The Vulnerability Principle

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

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.

Vulnerability vs. Voluntarism

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.

Theoretical Significance of the VCP

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.

Respecting Former Persons

Recent archaeological evidence excavated near Stonehenge suggests that the mammoth stone circle erected there in approximately 2500 B.C. was used at least in part as a monument to the dead. Another nearby neolithic site, Durrington Walls, was found to contain a profusion of pottery, animal bones, and other detritus suggesting that it was a feasting site. But few human remains have been found at Durrington Walls, while 52 cremations and numerous other human remains have been uncovered at Stonehenge, suggesting that it was used in Neolithic Britain as a cemetery, the stone circle representing the "domain of the ancestral dead." [Caroline Alexander. "If the Stones Could Speak: Searching for the Meaning of Stonehenge," National Geographic Magazine. Vol 213, No.8 (June 2008): 35-59.]

Like the Buddhas of Bamyam, the stones at Stonehenge have a kind of moral status because they have value to human moral agents. For us they have historical, cultural, and perhaps aesthetic value. But they probably had a different value to the people who erected them. Like the tombstones in our present cemeteries and public memorials to soldiers who died in wars, the stone circle represented the domain of the ancestral dead, or former persons.
Monuments to the dead, to former persons, are the enduring symbols of people who did once have intrinsic value as living, sentient, moral agents. We humans often choose durable things like stones to memorialize the dead, because they persist in time longer than most things, and can thus serve as a continuous link between the past and the present. The stones remind us that the dead are still in some sense "with us", not in themselves, but in the flesh and blood of their living descendants, in the cultures they created, and in the material artifacts that they produced.

Do former persons have a moral status? Can moral agents have moral obligations towards former persons? If so, what can such moral obligations be based upon?

Former persons, the deceased, are not alive, not sentient, and are not agents in the sense we ordinarily assume since they cannot act in the present, so in terms of our theory, former persons do not have intrinsic moral value because they possess none of the intrinsic properties that things must have in order to have moral standing in themselves.

But former persons did at one time exist as persons, and acted on the world in various ways as moral agents. Among the things they may have done is to have created cultural artifacts such as Stonehenge, or the Buddha statues at Bamyam, or the Illiad, or the Mona Lisa. Some of them must have also procreated and produced progeny, who procreated, whose descendants in turn, by means of causal chains of "begetting", may have begotten us.

The Great Chain of Being, as some ancient philosophical traditions called it, included spiritual beings, such as demons, angels, and gods, but the Great Chain of Begetting, does not. It is only the chain of biological inheritance that connects living generations of humans and other species with both their deceased ancestors, and their yet to be conceived biological descendants. While each of us, the living, has an intrinsic moral value in ourselves based upon the intrinsic properties and capabilities of our form of life, this intrinsic value is inherited from our ancestors and passed on by us to future generations of our species by means of biological procreation. There is nothing fancy or supernatural about this form of inheritance. If living things and sentient moral agent have intrinsic value, and they procreate and produce other living sentient moral agents, then those progeny inherit the kinds of moral value that was intrinsic in their ancestors. Our children, and their children, and their children's children, and so on, will inherit this same intrinsic moral value from us.

But from our present temporal vantage point former persons are nonexistent. Dead people cannot be affected or harmed in any way by our present actions. The dead are, in an important sense, invulnerable. If the dead cannot be harmed, as philosophers since Epicurus have thought, they are invulnerable and it would seem they cannot be objects of any moral responsibilities under the Vulnerability Principle, which normally presupposes that the moral patients to whom responsibilities of care and protection are directed must be vulnerable in some way to being harmed by our actions.

But the Vulnerability Principle is carefully stated: it says that moral agents have moral responsibilities to protect those moral patients who are specially vulnerable or in some way depending upon us. Can former persons, the deceased, be regarded as moral patients who are in some ways depending on us?

