case of the negligent mother, we can say that she had a duty not to leave her child unattended in the car while she went into the beauty shop. A number of particular actions, such as taking her child with her into the shop, or leaving the child in the care of a grandparent or baby sitter, would have served to fulfill her responsibility to protect her child from harm.

Agents normally have some discretion in choosing which particular actions they will employ in order to adequately discharge their moral responsibilities. It is the discretionary nature of responsibilities and their goal-directedness that makes them a better candidate for a theory of the nature normative obligations in my view.

Role-Related Responsibilities

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In the example of the ship's captain being responsible for the safety of his passengers, we are using the term 'responsibility' in the role-related normative sense. It is this sense of responsibility we use when we say that parents are responsible for the care of their children, doctors are responsible for the care of their patients, and that teachers are responsible for the education of their students. In this sense of "responsibility" persons who occupy particular roles or offices are said to be responsible for the proper management of the affairs associated with the offices or roles they occupy.

Everyone who occupies a socially-defined role has responsibilities of this kind, and persons can also acquire responsibilities of this type by entering into interpersonal relationships such as love and friendship. Role‑related responsibilities cut across the distinction between private and public roles; we can have responsibilities associated with our private roles as friend, spouse, or parent, and we can also have responsibilities associated with our public roles as citizens and as members of society, in our particular professions or jobs, or associated with the voluntary offices or roles we enter.

Unlike retrospective responsibilities as liabilities which moral agents incur through their past actions, role‑related responsibilities are always to some degree future‑oriented: they impose constraints on moral agents which guide the performance of their private and public roles in society. We say, for instance, the Department Chairman is responsible for the management of the departmental budget; the store clerk is responsible for seeing that the shelves are neatly stacked with goods; the tennis court manager is responsible for scheduling court time for members, and so on. When understood in this way, having a role-related responsibility grounds attributions of duties, that is, the commission or prohibition of certain kinds of acts. An office‑holder is said to be irresponsible if they omit the performance of tasks which it is their responsibility to perform. Role‑related responsibilities, then, are defined primarily in terms of the sorts of outcomes which are required of persons who occupy particular offices or roles.

However, not everyone has precisely the same set of role-related responsibilities, and some of the responsibilities that are associated with ones roles do not carry any moral special significance, although a person's diligence or lack thereof in fulfilling his or her task or role responsibilities is often taken as an indication of moral character traits such as trustworthiness and conscientiousness. But, I think that even those apparently non-moral obligations attached to specific roles can be understood as carrying some moral implications, particularly in case where others are relying on one to do certain things associated with one’s job. The dependence of others on one’s job-performance gives even these responsibilities a moral dimension.

R. S. Downie has developed an analysis of role‑related responsibilities which distinguishes three models of such responsibilities: a model of the morality of roles, a model of the morality of role‑enactments, and a model of role‑acceptance [Downie, R. S (1964). "Social Roles and Moral Responsibility." Philosophy, 39: 29‑36]. Downie notes that roles are defined by a "social system," that is, "a complex network of institutions which gives structure to the life of the community" (1964, 29). Duties and responsibilities are associated with the social roles defined by the social system independently of the individuals who occupy these roles: "A social system, of course, does not operate on its own: it is operated by individual persons. But the important point is that the individuals who operate the social system are not acting as free and uncommitted agents. Rather they are acting in social roles, understood as patterns of rights and duties the natures of which are determined by the natures of the institutions which give rise to social roles" (29). According to his first model, we can evaluate "a system of social roles conceived in abstraction from its operators as a network of responsibilities for and to" (30). We may, for instance, say that a particular social role, e.g., that of a torturer in a secret military prison, is inherently evil, or that another role, say that of ombudsman in a socially responsible corporation, is inherently good or useful. This sort of evaluation applies to the role itself apart from the individuals who occupy the role.

Sometimes an individual may attempt to escape personal responsibility for his role‑performance by suggesting that he was "only doing my job." For instance, a police officer who arrests a demonstrator with whose cause he is personally in sympathy may invoke this excuse as a way of disowning personal responsibility for his action. However, claiming that an immoral act was performed only because one was doing one's job can function as an excusing or mitigating factor in ascriptions of accountability or liability responsibility only when it is possible for the individual to claim that he did not freely or knowingly accept the responsibilities of his office. As Downie notes, "if moral judgments can properly be made about social roles there must be a connection at some stage between the nature of the role and individual human decision or acceptance" (30).

Questions of this kind concern what Downie calls the morality of role acceptance. In terms of his model, "a person is held to be responsible not just in the sense that it is he who carries out actions with a certain quality, but responsible as he would be supposing he had created the role. In so far as he did not bother to envisage the kind of actions which would be expected of him, he is morally blameworthy. But in any case he can resign or refuse to obey orders" (35). One should still ascribe liability responsibility to someone who voluntarily takes the job of torturer even though he made have tortured someone under the command of another. The possibility of evaluating role‑acceptance in this way suggests that role‑related responsibilities may be reducible to contractual or consensual ones; the torturer’s mistake was in consenting to enter a role in which he would be expected to commit torture. Thus, it may be that some role-related responsibilities may acquire a moral dimension if the agent consented to accepting the role knowing that torture would be a requirement of it.

Downie's third model, the model of role‑enactment, concerns the manner in which individuals who occupy socially prescribed roles fulfill the particular responsibilities associated with them. "It is this quality which is being noted when a person is described as conscientious, responsible, or irresponsible in his actions..." (31). Evaluations of this kind cannot be completely detached from evaluations of personal responsibility, since, as Downie argues, "roles can be more or less formal and hence more or less open to permeation by ideals" (32). He suggests a useful analogy:

The morality of a role and of its enactment may be compared with the performance by a musician of a musical score. On the one hand scores differ greatly: in some the composer has recorded not only every note he wants played but also every nuance of expression he wants brought out; in others the composer has written merely an unfigured bass line and has left the performer to fill in the harmony and melody as well as to perform with expression. On the other hand, musicians differ greatly in their abilities to interpret and perform music. Similarly, some roles may be clearly and meticulously defined. leaving little scope for individual imagination and personal qualities, while other roles may be mere adumbrations which leave everything to the individual person's enactment. (32)

Many existing social roles carry with them a well‑defined task‑structure which must be learned by those who occupy these roles. The task structure specifies the particular duties which are normally associated with a particular role. But existing social roles are products of culture and tradition, and their task structures must be renewed and re-adapted by each occupant placed in them, and they evolve with changes in technology. We may enact roles whose scripts are written for us, but we must still interpret those scripts in light of the demands and constraints placed on us by circumstances. We may also, in many cases, redefine parts of our roles by eliminating certain tasks, altering the ways in which they are performed, or incorporating new tasks into the role. We may also in some cases create new roles for ourselves and appoint ourselves to them. In all of these cases we can speak of the responsibilities of our roles in Downie's sense of role‑enactment. In so doing we assume that the bearer of those responsibilities must exercise personal judgment and discretion in determining what particular tasks or duties his or her role requires.

Generally speaking, there is an association among the concepts of authority, responsibility, and role‑enactment such that the greater the authority associated with a particular role, the greater the discretion assumed to belong to its bearers. Responsible persons, in this sense, are those who possess a particular complex of personal virtues which enable them to determine what needs to be done, figure out how to do it, and do that which needs to be done. Such individuals not only enact roles which are given to them, but in a real sense transform and create their social roles giving them new meaning and structure.

What controls the transformation of roles? The natural answer is that ends and outcomes control them. Most roles are defined either explicitly or implicitly by the ends which they are designed to achieve. The doctor's role and the task‑structure of that role is explicitly defined by the end of promoting the health of their patients. The particular tasks and acts need to performed in the doctor’s role are conditioned by this end, as well as by the doctor's medical competence and the state of medical science. Physicians choose to make tests, prescribe medications, and provide treatments which, their medical knowledge leads them to believe will improve their patients' health. When a new form of treatment is developed which is more likely to improve the health of a particular patient, the doctor's responsibility requires that she employ that treatment in preference to older and less effective treatments.

Roles also change and adapt in response to new technologies, and they also decay when the ends which they serve are no longer deemed important, or when the tasks required to accomplish those ends are transferred to another role. The advent of the automobile largely eliminated the blacksmith's role, and created the role of the mechanic. The copy boy in the press room has been eliminated by the electronic computer; doormen have been replaced by automatic doors, bank tellers by ATMs, and so forth. Thus, it is possible to speak of machines as performing certain roles. even though they are not moral agents because they embody the intentionality of their designers and those who deploy them in order to achieve certain results.

That role‑related responsibilities are defined by means of ends and structured by competences needed to accomplish these ends is an important fact about them. It serves to distinguish the kinds of obligations which arise from roles from those obligations produced by rights and contracts. Rights and the reciprocal obligations they normally entail are, generally speaking, owed to individuals. If we enter into a contract, we have acquired a duty toward the other party of that contract which requires of us the performance of a certain thing. Such obligations are "denotative" since they can exist only between known individuals. My promise to you obliges me to perform something for you and no one else. In this sense, we speak of obligations owed to individuals.

We must, however, sometimes distinguish the beneficiary of a responsibility, from the individual(s) to whom the responsibility is owed, that is, the object or addressee of one’s obligation. For instance, if I promise to feed your cat while you are out of town, I have a responsibility for your cat (the beneficiary), but I owe my responsibility to you (the addressee or direct object). We sometimes say that person is responsible to another for performing a certain task, e.g., employees are responsible to their employers, but may be responsible for the performance of particular tasks which have no particular beneficiaries, but may benefit some general class of moral patients.

In professional roles, professionals are responsible to their patients, clients, students, and so forth. This usually in understood to mean that the agents who occupy these roles are obligated to perform in certain ways towards the individuals whom they serve. Here the beneficiary of the responsibility is the same individual to whom the responsibility is owed. When we speak of responsibilities as being owed to others, we generally cede those persons to whom responsibilities are owed the power or authority to absolve or waive the bearer from the responsibility. An employer may, for instance, relieve an employee of a particular role and its attendant responsibilities.

In other cases in which the beneficiary and the addressee are the same, the bearer maybe relieved of responsibility by actions of the person to whom their responsibility is owed. Physicians have a responsibility to their patients not to disclose confidential information, to get informed consent prior to giving treatment, and so on. On one account, we can think of such responsibilities are arising from a contract between parties, as in a promise. In this case, the intended beneficiary has the power to relieve the physician of her responsibility to maintain confidentiality or disclose information relevant to informed consent. On another account, however, we can think of these responsibilities as following from the definition of roles themselves, and being referred "attributively" to whomever happens to come to occupy the position of recipient or beneficiary of one's role‑related responsibilities.

Teachers and professors typically have students assigned to their classes without their prior knowledge or consent, store clerks have to serve customers as they come, even physicians are required to treat some patients, for instance, those who walk into an emergency room, without prior knowledge of to whom they owe their responsibilities. When a role‑responsibility is attributive, we have a responsibility of a certain kind to whoever happens to be placed in the position of prospective beneficiary. In these cases, it may not always be possible for the beneficiary to relieve the bearer of a responsibility as is the case with voluntarily assumed denotative obligations.

Most role-related responsibilities are "agent-relative" as well as "object-relative," that is, they are only ascribed to some limited class of moral agents who are their subjects and the responsibilities or duties they confer are only directed towards some limited class of beneficiaries or addressees, their objects. However, it is also possible for moral responsibilities to be "agent-relative" and "object neutral", or "agent-neutral" and "object-relative", as well as "agent-neutral" and "object-neutral." What I call "social responsibilities" are "agent-neutral" moral responsibilities that may be either "object-relative" or "object-neutral."

Social Responsibilities

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Moral philosophers often seem to think that persons can be understood apart from their social roles. They like to construct thought-experiments in which idealized moral agents interact with other idealized moral agents in sparsely described situations designed to evoke some kind of moral response from an observer sitting in a lecture hall who is suppose to consult his or her moral intuitions and render a judgment about what ought or ought not to be done.

Although such idealized philosophical though experiments can sometime be useful, I find such exercises strange. I understand persons as always being embedded within certain social roles which they can enact well or not. Sometimes person enter these roles through their free consent, but sometimes not. It is not, in my view, possible to really think of persons as “bare moral agents” who are not assumed to be embedded in some particular social context or another. At the topmost level we can think of all human persons, and indeed most other kinds of moral agents as embedded within societies in which they interact with other agents and patients in various ways. Human beings do not enter society as if they were tele-ported there from some distant galaxy. We are born into particular families, in particular countries, at particular times, and as we grow from childhood into adulthood we come to occupy the role of member of society and eventually other special roles such as that of student, citizen, parent, employee, doctor, soldier, politician, and so forth.

In talking about moral responsibilities philosophers often draw a distinction between general moral obligations which every moral agent has, and special moral obligations which only some moral agents have. Such special moral obligations are also termed “agent-relative” responsibilities because they are borne by some moral agents but not others. When considering general moral obligations, such as the responsibility not to knowingly cause harm to others, we tend to assume that bearers of this obligation should be seen as bare moral agents apart from any of their particular special social roles. However, I think this is a mistake. On my view, moral agents should be understood as having certain general social responsibilities that derive from their occupying the role “member of a moral community” When we say that “everyone” has certain responsibilities we really mean that every member of our moral community has it, irrespective of any additional special social roles they may happen to occupy within their moral community.