There is a sense in which they can. Former persons, our ancestors, are depending on us to preserve their genes by passing them onto future generations; they are depending on us to preserve the cultures that they created, their knowledge, their art, their moral and religious beliefs. Past generations are depending on us to preserve their best material artifacts, their monuments and cathedrals, their pyramids, aqueducts, and their sandstone Buddha images.

Many people feel the moral pull of tradition very strongly in their own lives. A great deal of human activity is directed towards the goal of preserving the cultural traditions and cultural achievements of the past and passing them on to future generations. Educators are culture carriers in this sense, and no human culture can persist without educators. In complex cultures such as our presently emerging global civilization, there are specific detailed roles, such as archaeologists, New Testament scholars, classicists, Asian antiquities experts, Florentine art restoration experts, Chicago historical architectural preservationists, and so forth, whose specific roles are to preserve cultural artifacts created by former persons. But, for whose sakes are they doing this? Is it for the sake of the deceased creators of these things or is it for us, the living, or is it for those who will come after us, future persons?

When people draw up their last will and testament that specifies what is to be done with their possessions when they have died, they are depending on others, the executors of their wills, to fulfill their wishes. Are we not obliged to keep our promises to the dead even though they will not be harmed by our betraying them? If we honor a trust placed upon us by another, we respect them, and conversely, by betraying a trust we disrespect them. So respecting the dead, means that we, the living, must honor the trust they have placed in us. They, the deceased, have placed their trust in us to preserve what was best in their life's work, the fruits of their labors, and the legacies they created as "gifts to the future." Think about your own legacy and how you would want it treated by those who come after you. It is the same for our ancestors: just as we are trusting future persons to preserve what was best in our present day culture, previous generations trusted us to preserve and protect what was best in theirs.

We can certainly harm the living descendants of the dead. If we fail to execute a person's last will, we can deprive a rightful heir of what they are entitled to. Most all human cultures have adopted burial practices that involve memorializing their ancestral dead. The physical remains of the ancestral dead, their bones, and the stone and concrete monuments that the living erect for the dead, can be damaged or destroyed, and to do so is usually regarded as a sacrilege, and as a way of disrespecting the departed.

But the remains of the dead, and the monuments erected to memorialize them, can only have derived moral status, a form of moral standing that is wholly derived from the value that moral agents place on them. So it is really the living descendants of the dead whom we respect when we respect the bones of their ancestors or respect the memorial stones erected over their graves, or the public monuments constructed to honor them. The moral standing these kinds of artifacts have is derived from their value to living moral agents, not their value to the deceased.

This way of looking at the question reduces all of our moral obligations to ones owed, directly or indirectly, towards actual, existing, moral patients. On this view, the only reason for honoring former persons' wills, or for fulfilling the promises we make to the dying, is that not doing so would harm some interest of present persons.

It is part of our conventional homocentric ethics to hold the belief all moral obligations are owed to presently existing moral patients. Our conventional way of thinking about ethical issues is highly "present-oriented"; we are inclined to consider only the short-term effects of our actions. It is also quite "localist" in that we mainly consider only those personal interests most directly affected by our actions.

I do not think these assumptions are correct. There is no theoretical barrier towards thinking of former persons as moral patients to whom moral agents can have moral obligations. As in the case of inanimate objects and aritifacts, all we have to do is to assign the status-function "moral patient" to the referents of the term "former persons," and presto-chango, they become moral patients, in the same way as pieces of metal become "coins" when we assign the status-function "money" to them. Like other derived forms or moral status, the moral status we assign to former persons is "observer-relative." it depends upon how intentional moral agents like ouselves assign status-functions to things. By assigning the status function "moral patient" to the term "former persons" we decide to include the referents of that term within the category of things towards which we can have moral obligations.

But former persons actually existed at one time as living, sentient moral agents, persons, who had intrinsic moral value in themselves. This is different than the pieces of metal that we make into coins, which have no moral or monetary value in themselves apart from that which observers like us assign to them. We do not respect inanimate objects in themselves, but we do, I believe, respect former persons in themselves, we respect them for what they were and for what they have bequeathed to us. So former persons have a distinct kind of moral standing. Although former persons cannot be harmed, they can be disrespected and the trust they place in us can be violated or dishonored. We present moral agents can have moral responsibilities towards former persons which are based upon the moral stature they once had as human persons, like us.