I prefer the term “social responsibilities” to designate the "agent-neutral" kind of moral responsibilities that individuals and corporate entities have toward their moral communities. Social responsibilities are different than religious duties (to observe the Sabbath), personal moral responsibilities (for instance those of friendship), role-related social responsibilities (such as those of parents), or professional responsibilities belonging to particular professional roles (such as those ascribed to doctors, lawyers, managers, accountants, engineers, and so forth). Social responsibilities, as I understand them, are better understood as shared or collective moral responsibilities which can be ascribed to all competent moral agents who are members of a moral community.

Social responsibilities should not be understood on the model of strict legal obligations since they are discretionary in nature and call upon human moral agents, and organizations, to utilize the power and capacities at their disposal in a conscientious fashion in order to contribute to the solution of important social problems. It is difficult to specify the specific normative contents of our social responsibilities, because what they will require an agent to do will vary greatly depending on their particular position in society, their capabilities, the other demands upon them, the opportunities that present themselves for constructive action and the particular character of the social and environmental problems that confront them.

We can, for instance, say of a person that she is “socially responsible" and here we mean that she reliably enacts her social responsibilities. People who are socially responsible are motivated to respond creatively to challenges and threats to collective values and moral ideals. Being socially responsible, in this sense, applies to those who take an active role in attempting to transform social roles and institutions, and in attacking the problems of the society in general in an attempt to improve their moral quality. This is the sense of the term which John W. Gardner, social activist and founder of Common Cause employs when he writes,

...the men and women who undertook to regenerate the society did so on their own. No one appointed them to the task; they were moved by some deep impulse to accept responsibility. And so it must always be. Some fraction of the population must commit itself to do what is needed: to reinterpret old values in light of contemporary reality, and, where necessary, to forge new values. (Morale, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1978, p. 26)

In illustrating this sort of commitment, Gardner cites a statement by a friend of his who realized his own maturity when he "decided to accept responsibility for my world‑‑to the limit of reality. Obviously I couldn't accept responsibility for thunderstorms or nationwide depressions. But where I could possibly imagine that a fraction of responsibility lay on me, I resolved to welcome that responsibility" (Gardner 64).

There is a difference between 'accepting responsibility' and 'taking responsibility.' In the former there is the implication that the responsibility is external and is offered to one to acknowledge or not as one's own. One can be said to have accepted responsibility for one's role in producing past harms, for instance. But, when one takes responsibility one assumes a prospective responsibility which did not exist in a defined social role or which was defined but ownerless in the sense that no one occupies the role. When one voluntarily takes it upon oneself to act to promote a valuable end of some kind one can be said to take responsibility or to act in a socially responsible fashion.

Socially responsible individuals are those who take seriously the responsibilities associated with their roles as citizens, or as inheritors of cultural traditions, or simply their roles as members of society. If we take this course, then we lay ourselves open to the charge of so enlarging the notion of a "role" as to make it virtually useless as a concept. If everything which an individual does is done because of a social role which he or she occupies, then the distinction between role‑related responsibilities and personal responsibilities, on the one hand, and social responsibilities on the other, collapses. As Downie notes, "there are areas of our lives in which we are role‑free and can devote ourselves completely to the pursuit of our ideals or inclinations" (Downie 31‑32). We may, for instance, speak of having "responsibilities to ourselves", or instance, for caring for our own health, our happiness, and the development of our talents and abilities.

However, I think that such self-regarding responsibilities are also defined by social roles. Becoming a responsible adult who is able to live independently and take care of himself or herself is a kind of personal achievement, one which once attained, generates social expectations about how other should treat that person, that is, as an autonomous adult. Not all human beings have this capacity; young children, the infirm, and persons with severely impaired abilities, are not expected to take care of themselves but depend upon others for various kinds of assistance and so become the beneficiaries of other people’s other-regarding responsibilities. So, even in those areas of life where we are free to pursue our own ideals and happiness, I think we are enacting a socially-defined role.

But there is still a difference between social responsibilities and special role‑related responsibilities in that the particular ends associated with a role are often spelled out in the description of the role itself, while for these broader types of social responsibilities are not, and instead require that individuals respond creatively to the social problems which they perceive as most urgent and most important.

Here again we see the association between responsibility and discretion, which serves to mark off the notion of responsibility from that of duty. Duties are obligations to carry out or omit specific actions, while responsibilities are moral obligations to see to it that certain states of affairs are brought about, in which we determine how to best to achieve those outcomes. As Gardner says, social activists create new roles and appoint themselves to them because they intend some end or good to result for the larger society to which they belong. Being a socially responsible person, in this sense, denotes a particular complex of dispositions and virtues which individuals possess in varying degrees.

Social responsibility requires an attitude of commitment to moral ideals, a determination to achieve social goals, and responsiveness to the needs of others. It is generally regarded as a goal of moral education to nurture the development of the attitude of social responsibility and encourage people to work for the general betterment of society. Thus, in understanding the notion of social responsibility, we must focus attention on these personal attitudes and dispositions that prompt some people to act in socially responsible ways and seek to promote the general good of society. In other words, we also need to think about the concepts of 'responsibility' and 'social responsibility' as kinds of moral virtues.

Responsibility as a Virtue

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Responsibility as a virtue denotes an uncommon excellence in the exercise of the skill of moral judgment and action. Being responsible in this sense involves several interrelated skills, motives, and dispositions: e.g., a skill of moral perception in which the person is sensitive to the moral aspects of their behavior; a skill of moral evaluation and judgment, skill in moral decision-making, and a disposition to respond creatively to what one perceives to be a moral need or problem.

Ordinary moral competence, that condition deemed to be necessary for the ascription of liability responsibility, entails only being able to give an account of one's actions when required to do so, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong according to conventional standards under most circumstances calling for moral judgment. Responsibility as a virtue, however, describes the person who exhibits an uncommon degree of moral awareness and sensitivity. The responsible person is one who seems to know better than most how best to respond in a given situation calling for moral judgment.

Dewey and Tufts distinguish responsibility as liability in which an individual may be held accountable to society for his or her actions, and liable to praise or censure for them, from what they term "positive responsibility." In the latter case, "one responds, answers, to the social demands made; he is not merely called to answer,"

When society looks for responsible workmen, teachers, doctors, it does not mean merely those whom it may call to account; it can do that in any case. It wants men and women who habitually form their purposes after consideration of the social consequences of their execution. Dislike of approbation, fear of penalty, play a part in generating this responsive habit; but fear, operating directly, occasions only cunning or servility. Fused through reflection, with other motives which prompt action, it helps bring about that apprehensiveness or susceptibility to the rights of others, which is the essence of responsibility, which in turn is the sole ultimate guarantee of social order." (Ethics. New York: Henry Holt 1910, p.437)

Rather than merely speaking of an "apprehensiveness and susceptibility to the rights or others" I would rather say "concern for the interests and well‑being of others," since the possession of rights does not fully guarantee the enjoyment of the goods rights are intended to protect. 'Responsibility' in this sense is a particular moral disposition, which once formed operates independently of fear of punishment or promise of reward. The responsible person is one who has cultivated a disposition to regard the interests of others, and the general interests of society, as part of the normal way in which they calculate reasons for action. We use the term 'taking responsibility' to describe their actions, since it is they themselves who determine that they shall respond and how they shall respond to a perceived moral interest.

Being a responsible person, then, means being able to exercise proper moral perception, proper moral judgment and discretion, and to respond appropriately to the moral demands of the particular situation in which one finds oneself. Responsible people are moral agents who can be generally relied upon to apprehend what is the right thing to do, and to do it.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr has discussed this meaning of responsibility and has made it central to what he terms an "ethics of responsibility," a moral paradigm that he thinks is distinct from both consequentialism and deontology:

...we may say that purposiveness seeks to answer the question: "What shall I do?" by raising the as prior the question: "What is my goal, ideal, or telos?" Deontology tries to answer the moral query by asking, first of all: "What is the law and what is the first law of my life?" Responsibility, however, proceeds in every moment of decision and choice to inquire: "What is going on?" If we use value terms then the differences among the three approaches may be indicated by the terms, the good, the right, and the fitting; for teleology is concerned always with the highest good to which it subordinates the right; consistent deontology is concerned with the right, no matter what may happen to our goods; but for the ethics of responsibility the fitting action, the one that fits into a total interaction as response and as anticipation of further response, is alone conducive to the good and alone is right. (Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy. Intro. James M. Gustafson. New York: Harper and Row, 1963: 60-61)

If we accept this view, then responsibility is not the name of another particular moral virtue like honesty, courage, loyalty, or beneficence, but rather it functions as a kind of master‑virtue. The virtue of responsibility denotes the ability to determine in particular situational contexts which moral obligations are the highest. One must exercise moral discretion in order to determine what is fitting, in Niebuhr's sense to a particular situation; to balance the competing claims of various duties and obligations which the actor might have, and to decide which should take precedence at a particular moment; or to determine what is the proper moral response to a situation which requires moral reflection, deliberation, or judgment.

Responsibility, in this sense, cannot be reduced to a particular actions or rule of conduct, nor can it be said to serve any particular ends. Sometimes, being responsible will means doing ones duty while at other times it will mean striving towards some end in one's actions. It is forward‑looking, but unlike some versions of consequentialism, it does not abstract the actor from history, either from his or her own past history of action and interaction with others, nor from possible future interactions which the actor's response calls forth.

Being responsible means being engaged in an ongoing context of relationships and fitting one's conduct to the moral demands created by those relationships in that context. Responsibility is, then, a particularly important moral notion when relationships are dynamic, that is, in cases in which the morally relevant qualifications of action are changing, and one must adapt one's behavior to the evolving demands of the situation. Responsibility calls upon the whole person to determine what it is most fitting for them to do, as concrete historical actors, in particular historical situations, and also what is fitting for them as a way of life.

The sense of responsibility as a virtue is particularly important for understanding my notion of social responsibility. A socially responsible person is one who appreciates the particular moral problematics of his or her time and circumstance, and directs his or her actions in order to respond morally to them. This moral response can take many forms, is highly discretionary, and is shared with other members of the moral community. However, social responsibilities are not, on my view, optional. While moral agents have a large degree of discretion in determining how and when and to what degree they discharge their social responsibilities, they do not have the liberty to ignore them entirely. Social responsibilities, then, are not merely supererogatory.

Supererogation and Responsibility

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Although the term "supererogation" is not common in ordinary moral discourse, it is commonly used by moral philosophers to describe a class of moral actions which are familiar to most people. Etymologially it means "the act of paying out more than is required or demanded." As David Heyd writes, superogatory acts are "optional" or non‑obligatory, that is ‑ distinguished from those acts which fall under the heading of duty....they are beyond duty, fulfil more than is required, over and above what the agent is supposed or expected to do" [Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982: p.1].

These features serve to distinguish acts of supererogation from duties which arise, for instance, from the rights of others, and also, from duties which arise from moral responsibilities which do not derive from the rights of others. Unlike acts of pure supererogation, duties, obligations, and moral responsibilities are not optional; they are strict moral duties whose non‑performance is considered to be morally blameworthy (though perhaps not legally so). However, unlike the legal duties that flow from rights, the moral duties which flow from responsibilities cannot be demanded by others ‑‑ they are non‑peremptory. Legal obligations are peremptory and can be enforced by means of the coercive police powers of the state. There are many kinds moral responsibilities that are non-peremptory in this sense, for example, the duty of a child not to lie to her mother. The duty not to lie is not a legal duty except in cases where the agent in under oath or under some other legal requirement that forbids deception. However, truth-telling is not generally regarded as a supererogration; it is generally expected of competent moral agents as part of their responsibility to society.

Joshua Halberstam has suggested that there is a mirror category of what he calls suberogatory actions [Everyday Ethics: Inspired Solutions to Everyday Problems. (New York: Viking, 1993), pp. 54-55.] Suberogatory actions are those that while not morally forbidden are nevertheless blameworthy. "It's not that you're prohibited from behaving in these ways, but you'll be considered a moral toad if you do." He gives as examples of suberogatory actions rudeness and obnoxious behavior, for instance, blowing cigartte smoke in a non-smoker's face, might be considered a suberogatory action. There is some controversy as to whether this category of suberogatory actions is real or not. (For an interesting discussion of the notions of supererogation and suberogation see the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). However, I think this is a useful, and indeed, an important category of moral obligations. Suberogatory actions are ones that violate moral responsibilities that are non-optional but also non-peremptory.

We can have responsibilities towards others which require us "pay out" more than can be demanded by others as their right. Doing what is "right" is often more than merely doing what can be demanded as a right, that is, not all morally required actions are peremptory. However, to call an act "supererogatory" also is generally thought to imply that its performance is optional, that it may be omitted without moral fault. Heyd formally defines acts of supererogation as follows:

An act is supererogatory if and only if:

(1) It is neither obligatory nor forbidden.

(2) Its omission is not wrong, and does not deserve sanction or criticism ‑‑ either formal or informal.

(3) It is morally good, both by virtue of its (intended) consequences and by virtue of its intrinsic value (being beyond duty).

(4) It is done voluntarily for the sake of someone else's good, and is thus meritorius (115).

Heyd argues that "it is in the nature of any option that failure to choose it does not incur a critical reaction, while taking the option may win merit. Defining supererogation in terms of this asymmetry serves to illustrate not only the logical difference between duty and supererogation, but also the ethical justification of the distinction, in particular, the right not to engage in some forms of morally good action" (118).

The question I should like to raise here is whether there might not be a class of moral actions which are non‑peremptory but nevertheless non‑optional? I want to suggest that many of our responsibilities fit this description, that is, acts whose performance cannot be demanded by others as observance of their rights can be, but which would be, nonetheless, morally wrong to omit. This would leave us with a three‑fold classification of moral actions: those which are peremptory and non‑optional, corresponding to strict duties and obligations; those which are non‑peremptory and non‑optional, corresponding to substantive responsibilities; and those which are non‑peremptory and optional, corresponding to acts which have traditionally been referred to as supererogatory.

Heyd includes under supererogation saintly and heroic acts; acts of charity, generosity and beneficence; acts of kindness and consideration; acts of mercy and forgiveness; and other voluntary acts. He notes, however, "The very act of volunteering means doing something over an above what is required. One cannot volunteer to pay one's debts, or feed one's children" (p.3).The duty to pay one's debts is generally regarded as a non-optional, peremptory duty in that the person to whom the debt is owed can demand payment. Feeding one's children, on the other hand, is a part of parental responsibility. It is a strict duty of beneficence to feed one's children, and a parent ought to do so whether or not their children can demand to be fed.

Feeding one's children, on my account, represents a non‑optional and peremptory duty ‑‑ it is a strict role-related moral responsibility. Thus, I will argue that some cases which have traditionally been viewed as strict duties are really non-optional, peremptory responsibilities, and some cases of what have been viewed as supererogations are non-optional but non-peremptory responsibilities. This will have the effect of enlarging the set of responsibilities, which will here be taken to mean actions which are morally non‑optional yet whose performance cannot be demanded by others. The term "duty" can be used to denote acts which are peremptory and non-optional such as specific duties which individuals may have as a necessary means of discharging their role-related responsibilities.

That there are classes of duties which are distinct from supererogation can be shown in cases, for instance, we are in a position to benefit vulnerable others without sacrificing or risking anything of comparable value to ourselves. One need not be a saint to pull a drowning child out of a shallow pool when doing so does not involve the risk or sacrifice of anything of comparable value. But one does need to be a saint in order to jump onto a raging torrent to attempt to rescue a child who has fallen in.

The difference appears to lie in the degree of risk which the actor can be reasonably expected to accept, and this, will vary according to the special competences or skills which the agent can bring to the task at hand. One might suppose that a person trained in lifesaving techniques who is a member of a special police rescue squad has a strict role‑related responsibility to attempt to rescue the child from the torrent, even if doing so means taking a considerable risk. However, another bystander on the scene who is not likewise specially trained, would have no such peremptory role-related responsibility to attempt to intervene. For such a person to attempt to intervene would indeed be an act of supererogation and would normally be regarded as heroic even if the attempt was unsuccessful.

Heyd points out that while "the degree of risk and sacrifice involved in actions of a certain type may serve (along with other considerations) as grounds for classifying that type of actions as lying within or beyond the call of duty,...risk and sacrifice cannot be conditions of supererogation, because there are non‑risky supererogatory acts on the one hand, and supererogatory acts which do much good at a relatively small cost to the agent" (145). According to Heyd, although acts of supererogation "go beyond" what is strictly required by duty, they are nevertheless "correlated and continuous with natural (positive) duties." He explains,

A doctor who goes to a remote tribe to cure a rare disease is doing a supererogatory act. But he acts beyond his duty not in the sense that he is extending his social (professional, "institutional") role so as to include the tribe, but rather goes beyond his natural duty, which in this case is confined to the fulfilment of his social duty as a doctor in his community. Furthermore, the social or institutional duty of an Albert Schweitzer cannot be the sole criterion for judging whether an act (e.g. going to that distant place) is supererogatory or not, because even if it is agreed that the act in question lies beyond his institutional duty as a doctor, it may be his natural duty as a human being (who happens to have medial skill) to do so. A policeman touring a foreign country may have a duty to help overpower a violent criminal, because he happens to be trained to deal with such situations. His act is not supererogatory, even though he acts beyond his institutional duty as a policeman (which binds him only to his own country) (120).

These intuitions can best be accounted for by noting that, in Heyd's examples, persons which special knowledge or skill are, by virtue of their possessing these skills, are in a position to benefit others who are especially vulnerable to harm, and this combination of vulnerability and relevant competence, creates a context of action in which special moral responsibilities can arise.

Heyd argues for unqualified supererogationism: "This view not only acknowledges the possibility and existence of supererogation, but treats it as absolutely irreducible to duty. Acts of supererogation are characterized as purely voluntary, optional, and in a sense arbitrary, that is, not determined by universal standards or rules. Underlying such a contention is the view that holds human beings to be autonomous individuals having a basic right to pursue their own ideals and projects, sometimes regardless of the public or general good. People are not just tools for the promotion of good or for maximizing value or happiness in the world. Their duty towards others is limited, and moral considerations of what is obligatory do not come into every moral deliberation" (p.9). He contrasts this view with what he calls "qualified supererogationism" which holds that supererogatory acts are morally binding in some way, a view under which one "cannot regard omissions of these acts as being totally immune from criticism" (125).

On my view, social responsibilities form a category of moral obligations whose non-fulfillment is not totally immune from criticism. Competent moral agents have responsibilities to society which entail non‑optional but non-peremptory duties to protect themselves selves and others who are specially vulnerable which go beyond merely supererogatory actions. There is still a sphere of purely supererogatory actions, to be sure, which does not reduce to either rights or strict responsibilities, but this sphere is smaller than traditional accounts suggest because many of the sorts of actions which would formerly be regarded as supererogatory and therefore optional, should be seen to be non-peremptory, yet non-optional moral obligations that flow from our social responsibilities to protect the vulnerable.

Thus, for instance, when there is a major natural disaster such as a flood or earthquake, and tens of thousands of people are in dire need of relief assistance, I think that everyone has a social responsibility to aid them. Some people may be excused from fulfilling this responsibility for various good reasons, for instance, because they are unable to do anything to affect the situation, or because they have other more compelling responsibilities that conflict with doing something to aid the victims of a natural disaster. But individuals who can do something to help the victims, and have no good excuse for not doing it, are blameworthy, on my view, for they have failed to fulfill one of their standing social responsibilities.

Donating to disaster relief efforts, while generally regarded as an act of charity, and therefore as supererogatory, is, on this view, a non-optional yet non-peremptory social responsibility. In other words, it is something we can legitimately criticize others for not doing, but which we cannot demand that they do.

This way of cutting things up leaves us with the following classification of moral obligations:

A) Obligations which are peremptory and non‑optional, corresponding to strict or perfect duties.

B) Obligations which are non‑peremptory but non‑optional, corresponding to social responsibilities; and

C) Obligations which are non‑peremptory and optional, corresponding to acts which have traditionally been seen as supererogatory.

Logic forbids the fourth category of obligations that are optional but peremptory, since it would be strange to demand that someone do something they are not required to do.

Non-Peremptory Obligations

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Another way of thinking about the category of non-peremptory yet non-optional moral obligations is to understand them in relation to a classic debate in political philosophy about the nature of the law. The positivism legal scholar John Austin proposed that we can understand "law" as the command of a sovereign backed by the credible threat of sanctions for noncompliance ("A Positivist Conception of Law" from The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, 1832). This sanction theory of the law defines "obligations" as commands of a ruler which are enforced by threats of punishment.

But the great legal theorist, H.L.A. Hart argued that sanction theories of law confuse being "obliged" by means of a threatened sanction to do something, and being morally "obligated" to do it. Obligations have no necessary connection to sanctions or to commands for that matter. In his The Concept of Law (1961) Hart argued that Austin's definition amounts to saying that the law is the same as the demand of a gunman to hand over one's wallet. Being under threat of sanction provides a motivation to do what is demanded, but not a justification for doing it.

In order to understand the nature of obligation and hence that of law one needs instead to invoke the concept of following a social rule. But there can be rules that do not create obligations, or only weak ones, as the rules of etiquette for instance. For Hart, rules are conceived as imposing an obligation when, "the general demand for conformity is insistent and the social pressure brought to bear upon those who deviate or threaten to deviate is great" (Feinberg and Coleman, Philosophy of Law, p. 72). However, the social pressure to conform need not take the form of sanctions or threats of punishment, but instead "may take only the form of a general diffused hostile or critical reaction which may stop short of physical sanctions. It may be limited to verbal manifestations of disapproval or of appeals to the individuals' respect for the rule violated; it may depend heavily on the operation of feelings of shame, remorse and guilt." What makes rule-following an obligation, according to Hart, is the "seriousness of the social pressure behind the rules."

We have several grades of seriousness of social pressure. The most serious and strictest forms of social pressure are associated with peremptory legal norms compliance with which are demanded by society and disobedience punished by coercively imposed sanctions, e.g., laws against murder, rape, theft, fraud and so forth. Lesser crimes are sanctioned by fines and other kinds of administrative penalties. Various other kinds of harms are dealt with by means of torts law, rather than criminal law, for instance, failures to adequately discharge duties of care to prevent and avoid harm to others.

For other important moral obligations, however, we rely on other forms of social pressure to promote conformity with social rules which stop short of imposing sanctions. For instance, lying is generally frowned upon but is not illegal unless done under oath or when it constitutes fraud. While it may be wrong to lie to your mother about what you did last weekend, it is not a crime.

Finally, some moral rules, those normally associated with supererogations and suberogations, the rules are really framed as recommendations rather than as requirements. We are advised that it would be rather praiseworthy to so something, say volunteer for community service, or somewhat blameworthy to do something else, say, gamble with the rent money, but moral agents are given the option of noncompliance without threat of social sanction or censure. This last class are the weak obligations that I called non-peremptory and optional.

But they should not be confused with the middle class of obligations, those which are non-peremptory but non-optional, that characterize social responsibilities. These are real obligations, usually moral, but also sometime legal, but are not backed by formal sanctions for noncompliance. Failure to discharge such obligation may, nevertheless, lay the agent open to moral blame and criticism and other forms of non-coercive social pressure. There are in fact many common kinds of moral obligations which fall into this category for which noncompliance does not carry any realistic likelihood of threat of harm, but which are nonetheless, real obligations.

Moral and legal norms belong within the general category of what Jacques Ellul has called human techniques. Human techniques are for Ellul those in which “man himself becomes the object of the technique” (The Technological Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964 p. 22), that is, in which technique is applied to alter or control human conduct. Moral and legal norms are human techniques in precisely this sense; they are ensembles of techniques by which we attempt to bring about desirable patterns in human social behavior. In general, moral and legal norms are designed to promote social cooperation and to moderate conflict by regulating competition within certain limits. Morality and law structure “arenas of competition” in which permissible agent interactions are limited; for example, most kinds of voluntary trade of goods and services are allowed, while coerced or involuntary exchanges, such as theft, are disallowed. Action-guiding norms are human techniques that define the organizational forms of social interaction.

Morality and law, however, do differ: an analogy might be useful here. On older TV sets there used to be two tuning devices: a channel selector that one used to select the frequency range of the broadcast, and a fine tuning dial that one used to select the precise frequency that would deliver the clearest picture and sharpest sound. This is similar to the functional relationship between law and morality: the law sets minimum requirements for socially permissible behavior, that is, it selects the general range of behaviors that society is willing to tolerate. Behaviors that fall outside that acceptable range are subject to various kinds of punishments and sanctions designed to enforce general compliance with these norms. Morality supplies the fine-tuning. Within these ranges of legally permissible behaviors there are forms of conduct that while legal, are deemed more or less morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. The more informal dictates of morality and ethics appeal to the individual’s conscience and direct him or her towards selecting those forms of conduct that are more conducive to virtue and human happiness, and away from those forms of conduct that are vicious and harmful, although legal.

The two normative spheres do overlap particularly with respect to forms of conduct that are regarded as strongly impermissible; things that are strongly morally impermissible are often made legally impermissible as well precisely because noncompliance so strongly offends the moral sense. But on the other end of the spectrum, the law rarely enforces virtue, and many believe it should not attempt to do so. Under the modern liberal conception of the state, the sovereign should be neutral as regards the best way to live. Individuals are at liberty to choose their own conceptions of their good and to orient their lives towards the pursuit of happiness as they conceive it, so long, of course, as they do so within the limits of what the law allows. So, under this arrangement, society, by means of the institutions of the law, sets the outer limits on what is socially acceptable behavior, the basic channels, while individuals guided by their own morality and their own consciences, perform the “fine-tuning” needed in order to select what is, for them, the best way to live.