A global ethics, as I conceive it, alters our conventional assumptions about the boundaries of the moral community. In place of the homocentric bias of conventional ethics, it proposes a biocentric axiology in which living, sentient, non-human organisms can also function as moral patients and be the objects of human moral responsibilities. In place, of the "localist" bias of our conventional ethics, a global ethics proposes a "global" perspective in which our moral responsibilities extend beyond our own families and homes, our neighborhoods, and our own states and nations, to encompass all present persons and other living beings. So too, a global ethics must overcome the "present-oriented" bias of conventional ethics, and extend the boundaries of the moral community into the distant past, towards previous generations and former persons, and into the far future, towards future persons and future generations. On my theory, both former persons and future persons have moral standing as moral patients towards whom we, present persons, or actually existing moral agents, can owe moral responsibilities.

Protecting Future Persons

Like former persons, future persons, the individual members of future human generations, are, from our present temporal vantage point, nonexistent. They are not alive, not sentient, and are not agents in the usual sense because they cannot act in the present. But, like former persons, actual future persons, those human persons who will one day exist, form links in the great chain of begetting that from the evolutionary perspective stretches back in time to our ancient hominid ancestors, and before that, to those life forms that preceded them in the Earth's tree of life. We would like to believe that at least some actual future persons will exist, but we cannot know for sure.

It is curious, then, that we do not also construct monuments for future persons. Monuments to future persons would serve to symbolize our connection to those who will come after us, and who will inherit the kind of intrinsic moral value we presently have. Perhaps it would be a good thing if we invented this practice in order to remind ourselves that future generations of human beings, those human persons who are "yet to be", are also in some sense "with us now" as the future heirs to our civilization and to the particular kind of intrinsic moral value that human beings possess.

It is really even more important that we remind ourselves of our relationship to future people because, unlike the dead, future persons can be harmed by our present actions.

Future persons are vulnerable to us, but we are not vulnerable to them.

Joel Feinberg dreamt up a case that illustrates this rather strange asymmetrical relationship of vulnerability. Suppose, the story goes, Sam has the malevolent intention to commit the perfect crime. He decides that one way to do this is to construct a powerful bomb that is on a very long-delay timer and bury it deep underground. He constructs such a bomb and sets its timer to detonate in fifty years. Suppose that Sam dies 32 years before the bomb explodes. After his death an elementary school is built on the site over which Sam's bomb has been buried. Thirty-two years after Sam dies, the bomb explodes, and kills scores of innocent children, children who had not even been born when Sam constructed and armed the bomb and who Sam did not know would be harmed by his actions.

There is a straightforward sense in which is seems correct to say that Sam harmed those children, even though Sam was not alive at the time they were harmed, he was a former person. There is also a strong moral intuition that what Sam did was seriously morally wrong; it was in fact a crime. Forensic and police investigations might be able to determine that it was Sam who committed this crime, and to hold him responsible, in the liability sense, for this action. But as a deceased or former person Sam is beyond the reach of the law; Sam cannot be punished for his crime, since Sam is already dead and is, at the time the bomb explodes, therefore invulnerable. Sam, it appears, got away with the perfect crime.

Yet, despite this, our moral judgment about the wrongfulness of what Sam did seems secure. At the time he set the bomb to explode in fifty years Sam had a moral responsibility not to harm any future persons. He violated this responsibiliity even though he may not have known that an elementary school would be built over the site where he buried the bomb, and he did not know, in particular, which actual future children he would be harming when the bomb exploded. Sam acted recklessly with regard to the well-being of future persons who could be harmed by his actions, and so Sam committed a moral wrong. If future persons discover by forensic investigation that it was indeed Sam who set the bomb that killed the school children, they might assign to him the status function "murderer" because Sam was the moral agent who recklessly caused the children to be killed. That Sam constructed this bomb and set it to go off in fifty year is part of the causal chain leading to the children's deaths. It is a natural fact. But the status-function "murderer" is not; it is an observer-relative judgment we make in hindsight.