Responsibilities that Do Not Derive from Rights

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The "ethics of rights" represents the dominant contemporary approach to understanding the nature of moral obligation. However, some writers have criticized the "rights-based" approach to morality by claiming that morality cannot be based entirely on fundamental principles which assign rights to human individuals. Instead what we need is a pluralistic understanding of normative ethics which recognizes that besides rights, notions such as responsibilities, values, interests, utility, and other moral notions are also fundamental moral concepts.

According to Joseph Raz, "`x has a right' means that, other things being equal, an aspect of x's well‑being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty" ["Nature of Rights" Mind 93 (1984), pp.194-214]. This formula expresses is what is called the "beneficiary view" of rights which regards the "interests of people as the only ultimate value," and assigns duties to others which are grounded in rights of individuals to have their well-being or interests protected. This is a useful way of thinking about rights that I will return to later one. However, for now, I want to focus on the limitations of this view.

One important limitation of rights‑based moralities stems from their being nothing more than the grounds of duties to individuals. But, as Raz and others have argued, there are some things which we morally ought to do and to value which do not stem from duties to particular human individuals which arise in virtue of their rights; "There is more to morality than rights and duties and precepts which can be derived from them" (183).

Raz rejects moral individualism: i.e., the view that the only morally significant values are ones which resolve to individual personal interests. Rights‑based theories are usually individualistic in that they do not recognize "any intrinsic value in any collective good" (186). They typically hold that collective goods have only instrumental value. Since there are some collective goods which have intrinsic value, he concludes that rights-based approaches to morality cannot encompass all that which moral agents ought to do or to value.

As an example of this he cites various collective goods which individuals may value but which do not resolve to benefits to individuals:

Consider collective goods such as living in a beautiful town, which is economically prosperous, and in a society that is tolerant and cultured. Living in such a society is in the interest of each of the inhabitants: it is more agreeable to live in such a society, whatever one's personal circumstances, than to live in one which lacks these attributes. But the fact that it is in my interest to live in such a society is not normally considered sufficient to establish that I have a right to live in such a society....This is explicable on the definition of rights offered above, according to which a right is a sufficient ground for holding another to have a duty. It is the common view that my interest in living in a prosperous, cultured, and tolerant society and in a beautiful environment is not enough to impose a duty on anyone to make my society and environment so (189‑190).

The existence of such collective (or public) goods suggests that, "It is implausible to assume that an individual can conduct his whole life on the basis and sole motivation of respecting other people's rights" (198).

In addition to moral duties which are derived from the rights of individuals, Raz also mentions duties which arise in the context of various personal relationships: "Personal friendships, marital relations, one's loyalty and sense of pride in one's workplace or one's country are among the most valuable and rewarding aspects of many people's lives" (200). The moral significance of personal relationships consists in the fact that special duties may arise in such cases which do not correspond to rights which individuals may demand.

For instance, "Friendships entail a special concern for the welfare of the friend, concern for his welfare over and above the concern required of us towards other human beings generally..." (197). We may, in his example, feel we have a duty to compensate a friend for a loss, even though we did not cause it, because of the value which we place on the friendship. Such a duty, he argues, does not derive from our friend's "right to compensation" since compensation for a loss is not something which he can demand.

These reflections are perfectly consistent with, and indeed support my claim that there are certain moral responsibilities that we can have that are non-optional but also non-peremptory. Since friends are supposed to care for their friends' well-being and happiness, they can be thought to have a special role-related moral responsibility to compensate them for a loss, even though their friends cannot demand that they do so. One has such responsibilities independently of any rights that one's friends may have against you.

As a second example of duties that do not derive from rights, Raz discusses the duty not to destroy a valuable work of art which one owns. Normally. ownership entails the right to dispose of one's property in any way that one pleases. Owning a Van Gogh painting gives me the right to destroy it, even though one ought not to exercise that right because one has a responsibility not to wantonly destroy something of beauty and value.

On the other hand, despite the fact that many people would derive pleasure from seeing the painting, no one has a right that I shall not destroy it. "Nevertheless, while I owe no one a duty to preserve the painting I am under such a duty. The reason is that to destroy it and deny the duty is to do violence to art and to show oneself blind to one of the values which give life a meaning" (197). Put in another way, I have a non-optional but non-peremptory responsibility to protect the painting even though I have the right to destroy it. Saying that I have the right to destroy it simply means here that no one else is in a position to demand that I not destroy the painting. Yet having a responsibility to protect it entails that I have a moral responsibility not to destroy it. While I may exercise my right to destroy my painting, doing so would leave my action open to moral criticism. One sometimes has a responsibility not to do things that one has a right to do.

I prefer the term "responsibility" to denote what Raz describes as "duties which do not derive from rights." In his example, the owner has a responsibility not to destroy the Van Gogh painting but to preserve it, though his ownership gives him the right to destroy it. I, the painting's owner, in particular have this responsibility because ownership places me in a position of power over the objects I own; my possessions are specially vulnerable to me.

But my right of ownership is limited by a coordinate responsibility to care for items of my property which are valuable and specially vulnerable to harm. I may, in this case, have a duty to care for a valuable work of art, though that duty is owed to no one in particular in virtue of his or her rights. Responsibilities to protect valuable moral patients which are not persons provides an example of a moral responsibility that does not derive from someone's rights.

Legalism and Responsibility

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A somewhat different approach to the limitations of rights-based moralities has been developed by John Ladd ["Legalism and Medical Ethics." Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Ethics. J. W. Davis et. al. Eds.. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1978: 1‑35]. Ladd criticizes what he calls "legalism" in medical ethics and argues for moving away from a legalistic approach to one based on the notion of responsibility. He writes, "By `legalism' I shall mean: `the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules'"(1).

According to Ladd, legalism leads to the "almost exclusive use of the concept of rights as a category of analysis for problems in medical ethics....As a result,...our view of these problems and how to go about resolving them is unduly narrow and dogmatic, i.e. "legalistic" in the worst sense" (6). The legalistic approach is limited in the medical and other contexts because of its essential reliance on the notion of rights, and therefore, on the limitations of an exclusively "rights-based" approach to ethics. There are, he argues, three essential features of rights which make them particularly inappropriate in the medical context: "(1) the peremptory nature of rights, (2) the particular kind of interpersonal relationship implied in the appeal to rights, and (3) the ethical importance of distinguishing between the possession and the exercise of a right" (16).

First, "unlike other moral considerations, such as appeals to generosity, appeals to rights are appeals that are peremptory; to secure them it is usually permissible to use coercion, either in the form of legal action or in the form of self‑help" (16). Second, rights "represent a relationship between two persons (or parties): the right‑holder and the right‑ower. To have a right is to have a right against someone (or against anyone or everyone)" (17). Third, "one can possess a right only if one can choose not to exercise it" (17): "Strictly speaking, this condition requires that right‑holders (and right‑owers) be competent adults capable of self‑directed choice." Ladd argues that, "these three properties of rights show why it is sometimes quite inappropriate ethically to base medical decisions on the notion of rights alone. For neither medical advice nor patients' requests need be peremptory, that is, advanced as demands backed by force, nor does the doctor‑patient relationship need be an adversary one" (18). Generally speaking, "standing on one's rights is a last ditch stand, to be taken only after communication has broken down or when there was no hope for communication to begin with" (20). "Indeed, if one insists on a right, it will more than likely destroy the relationship altogether because it implies the absence of trust, which may be more important ethically. That is why the appeal to rights is sometimes inappropriate, improper, and immoral" (19).[i] A fourth feature of the notion of rights, acording to Ladd, is that there can be no rights without rules: "it is quite impossible to understand what is involved in asserting a right without examining a rule, or a possible rule, that it refers to or with which it is correlated in some way" (7).

But, rights and the rules they are based on, Ladd argues, are often mistakenly treated as context-independent guides to action: [I]n dealing with issues of medical ethics, and with other kinds of ethics that are concerned with problems of modern life, we must begin by recognizing the contextual character of rules, practices, and concepts. Legal answers are relevant in legal contexts, but may not be so in other contexts; by the same token, some moral categories may be appropriate in one context and quite inappropriate in other contexts. In general, then, we must take into account the context in which problems arise and in which our rules, principles, etc. are designed to operate before we can determine how and to what extent they are valid for the radically new kinds of situation that arise in modern medicine and modern life in general (4).

Ladd contrasts the rule-guided, context-independent, "right-based" approach to moral questions with an approach which he terms "the ethics of responsibility." Responsibility, unlike rights, operates contextually relying on the discretion of the moral agent to determine what is the morally "best" response to make in a given situation. While agents may have recourse to moral and legal "rules" in making these judgments, the ethics of responsibility acknowledges that it may not always be possible to bring any particular action‑situation completely under rules. Situations calling for moral judgments are often unique and require the moral agent to devise a "fitting" response, not just one that follows a rule.

In the medical context, "the unreflective acceptance of an ethics of rights in preference, say, to an ethics of responsibility, inevitably leads to moral confusion and irresponsibility...for the simple reason that the ethics of rights rests on the twin assumptions that, from a moral point of view, someone must have a right and that, in the ultimate analysis, rights relationships can only obtain between equals" (29). As an alternative, he suggests, "we need [an ethics] that covers such things as caring, as providing for another person's needs‑‑in more general terms, we need an ethics of giving and receiving" (22). The ethics of care and the VCP provide the basis for such an approach to normative ethics. It may also enable us to better understand the sorts of moral relationships that exists between "unequals".

Ladd's views are consonant with my own; the doctor-patient relationship is a special moral relationship characterized by the VCP as one in which the physician or caregiver has special responsibilities to protect her patient that cannot be reduced to or entirely derived from the patient's rights. These responsibilities are highly discretionary, but non-optional in the sense that the physician can be rightfully blamed or called to account for failing to fulfill them, even though they are also non-peremptory in that no one can demand that these responsibilities be fulfilled as their right.

The reflections in the last two sections, then serve to cement the proposal that there is a class of moral obligations, what I call moral responsibilities, that are distinct both from peremptory duties derived from the rights of others and from supererogations.

Having reviewed the meaning of the term "responsibility" we are now in a position to consider and respond to several objections to the kind of account I have been developing.

Moral Status and Personhood

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In order to understand the VCP on must grasp the concept of moral status. Moral status is what determines whether something can function as the A and B terms in the Vulnerability Relation, which is, as you will recall,

The Vulnerability Relation: A is vulnerable to B with respect to C because of D.

The B term specifies the bearer or subject of the sorts of moral responsibilities that I content derive from the Vulnerability Relations, while the A term specifies the addressees, beneficiaries, or objects of these kinds of moral responsibilities. The VCP says that moral agents can have moral responsibilities to protect those who are specially vulnerable or in some way depending on them for their care. But the questions which we must now address are:

Who (or what) can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities in this sense? and,

Who (or what) can function as the objects of moral responsibilities in this sense?

I will begin my discussion of the concept of moral status with the work on this topic by several contemporary philosophers.

Mary Anne Warren has characterized the concept of moral status as follows:

To have moral status is to be morally considerable, or to have moral standing. It is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations. If an entity has moral status, then we may not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged to give weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being. Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely because protecting it may benefit ourselves or other persons, but because its needs have moral importance in their own right. [Warren (1997) Moral Status: obligations to persons and other living things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 3]

Personhood is an example of moral status in this sense. To have the status of a person is understood as the basis of having human rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the others. The moral status of persons is typically conferred upon types of individuals who meet certain general criteria, for instance, sentience, rational agency, intentionality, and the like. Normally adult human beings are regarded as persons. I have already noted that moral agency is a precondition for attributions of liability responsibility. So it is reasonable to suggest here that moral agency is likewise a precondition for something functioning as the bearer of moral responsibilities in the substantive normative sense. So, the short answer to the first question is that only individuals who possess moral agency can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities in the vulnerability relation. Since persons possess moral agency, persons can be the bearers of moral responsibilities.

Adult human beings are, for the most part, persons. Philosophers sometimes call human moral agents 'undoubted persons' because there is no doubt that they satisfy the conditions for moral agency. However, not all human beings are also persons in this sense. Individuals in deep comas are not, nor are infants and young children, nor are embryos and fetuses. In none of these kinds of cases does it make sense to ascribe moral responsibilities to these kinds of human beings. There are also some borderline cases in which one might legitimately doubt whether someone is a person, for instance, when dealing with severely psychotic or schizophrenic individuals. People who are deranged in these ways are not normally held to be morally responsible for their actions, even though they look just like undoubted persons.

But there are also certain kinds of things which are persons but are not human beings. The prime example of this category are corporations and other sorts of collective entities. I will return to this topic at a later point, but for the time being, I want to note that corporations and other kinds of collective entities can be ascribed moral responsibilities even though they are not human beings, and in fact, are not even alive. Corporations do not bleed and they do not die. Nevertheless it is important to understand that corporations can satisfy the necessary conditions for moral agency, and hence be regarded as moral as well as legal persons.

If there are extra-terrestrial intelligent races out there somewhere in space, then it is quite possible that we would classify them as persons who are not also human beings. Think, for instance, about the alien in Steven Spielberg's movie E.T. -- not human to be sure, but capable of moral agency and hence moral responsibility nonetheless. It is certainly imaginatively possible to conceive of other kinds of beings which are 'persons' in the sense of possessing moral agency, but which are not human beings. Think about hobbits.

Science fiction provides other examples of possible non-human persons. Issac Asimov's story "The Centennial Man" (later made into a movie called the Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams) contemplates the possibility that some day we will have robots that claim their civil rights as persons under the law. For the time being, this is just a fictional possibility, but some authors, such as Ray Kurzweil, have predicted that the day in which we have such forms of artificially intelligent robots is not as far off as many people think. If and when these robots do come into being we will need to think of them as nonhuman persons.

Some people also think that some of our biological relatives, higher primates such as chimpanzees, or cetaceans such as bottle-nosed dolphins, might quality as nonhuman persons. Other people doubt this is true, which is why it might be possible to call these members of other species "doubted persons". Since I think of personhood as closely connected with those capacities necessary for moral agency, I am comfortable with this designation. Philosophers, by and large, have tended to over-emphasize the evolutionary discontinuities between human beings and other intelligent species. I, on the other hand, am more persuaded by the arguments of the biologists and evolutionary psychologists that there are significant continuities between humans and other members of the animal kingdom in the underlying psychological capacities that make moral agency possible.

Philosophers have spent a good deal of time and lots of ink trying to figure out exactly where to draw the boundaries of moral personhood. While interesting, I am not going to say much more about this topic here other than to note that I believe this is a matter for decision rather than discovery. That is, we will ultimately need to decide to draw the boundary somewhere or another, and where ever we draw it is going to be politically contested, as it is, for example, in the debate over the morality of abortion. We can fix on various kind of natural or psychological features of individuals as the basis for drawing the boundary, but this does not alter the fact that we construct and create it.

Definitional boundaries are rather like political borders in this sense; we can use the presence of a river or a coastline as the marker for a political boundary, say between the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but it is still our decision to use this natural feature as a boundary. The ability of the river to function in this way depends upon our collective intentionality to treat it as a political boundary. The same thing is true of the definitions of terms like "person" or "moral agent". We construct the meanings of our symbols.

Moral Patients

2008-02-07T20:00:00.003-05:00

We need to understand that while only moral agents, or persons, can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities, it is not the case that only moral agents can function as their objects. As I shall use the term, a moral patient is something that can function as the object of the moral responsibilities of moral agents, that is, something to which moral attitudes such as moral concern, respect, or care can be directed.

Moral patients are things towards which moral agents can have moral responsibilities. On this definition, all moral agents are also moral patients, but moral patients need not be moral agents. Only moral agents can function as the bearers of moral obligations towards others, while moral patients can be the objects of the moral obligations of others, but need not themselves be capable of moral agency.

We generally think of other adult human beings as moral agents, even though some adult human beings lack the effective capacity for moral agency, for instance, persons in comas. To qualify as a moral agent, one must satisfy the criteria generally accepted for mental competence as required for ascriptions of moral responsibility in the sense of liability for moral blame or praise. The actions of moral agents can be evaluated morally as to their blame or praiseworthiness, but not, for instance, the actions of infants and most animals. Nonhuman animals because they lack an effective capacity for moral agency can be readily classified as moral patients.

Thus, a moral patient does not have to be a moral agent or person, but could, for instance, also be nonhuman animals or an entire species, plants, microorganisms, an ecosystem, or even perhaps an inanimate object such as a work of art or a prized possession. The category of moral patients might be quite large and quite differentiated. It will need to be defined further.

Some kinds of moral patients are also agents, just not moral agents. In using the terms 'agent' and 'patient' I do not mean to imply that moral patients lack agency in their own right, or that moral agents cannot also be acted upon by moral patients. A shark, which is a moral patient can kill a man. A human infant, which is another kind of moral patient, can evoke in most human adults a caring impulse. Moral agents act upon moral patients and vice versa. In order to be considered a moral patient, that is, as the object of a moral responsibility, an entity must have some kind and degree of moral status.

As Francis Kamm has noted, there is a broad sense of moral status in which the concept can be defined as "what it is permissible or impermissible to do to some entity. In this sense, rocks may have the moral status of entities to which, just considering them, it is morally permissible to do anything" (F. M. Kamm. Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 227). But we normally use the term in a narrower sense as a contrast between "entities that in some important sense 'count' morally in their own right, and so are said to have moral status, and others that do not count morally in their own right." I will employ the term "moral standing" to denote things which count morally in their own rights either because of their intrinsic properties or relational properties. Having moral standing is a kind of moral status; other things like ordinary rocks do not have moral standing because they have the moral status of things to which we can do anything we please. Some other things which we cannot affect at all by means of human action have a different kind of moral status. The planet Jupiter or the Carina Nebula would fall into this category and would also lack moral standing.

Kamm endorses a suggestion by Christine Korsgaard that entities do not have to be considered to have an intrinsic value in order to have moral status in this sense; they only need to be considered as ends in the sense that some aspect of their good can "provide a reason (even if an overrideable one) for attitudes and actions independent of other considerations" (228). For instance, Kamm says, "A work of art or a tree may count in its own right in the sense that it gives us reason to constrain our behavior toward it (for example, not destroy it) just because that would preserve this entity" (228).

But Kamm further distinguishes doing something to an entity "for its own sake and not just in its own right." For Kamm only entities that have the capacity for sentience or consciousness can qualify as objects for whose sakes we can have moral obligations. I agree that entities which have the psychological capacities necessary for sentience have moral standing and are therefore moral patients. But I disagree with Kamm and also believe that there are organisms which are not sentient towards which we can act morally in their own rights even though they do not have interests in the psychological sense. All of those living things whose well-being can be affected for better or worse by the actions of moral agents can, on this view, be considered to have some kind or degree of moral standing and can therefore function as moral patients within the vulnerability relation.

To clarify the notion of moral status further, Kamm argues that, "there is a difference between one's having a duty to do something and having a duty to a specific entity to do it" (230). When we have a duty to someone, it typically creates a "correlative right or claim had by the entity to which the duty is owed against the person who owes it." We say that we act wrongly when we fail to fulfill a duty or responsibility to do something, but we say that we have wronged someone when we fail to fulfill our duty towards them as a right-holder. The party to whom a moral obligation is owed (its addressee) is not necessarily the party who is benefited or affected by that obligation (its object). This can be made clear by means of an example or two.

Suppose that Sam has mother, Judith, who has had a stroke which left her severely incapacitated and in need of care. But Sam has a job and a young family to care for as well, so he hires Gwen, a professional nurse, who promises Sam to take care of Sam's mother Judith while he is at work. In this example, Sam has a moral responsibility to care for his mother when she is vulnerable and depending upon him for her care, but he can delegate this responsibility to another caregiver who then enters in as a party to this moral relationship.

In this triangular moral relationship Gwen is a duty-bearer; she has a duty to Sam to take care of his mother Judith. Sam is the right-holder and the addressee of Gwen's duty since it is Sam who would be wronged by Gwen if she failed to properly discharge her duties. Judith is an object and beneficiary of Gwen's duty. Judith is in this case is a moral patient who is also a moral agent but who functions as the indirect object of Gwen's moral obligations. Sam functions as the direct object of Gwen's responsibility because she owes her duty to Sam. While Gwen owes her duty to Sam, because of her promise was addressed to him, Judith is the object of Gwen's duty because Gwen now has a responsibility to care for Judith that was delegated to her by Sam. On this account, Sam has a right against Gwen, and Gwen has a duty she owes to Sam, but Gwen also has a moral responsibility towards Judith who is the object and the beneficiary of her care. Judith is the object of Gwen's duties, but Sam is the right-holder who is in a position to demand that Gwen fulfill her responsibilities.

This is an example of how moral patients can function as the objects of a moral agent's obligations although they are not themselves are not right-holders in the relevant sense. Thus, a moral patient can be the object of the moral responsibilities of others without having rights against them.

One can drive this point home more forcefully by substituting something that is not a human being for Judith. Suppose we vary the case and stipulate that Sam asked Gwen to water his plants while he was away on vacation. Sam's plants are not moral agents, nor are they sentient, and are not the kind of things that can have rights. But Gwen still has a duty towards the plants because of the promise she has given to Sam. Sam has rights against Gwen, but Sam's plants don't.

Or consider the case in which Sam asks Gwen to take care of his 1200cc Harley Davidson motorcycle for him, say to change its oil and polish its chrome. In this case we would say that Gwen has a responsibility concerning Sam's Harley, but many people would be disinclined to say that the motorcycle is the object her responsibilities. Sam is still the addressee of Gwen's duties and he would be wronged if she does not do as she has promised. But motorcycles, and most other inanimate, non-living material artifacts, are not normally considered to be things that we can have obligations towards. In such cases, I will say that the object in question has a derived, or observer-relative kind of moral status. Its status is derived from the interests of moral patients who have "goods of their own" or can be regarded as "ends in themselves," but the object of the obligation, its beneficiary, itself cannot.

There can also be cases where a single entity, for example, another person, functions both as the object or beneficiary and the right-older with respect to someone else's duties. When rights ground moral responsibilities, for example, a duty, to refrain from torturing another person by subjecting them to electrical shocks, my duty corresponds to a right on her part not to be tortured. Here the object of my responsibilities and their beneficiary are the same individual. Rights ground moral duties that are in the interest of the right-holders. If I commit torture I both harm the person I torture and I wrong him because I have violated a right which he has against me.

However, when we have moral responsibilities concerning moral patients who are not also moral agents, no such rights are involved. So, for example, I may have a duty not to destroy a tree without good reason because the tree has a moral status, which (other things being equal), gives me reason not to destroy it. But this moral duty does not correlate with right on the part of the tree, and I will not have wronged the tree if I destroy it, although I may still have done something wrong. Trees and other kinds of living things can be moral patients that function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents without their also qualifying as right-holders.

Moral agents can have moral responsibilities that are other-regarding towards (or concerning) both other moral agents and towards various categories of moral patients having intrinsic and derived moral status. Moral agents can also have self-regarding moral responsibilities, that is, persons have can have moral responsibilities to themselves. Moral patients are, in general, things which are valuable and vulnerable to human action in a variety of different ways. Things which cannot be affected for good or for ill by human actions cannot be considered to be moral patients at all. The planet Jupiter, for instance, which is only a great gaseous sphere in space, is something which cannot be a moral patient because we cannot affect it in any way that might be considered as mattering to its "good" or "well-being." The limits of human action also mark the outer limits of possible human responsibilities.

We cannot have moral responsibilities concerning those things whose well-being we cannot affect through our action or inaction. We can't really do anything to Jupiter even though we have now shot satellites into it to try to learn more about it. But this action did not harm Jupiter in any way. Jupiter is, in fact, not even the sort of thing which can be harmed. We can only harm those things which can be thought of as having a well-being or a good of their own. The planet Jupiter has no good of its own, and even if it did, its good could not be affected in any way by human action, which is just another way of saying that things like the planet Jupiter cannot be moral patients.

However, I think that we can have moral responsibilities concerning the Earth, since we can affect the earth for good or ill by our actions. Unlike Jupiter, the Earth has a moral status of its own which derives from its being a living planet – a place in the cosmos where the phenomenon of life has emerged. Perhaps there are other planets in the universe where life has arisen. Personally, I believe that Earth cannot be the only site of life in the cosmos, but at this stage in humanity's scientific understanding of the universe we don't know this. However, we do know that life exists on Earth and that this fact makes Earth rather special. On the bio-centric view of moral value I will develop shortly, life is the basis of intrinsic value.

Intrinsic vs. Relational Moral Value

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We consider moral patients to have moral status in that they count, morally speaking, in their own rights. Counting morally means that something that is a moral patient can function as the object of moral responsibilities of moral agents.

But what does it mean to count morally? One idea is that in order to count morally a thing must be valuable in some way. The VCP directs us to protect those moral patients which are vulnerable, and valuable, and whose well-being, their 'good' is in some way dependent on our choices and actions. But what kind of value are we talking about? What gives certain things this kind of value, the kind that enables them to count morally?

It is important to remember that we have been talking only about moral value, that kind of value that makes a thing a possible object of a moral responsibility in its own right. There are many other kinds of value: aesthetic, functional, instrumental, nutritional, medicinal, commercial or economic value, and so forth. While we are mainly concerned with understanding the concept of moral value, it is important to bear in mind that the same thing that has moral value can also have some of these other kinds of value.

The main conceptual distinction that is conventionally drawn is between the notion of intrinsic value and that of relational, derived, or instrumental value. Something has a relational or derived value when its value depends on the existence of a valuer who places or confers a value upon that thing. So, for instance, commercial value is determined by markets, and markets consist of buyers and sellers who jointly determine the commerical values of various kinds of commerical goods and services. A used car has a commercial value, but this value is wholly derived or relational, since it depends on the acts of buyers and sellers who jointly determine its value. Many other things that we say are valuable have only derived or relational values. There is an old debate, however, about whether or not it is possible for all sorts of values to be derived.

Some philosophers have thought that all values are derived. David Hume, for instance, the towering intellect of the Scottish Enlightenment, seems to have held the view that even moral values, for instance the values that we attach to certain kinds of actions, are derived from our sentiments:

Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You can never find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, toward this action. Here is a matter of fact; but this the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from contemplation of it. (David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. Courier Dover Editions, 2004, pp. 333-34).

In Hume's view, the willful killing of another person is not morally wrong because this act destroys the life of another person, a vulnerable living being whose life has an intrinsic value; it is wrong because a moral observer places a value on that person's life and the violation of this derived value produces in this observer feelings of disapprobation at the loss of something in which he has placed a value. On this view, things have moral value only if someone, a valuer, attaches a moral value to them. Philosophers call this theory in metaethics non-cognitivism or emotivism. On this view, even moral values are relational, they are derived wholly from the sentiments of human valuers. On this view things only have value to the extent that human valuers place values on them.

Like Kant, I do not think that noncognitivism with respect to moral value can be correct. A view that holds that all values are relational or derived leads to a regress which can only be ended by circular reasoning, or by nihilism (the view that nothing in the universe has value), or by taking some things as having an intrinsic value.

The regress arises if one asks the question, "If a human being's life is valuable only because a moral observer, in this case, another human being, places a value on it, then what is it that makes the moral observer valuable?" If the value of a thing is derived from an act of valuing it by another thing, then in order for the second thing to have value, the valuer must itself have value. If the valuer has no value in itself, then how can it confer value upon something else? What is it that gives moral valuers their value?

If it is other moral valuers, then we have a circular argument in which moral valuers have value because moral valuers confer it upon themselves. But this begs the question of how moral value arises in the cosmos, for one can still ask where did the moral valuer get the value that it confers upon itself? If some other moral valuer conferred the value upon the valuer, then one can ask where that being got its value from, and if the answer is another moral valuer, then we can reiterate the question, and so on ad infinitum.

If valuers have no value in themselves, then nothing can have any value, since, by our hypothesis, things only acquire value in relationship to valuers who place values on them. This is nihilism, the view that nothing in the universe has any value. Nihilism violates our ordinary moral intuitions in a quite radical way since it entails that nothing is either morally right or morally wrong. Since human lives have no value, for the nihilist, genocide is just as morally acceptable as baking apple pie. Most moral philosophers want to avoid nihilism since it makes everything meaningless and valueless. If nihilism is correct, then everything really is permitted.

In order to escape circularity and avoid nihilism one must take some things as possessing intrinsic rather than derived value. Those things which Kant called "ends in themselves", or which we can say have intrinsic moral value, are the source and the origin of the value that exists in the cosmos. In order for chains in which the value of one thing is derived from acts of valuing by valuable beings, there must be something in the universe that has an intrinsic moral value, something that is valuable in itself.

One traditional way that people have thought they could stop the regress is by invoking a deity or supernatural being, who functions as the valuer of last resort. On this kind of religious theory, human beings have a value because God loves us above all of his other creatures, because we are created in "God's image." If this is our view, then the value of human lives is still a derived value; human beings are believed to be valuable to God, not intrinsically valuable, or valuable in ourselves. Only God is assumed to be "valuable in Himself"; everything else's value derives from acts of valuing by a divine moral valuer who places a value on human beings because he loves us. This is the theocentric perspective that humans have used for many centuries to help them understand the moral order and which still holds sway over many people's minds. Without the belief in a personal deity who functions as the valuer of last resort, there would be no escape from nihilism and human existence would seem meaningless to many people. This is one powerful reason why the religious belief in a personal creator God remains so popular.

But for atheists and religious skeptics, like Hume, and even for philosophers such as Kant, who was a theist, this theocratic answer is not satisfactory. If the belief that some things are right and wrong depends ultimately on the belief in God's functioning as valuer of last resort, then the entire moral world collapses when belief in a personal creator god wanes and is replaced by a scientific worldview in which there are no personal deities who create and manage the universe, who lay down moral laws, answer our prayers, and judge us morally after we die.

Kant and modern day secular humanists choose a different place to stop the regress. They insist that human lives have intrinsic moral value because they exhibit rational moral agency. This is, of course, also circular, but it is no more so than insisting that God is valuable just because he is God. Explanations must come to an end somewhere, Wittgenstein famously said. So why is it worse to stop the explanation of the origin of moral value by insisting that human beings, as rational agents, are intrinsically valuable than by insisting that there must be a deity who is intrinsically valuable and whose valuing human beings confers value upon us? At least we know that human beings actually exist, while the God that people talk about seems to many of us quite imaginary.

Despite claims from religious people of how much God loves us, he seems in fact to be indifferent to human suffering, while at least some human beings do care about human suffering at least to some extent, at least some of the time. From a theocratic point of view, of course, the alternative secular humanist answer to the question of the origin of moral value is seen as a major threat to their belief system. They deride it as "moral relativism." Despite such protestations, however, people are still losing their religion in increasing numbers. While many people see this as a symptom of moral decline, others, like me, understand that it is really an opportunity for spiritual renewal.

From the human-centered (homocentric) point of view, the concept of dignity, or inherent worth, is used to describe the kind of moral value which underpins the moral status which belongs to human persons. Possessing dignity is not the same thing as having self-respect or acting in a dignified manner, as is appropriate to one's class, rank or position. Dignity is that moral property of human persons by which we acknowledge them as beings who are intrinsically worthy of moral concern and as having inherent rights which specify how they may and may not be treated. If one strips a person of his or her human dignity, then one removes the ground of his or her moral status and with it his or her human rights. For this reason, dignity is deemed to be an inherent and inalienable moral property of all human persons. The term 'dignity' refers to the intrinsic moral value of human persons. Many homocentric ethical theories of moral status, such as Kant's, divide the moral universe into persons and things. Persons possess dignity or instrinsic value, because, for Kant, they have rational wills, and hence they are moral agents, while mere things do not. For Kant, everything that is not a person is a thing. Possessing a rational will is the necessary and sufficient condition for moral personhood on Kant's view. On this view, one either has moral status or one does not; there are no kinds, degrees, or levels of moral status. Only things with intrinsic moral value have moral status, and only persons with their rational wills have intrinsic moral value.

But this Kantian theory of intrinsic moral value is inadequate for several reasons. First it denies moral status to sentient animals, other living beings, ecosystems, and endangered species. Secondly, by reducing the grounds of moral status to a single criterion, rational agency, the Kantian view denies full moral status to human beings who may lack this capability at various times during their lives. Third, a single criterion view like Kant's fails to capture the multi-faceted nature of our moral intuitions about what makes some objects more morally valuable than others. In Kant's moral ontology there are only two sorts of things: moral agents, whose intrinsic value gives them the moral status of persons, and 'things' which have no moral status because they have no instrinsic value, but only instrumental or derived value. But this is clearly an inadequate description of the moral world. We need to have a richer vocabulary if we are going to understand the nature of our moral community.

But there is also another possibility -- we can adopt a biocentric perspective according to which Life is what has intrinsic value and is the source of all forms of derived value. This view is reflected in the various forms of nature mysticism that one encounters, for instance, in the work of poets like Walt Whitman, or naturalists like John Muir. It is also the basis of some religious beliefs, such as the Buddhist doctrine of ahimsa, or Jainism, which teaches that it is wrong to harm any living thing without reason. It is also present in many pre-Christian religious traditions in which the Earth is understood to be a goddess, Gaia, who gives birth (life) to all that moves, and swims, and flies. One encounters a similar idea in the writings of New Age spiritual teachers such as Ken Wilber and Eckhardt Tolle. From the biocentric perspective all living things have intrinsic moral value, and are ends in themselves, and can therefore be the objects of human moral responsibilities. The kind of value that living things have is an objective value that exists independently of the acts of moral observers who may or may not value them for their own sakes and who often attach other kinds of derived value to them.

If explanations must come to an end somewhere, it makes much more sense to end the explanation of the origin of moral value in the phenomenon of Life on Earth than it does to place it in an imaginary deity or in human beings alone among all the life forms that have made their home on this planet. This bio-centric theory of moral value is perfectly consistent with a scientific world view that understands the Earth itself as a speck of stardust revolving around a rather ordinary star, on the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which is only one among the billions of galaxies in the cosmos. Because of a series of cosmic accidents, like the asteroid collision that created the Earth's moon and in the process reconstituted its atmosphere, Earth became suitable for life as we know it to arise. It is also consistent with some traditional religious views in which the hand of God directed the Earth to bring forth life. Bio-centrism is also consistent with various forms of New Age spirituality in which life on Earth is just an outward manifestation of a cosmic intelligence, an infinite and eternal Presence, which is the formless source of all manifest forms of being.

Whichever of these metaphysical world views suits you it still makes sense to regard Life as having intrinsic moral value. This metaphysical adaptability makes the bio-centric perspective the leading candidate for providing the basis for a global ethics.

Intrinsic and Observer Relative Properties

2008-02-07T16:55:00.002-05:00

The New York Times has reported that Peru and Chile have been embroiled in a dispute over which country can lay claim to have given the potato to the world.

Chileans gain comfort from studies showing that more than 90 percent of modern potato varieties outside the Andes have a common origin in potatoes once found in the area around Chiloé Island, in southern Chile. Potatoes from Chiloé found their way to Europe, where they were well suited to latitudes with relatively long days.

But potato experts here, and there are many, point to genetic studies showing that all potatoes currently eaten in the world originated more than 10,000 years ago from a single ancestor, Solanum brevicaule, found on Lake Titicaca's north shore. That would be on the Peruvian side, not in Bolivia.

"The silly part is that the story of the potato began millennia before the concept of nation states existed," said Charles Crissman, a researcher at the International Potato Center. "But, yes, the first potatoes came from what is today Peru." ["Chile and Peru Vie in Spat Over Spud", June 1, 2008, A6].

That potatoes originated in what is today Peru is an "observer-relative" fact about them. Other facts about potatoes, for instance, their genetic composition, their mass, their caloric value, and so forth, are not observer-relative; they are properties that are intrinsic to the potato itself.

The philosopher John Searle explains that, "...there is a distinction between those features of the world that we might call intrinsic to nature and those features that exist relative to the intentionality of observers, users, etc." [The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995, p. 9]. He uses the example of a screwdriver whose intrinsic features include that it is partly made of wood and partly made of metal, but whose observer-relative properties include that it is a "screwdriver". Being a screwdriver is the intended use or function of this particular artifact, as observed from the point of view of "makers, designers, owners, buyers, sellers, and anyone else whose intentionality toward the object is such that he or she regards it as a screwdriver" [10]. It is important to be quite clear about this distinction, since it will figure importantly in our account of moral status. Searle's account is admirably clear in part because he is clear about his ontology and his epistemology. Ontology is that branch of philosophical inquiry that deals with the questions "What exists?" or "What is real?" Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that addresses questions like "How do we know anything?" and "How do we know what exists?" Searle has wants to answer the specific ontological question about things like "money, property, governments, and marriages," or what he calls institutional or social facts, namely in what sense, if any, things like these can be said to exist. Social facts contrast with what he calls "brute facts" or natural facts, such as the fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron, in that natural facts do not depend on human institutions for their existence, while social facts do:

In order that this piece of paper should be a five dollar bill, for example, there has to be the human institution of money. Brute facts require no human institutions for their existence. Of course, in order to state a brute fact we require the institution of language, but the fact stated needs to be distinguished from the statement of it (p. 2).

In drawing this distinction Searle takes exception with those post-modernist thinkers who have argued that all of reality is somehow a human creation-- that there are no brute facts, but only social facts created by human language. Searle (and I) reject this view and defend the distinction that claims that some properties of things or features of the world are intrinsic to them or "observer-independent", while others are not intrinsic to them, or are "observer-relative".

I also agree with Searle when he claims that our contemporary scientific ontology based upon atomic theory in physics and evolutionary biology, commits us to the view that "The world consists entirely of entities that we find it convenient, though not entirely accurate, to describe as particles." (6)

These particles exist in fields of force, and are organized into systems. The boundaries of systems are set by causal relations. Examples of systems are mountains, planets, H2O, molecules, rivers, crystals, and babies. Some of these systems are living systems;...and some of them have evolved certain sorts of cellular structures, specifically, nervous systems capable of causing and sustaining consciousness. Consciousness is a biological, and therefore physical, though of course also mental, feature of certain higher-level nervous systems, such as human brains and a large number of different types of animal brains.

For Searle, the existence of conscious or sentient life forms is a natural fact about the universe, and "with consciousness comes intentionality, the capacity of the organism to represent objects and states of affairs in the world to itself" (7). Intentionality is a technical terms employed in philosophy to describe the feature of representations, signs, and symbols by which they are about something or refer to something other than themselves, for instance, the word "bread" refers to a type of baked food made out of ground up wheat, corn, rye, or other grains. The slice of multigrain bread I had for breakfast had a certain caloric value, one of its intrinsic properties, but the facts that it was understood by me as "food" and that I called it "bread" rather than say, "pane" or "brod" or "Ψωμί" are observer-relative.

Philosophers who mistakenly believe that all features of the world are observer-relative are confused, according to Searle, about two different meanings of the terms "objective" and "subjective," their ontological and their epistemological senses. In the epistemological sense, the subjective/objective distinction is used to express the idea that the truth or falsity of certain kinds of judgments we make about things cannot be settled independently of the attitudes, feelings, and points of view of the makers and hearers of those judgments. So, in his example, the statement "Rembrandt is a better painter than Rubens." expresses an epistemically subjective judgment. The statement, "Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year 1632," expresses a judgment that is epistemically speaking objectively true in that "the facts in the world that make them true or false are independent of anybody's attitudes or feelings about them" (8). When we state true facts about the world in the epistemically objective sense we can also say that we have described objective facts.

However, we also use the terms subjective/objective in an ontological sense in which they are predicates not of judgments but of entities and they ascribe to these entities a certain mode of existence. In this ontological sense, pains and other sensations, are subjective entities, "because their mode of existence depends on their being felt by [conscious] subjects." Mountains, such as Mt. Everest, on the other hand, are ontologically objective "because their mode of existence is independent of any perceiver or mental state" (8).

These two senses of the objective/subjective distinction yield four categories of judgments that we can make about entities or features of the world:

(1) Epistemologically objective judgments about ontologically objective things;

(2) Epistemologically objective judgments about ontologically subjective things;

(3) Epistemologically subjective judgements about ontologically objective things; and

(4) Epistemologically subjective judgments about ontologically subjective things.

Judgments of type (1) concern features of things that are objectively real in that their existence is observer-independent. For instance, the Delaware river is objectively real and it would exist had there been no human beings or other sentient creatures around to observe it. Judgment of type (2) concern what can be called institutional or social facts, for instance, the judgment that a certain piece of paper is a five dollar bill, is a judgment of this type. The piece of paper has an ontologically objective existence, but that it has the status of "money" with a value of "five dollars" are observer-relative or ontologically subjective features it has. Yet, it is objectively true that this piece of paper is a five dollar bill, since it is true independently of my own attitudes, feelings, and point of view; its status as money having a certain value is fixed by social institutions in which I participate but which I do not control.

The moral status of entities or features of the world, that is, whether or not it can function as a "holder of rights" or as an "object of moral obligations" is due to certain social or institutional facts and are thus observer-relative features. However, that there are certain things in the world that are "alive" and "sentient" is ontologically objective fact about the world. Of course, the linguistic conventions we use to state facts about these kinds of things in the world depend upon human institutions and social facts, but again, it is a mistake to confuse the fact stated from our statement of it. So to state that "I am a living, sentient creature." is to state an ontologically objective fact in an epistemologically objective way. While, to say that "I am the holder of a right to life." is to state an ontologically subjective fact in an epistemologically objective way. The latter statement is ontologically subjective because "rights" are things, like money, that exist because of social institutions, which in turn, presuppose the existence of sentient social animals like us. We assign the moral status "holder of a right to life" to creatures like ourselves and in doing so we impose (or assign) a status function to creatures like ourselves. Similarly, if we call something a "moral patient" meaning that it is the sort of things towards which moral agents like ourselves can have moral obligations, duties, and responsibilities, we also assign to those things a certain "status function". Status-function assignments are subject to revision; but revising them requires changing our social institutions, not just changing our attitudes and feelings. Moral status functions, then, are observer-relative features of the world, but statements we make about them can be objectively true in the epistemic sense.

As Searle notes, "whether a feature is intrinsic or observer relative is not always obvious" (11). He suggests that a good "rough and ready" way to distinguish between something's intrinsic and its observer relative features is to ask yourself "could the feature exist if there had never been any human beings or other sentient beings?" (11). So for instance, the body of water known as the "Delaware River" must have existed for many millennia before European settlers (and perhaps even Native Americans) came to occupy North America, just as the potato existed before humans discovered they could eat them and before the nation states of Peru and Chile were created. The Delaware river is an intrinsic feature of the North American landscape. However, that the Delaware River is the political boundary between the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is an institutional, social, or observer-relative fact about it. We could, if we chose to, revise this fact, and change the boundary. But we haven't, so it is objectively true to say that "The Delaware River is the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey." I am not making this fact up and it does not depend on my personal feelings or opinions. It is an institutional or social fact that depends upon the existence of sentient social animals like us. If we subtract all of the human observers, then the body of water would still exist in itself; it just wouldn't have the status function "border".

There is an important caveat to this simple test for "intrinsic" vs "observer-relative" features of the world, namely, "Because mental states, both conscious and unconscious, are themselves intrinsic features of the world, it is not strictly speaking correct to say that the way to discover the intrinsic features of the world is to subtract all the mental states from it" (11). If mental states are themselves intrinsic ontologically objective features of certain kinds of organisms that really exist in the world, sentient organisms, it follows that mental states constitute intrinsic features of the world which do not exist independently of sentient organisms and their mental states.

With these concepts and distinctions in mind, we can now proceed to consider theoretical questions concerning the notions of intrinsic moral value and moral status. As I have suggested, moral status will always be observer and observer relative feature of things, one which we, moral agents, assign or ascribe to them. However, at least in some cases, we can choose to base our social institutions about moral status on natural facts or intrinsic features of various kinds of things to which we assign moral status. I am going to be arguing for revising our social institutions about moral status to make them more inclusive than they are normally understood to be.

A Bio-Centric Axiology

2008-02-07T14:03:00.001-05:00

Axiology is the name of the field of philosophical inquiry that concerns the nature of values and value judgments. As noted earlier, there are many kinds of values, aesthetic, medicial, commercial, and functional or instrumental values of various kinds. The basic distinction is between intrinsic and derived values. A bio-centric axiology is a theory of value that takes Life as the basis of intrinsic moral value, and assumes that all of the various kinds of derived value acquire their values in relation to living beings. One can understand the bio-centric axiological perspective from ecological, evolutionary, and ontogenetic perspectives.

The Ecological View of Intrinsic Moral Value

When Aldo Leopold's classic work "A Sand County Almanac" appeared in 1949, the ecological crisis that human activities were producing on Earth had only become apparent to a few people. Because of his love for the land, and his work with the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold had a better view than most people of the ways in which humans were destroying the land because of their indifference to its moral status. He hoped for an enlargement of the human sense of moral community to include a "land ethic" that would include a regard for preserving the "integrity, stability, and beauty" of the land for its own sake, and not only for the economic value that certain portions of land, or certain species of plants and animals might have for human beings. He wrote that, "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate….The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land" (Leopold, 1948, 203-4).

It is important to appreciate that for Leopold, the land is not merely soil;

...it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct the energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption for the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. (216)

Land is used here as a collective noun, like "furniture" which encompasses a number of distinct types of things. But unlike furniture which is just a collection of different kinds of man-made inanimate objects, the land supports a biotic community, a place of life. Without its living members there would be no energy circuit and the soil would be as dry and lifeless as dust on the Moon, the Earth's barren twin. The energy of the Sun reaches the Moon just as it reaches the Earth, but there it is only reflected back out into space. While on Earth some of this solar energy is captured and converted into living forms.

In order to understand the land in this sense, one needs to understand ecology, but this turns out to be very difficult to do. We humans are only beginning to comprehend the exquisite balance that sustains biotic communities in different regions and locales of the Earth and under its seas. Like the evolution of our scientific understanding of ecological systems, Leopold thought that a land ethic would evolve once we humans "quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem," and began to examine the land "in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient" (224). He offered as a guide to what "right" means in this context when he wrote: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (224-5).

Since Leopold's time significantly more human beings have come to appreciate the wisdom of this perspective and have come to regard biotic communities, the land in this sense, as something worth preserving for its own sake. By adopting this moral response to the land, we humans create and extend the boundaries of our moral community. We do so in part because we have come to understand that we ourselves are part of the land and draw our energy from the same fountains of energy that support other living beings, so that when we harm the land, we harm ourselves as well. School children now learn this, but few fully understand it.

But we do no need to think that the elements of a biotic community have equal moral status. Soil and air, water and sunlight, for instance, which are necessary for life, are not themselves things which are intrinsically valuable. Some people think that the microbes and bacteria are intrinsically valuable because they are living things, and more people may admit that the plants and animals which nourish themselves on these microscopic creatures have some kind of moral standing. But these remain controversial views.

On the other hand, most people will readily agree that they themselves have intrinsic value. Each of us, from an egocentric point of view, regards our own life as intrinsically valuable, and we have come around to understanding that we must, to be consistent, universalize this idea and regard all other human being as "ends in themselves," as things which have their own good and to whom moral obligations can be owed for their own sakes. This understanding is what shapes the idea of global human moral community based on the ethics of human rights

However, under the conventional ethical theory most humans accept, human beings are the only creatures that are ends in themselves. The value that all other living things on the land in the sea and in the air have is only an instrumental value, a value for us, not an intrinsic value. This homocentric (human-centered) perspective is what most humans use to understand the moral domain. From this perspective we need inquire only about the usefulness or utility of other members of the biotic community for us, their ability to satisfy our appetites and desires. When we see the moral world in this way, other living beings have no intrinsic value at all; their value is only instrumental and is derived from their utility to us. Since most other living things have little or no use for us, we tend not to care about them.

But this homocentric (or anthropocentric) view is cock-eyed from the ecological perspective. Human beings, standing as we do at the top of the food chain, may represent the apex of the biotic pyramid on Earth, but we are not its base, nor its intermediate levels. We have the moral stature that we do because we stand upon the backs of all of the other creatures of the land and sea, and along with them upon the Earth itself rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. Moral stature is built from the bottom up, not bestowed from the top down. We humans have the moral stature we do because we stand upon a pyramid of value which sustains our existence as a species. That pyramid of value is what Leopold called the Land, the living Earth, which encompasses the land and sea and air and all of the biological forms that inhabit them. As living forms human beings have intrinsic value, but we only have the moral stature we do because we stand upon a high plateau on the great pyramid of life.

The Evolutionary View of Intrinsic Value

The biological basis of intrinsic moral value can also be understood from the evolutionary perspective. The human beings who are now living are the growing end of an evolutionary process that began billions of years ago when life first appeared on the planet Earth. Our present understanding of the evolutionary epic which led to our existence while limited and incomplete enables us to understand that through a coincidence of fortuitous circumstances life was somehow able to spring forth from the Earth. The conditions of the primordial planet, its atmospheric composition, the abundance of heavy atoms born from exploding stars in its soil, the presence of water, and the continuous influx of energy from the sun, somehow enabled living forms to arise. The first of these life forms, primitive microbes, such as cyanobacteria, discovered how to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into life sustaining energy, producing oxygen as a byproduct, and so began an evolutionary process that over billions of years produced the manifold living forms that now inhabit the planet.

Each living link in this great evolutionary chain of being possessed intrinsic value because it contained the spark of life, the sacred fire. This value was passed onto its progeny and from them onto theirs by means of biological inheritance encoded in the DNA molecules that all life forms have. As life became more complex and multi-cellular animals and plants can into existence these living things increased in moral stature. The emergence of sensation and intelligence in some creatures further enhanced their stature. And finally, at the end of one branch of the great tree of life, homo sapiens came forth into the world with the power of language and thought. But the capacity for language and thought is not the basis of our value; rather it is the product of a process of cosmic evolution through which living value grew slowly over billions of years. We are only the inheritors of this intrinsic value, not its creators.

The Ontogenetic View of Intrinsic Value

One can grasp this conception of intrinsic value in another way. From the ontogenetic perspective each of us now living grew from living seeds, ova and sperm, which when joined together somehow "knew" how to divide and multiply in order to form a new human individual. Those living seeds carried the spark of life inherited from the evolutionary history of the species and, by combining, began a new cycle of life. The fertilized embryo, then, has some intrinsic value, it was valuable in itself, because like other living things, it inherited its value from its ancestors, and perhaps will one day pass that living value onto its progeny.

But the embryo's moral stature is relatively low at this stage in its development compared to other moral patients. It lacks sentience and intelligence, it cannot think or speak, and is not yet a member of human society. Yet, unless it's growth is interrupted, the process of gestation enables the embryo to continue its ontogenetic development by drawing energy and nutrients from its mother's body. As a fetus develops in utero it grows in moral stature as well as in size and functioning. While birth marks the entry of a new member into the human moral community, the growth process continues through infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The process is itself gradual and seamless and as the individual human being takes shape and grows into an adult its moral stature increases. As adult human beings we have come to have full moral status as moral agents, a moral stature that puts us on a high moral plateau. But we have attained this stature only because we have inherited the value inherent in each of the earlier stages of our individual existences, our earlier living incarnations each of which had its own moral status based, at least in part, on its intrinsic moral value.

One of the great achievements of modern ethics has been to recognize that the equal intrinsic moral value of all human persons. The ethics of human rights creates a single status moral community in which all persons occupy a single moral plateau in which we are all "equal in dignity and rights." This achievement has been the result of a long historical struggle, one which is yet not completed, to secure universal recognition of the inherent dignity, the intrinsic moral value, of all human beings.

But this great egalitarian achievement still depends upon a homocentric axiology. A homocentric axiology which take human beings or rational moral agents as the only things in the universe that have intrinsic moral value stands the living pyramid of intrinsic value upside-down. By assuming that only human beings possess inherent worth it reduces all other living beings to mere things which exist for our sakes, whose value is wholly derived from their utility in relationship to human interests.

But when we invert the value pyramid and place it back on its proper base we see that the moral plateau we humans occupy stands on top of a mountain of life, and at the growing end of a chain of living things each link of which has (or had) its own intrinsic moral value. When we understand the existence of human beings on Earth from the ecological, evolutionary, and ontogenetic perspectives, or, for short, from a biocentric point of view, the intrinsic value that human beings have is seen to be a function of our position within the broader biotic community that has evolved on Earth. From this bio-centric perspective we do not give other living things their value; Life gives intrinsic value to us.

The Cosmic Trolley

2008-02-07T13:58:00.000-05:00

But someone might object to my account by saying that I have not sufficiently justified adopting a biocentric axiology instead of a homocentric one. Human rational agency, the objection goes, is really the only thing that has intrinsic moral value in the universe since only rational human agents can be the bearers of moral obligations. While it may to true that there must be something in the universe that has intrinsic moral value, it is better to halt the regress with human rational agency than with life since the former grounds the concepts of duties and rights. While other living beings may have other kinds of intrinsic values, for instance, aesthetic or instrumental ones, they lack intrinsic moral value because they cannot be duty-bearers.

One way of answering this kind of challenge is to ask oneself to consider a philosophical thought experiment in which one is given a forced choice between sacrificing two things of value. Such problem are known a "trolley problems" in the philosophical literature. Usually one put a person on one track and, say, five persons on the other track, and one is instructed that one cannot prevent the trolley from running over and killing either the one or the five. Most people readily choose the lesser evil and save five while sacrificing the one.

But lets alter this example as follows: let's assume that we put the human species on one track, and all other living species on the other. I call this the Cosmic Trolley. Suppose that one is now asked to choose between saving humanity and saving all other living species on Earth. What morally should one choose?

Defenders of the homocentric ethics, like Kant, would have to choose to save humanity, even if that meant sacrificing all other living species, because they believe that only rational human moral agents possess intrinsic moral value, and therefore that the value of other life forms derive from their relationship to our interests. But this could not be a universal law using Kant's categorical imperative since making such a choice would end up in self-contradiction. Choosing to save humanity while sacrificing all other species would be self-defeating because other species of living things can survive perfectly well if there were no human beings at all. But humans cannot possibly survive without other living things. What would we eat once the Tang ran out?

Humans are dependent on the rest of the biological world for own survival, but the converse is not the case. Thus, willing the destruction of all other species of living things in order to preserve humanity would be self-defeating. Therefore, it follows that nonhuman life has a greater moral value that human life. This, of course, does not prove that human life has no intrinsic value, but only that it cannot be the only thing in existence that has such value. The intrinsic value of human beings is entailed by the biocentric view, because we are also alive, but not conversely. The biocentric axiological perspective thus subsumes and encompasses the traditional homocentric axiology that has been the basis of most systems of human morality up until now.

The Biological Origin of Agency

2008-02-07T13:03:00.002-05:00

The scientist, Stuart Kauffman, has an interesting perspective on the topic of agency. In Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Perseus Books 2008) he argues that the centuries old schism between science and religion is due to the reductionist worldview of modern science which sees all of nature as ultimately reducible to sub-atomic particles and energy, mere happenings, lacking meaning and purpose. But, "where all that exist(s) are the fundamental entitites and their interactions, and there are only happenings, only facts, [there is] no place for values" (11).

Hume recognized this gap by claiming that values cannot be derived from facts. The existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century tried to bridge this gap by insisting that agents themselves create values. But if scientific reductionism is correct, and human moral agents are no more than particles colliding in space, then "how can values and doings arise from particle interactions....?" The derivation of value from human agency does not resolve the problem; it only postpones it so long as agency itself is reducible to mere facts and happenings.

According to Kaufmann, the way to overome the schism, and to provide a satisfactory answer to Hume, is to deny reductionism and to understand that "agency is both real and emergent and cannot be reduced to the mere happenings of physics." This is so, he argues, "because biology is not reducible to physics. The biosphere," he writes, "is laden with agency, value, and meaning. Human life, which is certainly laden with agency, value, and meaning, inherits these qualities from the biosphere of which it is a part" (12).

Intrinsic moral value along with agency emerges in the course of cosmic evolution as an attribute of living forms. As lifeforms we humans do indeed have a kind of intrinsic value. But we are not the only living things have agency or should be regarded as having intrinsic value. Human beings have intrinsic value because we occupy a high plateau on the great pyramid of life.

Earlier in discussing moral agency I suggested that nonhuman animals exhibit agency, though perhaps not moral agency as is found in humans. We easily acknowledge agency in other mammals, for instance, our dogs and cats and most other domestic species, as well as in primates, cetaceans, felines, canines, bovines, etc. Probably most people are comfortable thinking of birds and reptiles as manifesting some kind of agency, and perhaps even insects, like the locusts I discussed earlier. But what about plants? Can we extend the concept of agency down towards the base of the tree of life that far? Can we perhaps extend it even further towards simple multicellular organisms, bacteria, viruses?

Kauffman argues that in the phenomenon of agency "we can find the origin of action, meaning, doing, and value as emergent realities in the universe" (72). The full-fledged, complex kind of conscious agency we find in ourselves is derived by evolution from more basic agentive characteristics found in all living things. Agency, then is a natural phenomenon, for Kauffman (and for me), and is the basis of meaning and value. It is the link that connects the physical world of happenings with the moral world of doings and action, the world in which we employ the teleological concepts of meaning, purpose, and value.

Kauffman asks, "What is the simplest system to which we might be willing to apply teleological language?" (78). He proposes that we can use it meaningfully and literally in describing the behavior "of a bacterium swimming up a glucose stream 'to get' sugar." The bacterium is acting autonomously, that is, it is acting on its own behalf and according to its own internal telos which directs it towards the goal of getting sugar. Kauffman proposes that a bacterium can be considered "a minimal molecular autonomous agent": which he defines as a system that (a) self-reproducing, (b) can carry out at least one thermodynamic work cycle, (c) is enclosed in a bounding membrane, and (d) has at least one receptor that enables it to detect properties of things in its environment (78-9).

I leave the technical details of his theory aside here. Interested readers should consult his book, which despite its being "high science" is quite readable. The important point for my purposes here is that if Kauffman's theory of agency is close to correct, then it also provides "a minimal definition of life," and a naturalized account of how "meaning, values, doing, and purposes emerge in the universe" (85), an account which does not require the postulation of a divine creator and is fully consistent with a scientific worldview. This is a very big deal. It is worth quoting his account at length so you can get a sense of what he is talking about.

Consider then a bacterium swimming up the glucose gradient. The biological function that is being fulfilled is obtaining food. The capacity to do so by detecting the local glucose gradient and swimming up it was assembled into a working organization of structures and processes by natural selection. This requires at least one receptor for glucose to discriminate between the presence and and absence of glucose, or better, two receptors spaced some distance apart to detect the presence of absence of a steep enough local glucose gradient. Without attributing consciousness to the bacterium, we can see in this capacity the evolutionary onset of choice and thus of meaning, value, doing and purpose. The technical word for meaning is semiosis, where a sign means something. Here, the bacterium detects a local glucose gradient, which is a sign of more glucose in some direction. By altering its behavior and swimming up the gradient, the bacterium is interpreting the sign. The bacterium may, of course, be mistaken. Perhaps there is not much glucose to be found in that direction. Neither "signs," "interpretation," nor "mistakes" are logically possible in physics, where only happenings occur. Thus, meaning has entered the universe: the local glucose gradient is a sign that means glucose is -- probably -- nearby. Because natural selection has assembled the propagating organization of structures and processes that lead to swimming up the glucose gradient for good selective reasons, glucose has value to the bacterium. And because getting food is the function of this organized behavior, as assembled by natural selection acting on fitter variants, getting food is the purpose of the activity, and is the doing or action of the bacterium. (86-7)

Agency, for Kauffman, is not reducible to the law of chemistry and physics, it is an emergent natural phenomenon that arises at a certain level of organizational complexity. Perhaps his theory of where to draw the boundary between agency (or life) and non-agentive causality will need to be modified by future research: his way of drawing the boundary leaves viruses and our current kinds of robots on the 'non-living' non-agentive side of the line. What is important is that if he is close to being right, then "values, meanings, doing, action, and 'ought' are real parts of the furniture of the universe" and this includes human values, meanings, doings, actions, and oughts. The moral realm is thus seen as natural and real, but not reducible to physics, and value, meaning, and purpose are seen as inherent in living forms as simple as bacteria.

Kauffman thinks that this insight is one of the keys to what he calls "reinventing the sacred." I agree, but prefer to talk about the less controversial notion of intrinsic value. In Kauffman's example, glucose has a value to the bacterium. This is a relational value, not an intrinsic one. But what about the bacterium itself? My view is that the bacterium, because it exhibits agency, and meaning, purpose, and action, should be considered as possessing an intrinsic value in its own being, that is, it exists autonomously as an"end in itself" and so can be regarded as having a basic kind of moral status.

On my bio-centric axiology all living beings have intrinsic value and hence basic moral status, which means that their survival and well-being can be the objects of the responsibilities of moral agents like us. Saying that bacteria can be the objects of our responsibilities, is not yet the same thing as saying that we have any serious moral responsibilities towards bacteria, only that they are the kinds of things toward which we could have them.

Uni-criterial vs. Multi-criterial Theories of Moral Status

2008-02-06T16:00:00.001-05:00

According to Mary Anne Warren, "ascriptions of moral status serve to represent very general claims about the ways in which moral agents ought to conduct themselves towards entities of a particular sort" (Moral Status: obligations to persons and other living things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 9). She also notes that "a second important feature of the concept of moral status is that the moral obligations that are implied by the ascription of moral status to an entity are obligations to that entity" (10). Having moral status, then, qualifies something as a possible object of the moral responsibilities and duties of moral agents. If the VCP is a fundamental principle of normative ethics, then it tells us that human moral agents have moral responsibilities towards things which have some kind of moral status, in particular, it tells us that we have moral responsibilities to protect them particularly when they are specially vulnerable and in some way dependent on our choices and actions.

Warren contrasts theories of moral status which are uni-criterial with those that are multi-criterial. A uni-criterial theory of moral status takes the view that there is some single criterion that we can use to determine what the moral status of a particular entity is. Various philosophers have proposed various uni-criterial theories of moral status. Kant's view that take rational agency as the sole criterion of intrinsic moral value, and hence moral status, is one example. Other people have proposed that genetic humanity is the proper criterion. Peter Singer, and other utilitarians have proposed that sentience, in particular, the capacity for pain and pleasure, functions as the sole criterion. Still others take other things such as self-consciousnsess or being the "subject of a life" as providing the criterion for moral status. Others, like Albert Schweitzer, propose that life or being alive is the criterion for having moral status.

But Warren argues that none of these uni-criterial theories of moral status can adequately account for the full range of our considered moral intuitions about cases calling for moral discrimination and judgment. Her view, which I find to be convincing is that "any satisfactory account of moral status must be a multi-criterial one, comprising a number of distinct but related principles" (20-21). In particular, Warren argues that:

(1) there is more than one valid criterion of moral status; (2) that there can be more than one type of moral status, with different types involving different obligations on the part of moral agents; and (3) that the criteria of moral status must include both certain intrinsic properties, including life, sentience, personhood, and certain relational properties, which sometimes include being part of a particular social or biological community. (21)

Like Warren, while I think that it would be nice to have a simpler theory of moral status, it is preferable to have one that is more descriptively adequate and which can account for a wider range of robust moral intuitions that competent moral judges have about cases calling for moral discrimination and judgment found in our current commonsense morality. Theories of moral status, however, should not be expected to satisfy everyone's opinions on these matters. Theories and principles are important in normative ethics because they help us correct our biases and guide our judgment in borderline cases. Theory choice in normative ethics is determined by a number of factors other than simplicity and descriptive adequacy alone, so it does not follow that just because a theory of moral status is "simple" or accounts for a number of current moral intuitions, it is correct. Ultimately, any theory of moral status will have to be discursively legitimized and translated into moral and in some cases legal norms that function to guide the judgment and action of large numbers of human moral agents. Philosophers, like Warren and myself, can only point the way towards such socially legitimized norms, we cannot by writng down our thoughts and reasons create them.

Warren does an excellent job in her book of giving philosophical arguments against the various uni-criterial theories of moral status. I am not going to spend a lot of time here rehearsing her arguments, but suggest that the interested reader consult her work. Since I agree with her general approach, I am going to save some time by jumping right into her own multi-criterial theory of moral status. It is, I believe, the best available account of its kind and so can provide a good starting place for further philosophical development.

The goal of this inquiry, recall, is to provide an account of what I am calling "moral patients", that is, those things which can function as the objects of our moral responsibilities. It is necessary to provide such an account in order to determine the boundaries of the moral community for which, I believe, we need an ethics of global responsibility.