This story has obvious relevance to the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century. The present generation of living human beings is destroying natural ecosystems, polluting the air and the water, causing species extinctions, and warming the earth's atmosphere by continuing to pump greenhouse gases into it. We are recklessly setting bombs on long delay fuses that will one day harm future persons. We may not know which future persons will be harmed or killed by our present actions, but it is a pretty safe bet that there will be some actual future persons who we will harm. As the philosopher John Broome has noted,

Climate change will cause harm. Heat waves, storms and floods will kill many people and harm many others. Tropical diseases, which will increase their range as the climate warms, will exact their toll in human lives. Changing patterns of rainfall will lead to local shortages of food and safe drinking water. Large-scale human migrations in response to rising sea levels and other climate-induced stresses will impoverish many people. As yet, few experts have predicted specific numbers, but some statistics suggest the scale of the harm that climate change will cause. The European heat wave of 2003 is estimated to have killed 35,000 people. In 1998 floods in China adversely affected 240 million. The World Health Organization estimates that as long ago as 2000 the annual death toll from climate change had already reached more than 150,000. ["The Ethics of Climate Change." Scientific American, Vol. 298, No. 6 (June 2008): pp. 96-102.

But if this is true, then there is a good moral argument for not doing those things we are presently doing that will cause harm to future persons, and for compensating them for the harms that we are causing. The argument derives from an elementary moral principle that nearly everyone accepts, namely that, "you should not do something for your own benefit if it harms another person. Sometimes you cannot avoid harming someone, and sometimes you may do it accidentally without realizing it. But whenever you cause harm, you should normally compensate the victim." The kinds of harms likely to be brought about by global climate change are not intentional, and are the result of our collective rather than our individual actions, yet it seems that this elementary moral principle still applies.

In going about our daily lives, each of us causes greenhouse gases to be emitted. Driving a car, using electric power, buying anything whose manufacture or transport consumes energy--all those activities generate greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. In that way, what we each do for our own benefit harms others. Perhaps at the moment we cannot help it, and in the past we did not realize we were doing it. But the elementary moral principle I mentioned tells us we should try to stop doing it and compensate the people we harm.

This same principle also tells us that what we should do about climate change is not just a matter of weighing benefits against costs--although it is partly that. Suppose you calculate that the benefit to you and your friends of partying until dawn exceeds the harm done to your neighbor by keeping her awake all night. It does not follow that you should hold your party. Similarly, think of an industrial project that brings benefits in the near future but emits greenhouse gases that will harm people decades hence. Again suppose the benefits exceed the costs. It does not follow that the project should go ahead; indeed it may be morally wrong. Those who benefit from it should not impose its costs on others who do not.

While this seems straightforward enough from a common sense moral point of view, philosophers such as Broome, Derek Parfit, Gregory Kavka, and my colleague Melinda Roberts, have found reasons to wonder about whether our ordinary sorts of moral status ascriptions can be applied to future persons. The question is: How can we, presently existing moral agents, have moral responsibilities towards future persons?

With regard to former persons, we can use what philosophers call "rigid designators" such as proper names to refer to particular individuals. For instance, the proper name "George Washington" refers to an actual former person who was the first president of the United States of America. The proper name "Hamlet" on the other hand, does not refer to any actual former person; it refers to a fictional character created by William Shakespeare (who may or may not be the actual former person who wrote the play of the same name).

But future persons cannot be referred to by proper names and other rigid designators. We can talk about the "descendants of Thomas Jefferson" and that class includes all of that dead president's past, present, and future biological descendants. But this predicate is not a rigid designator and does not pick out just one feature of the actual world, but rather features of many possible worlds.

Unlike former persons, future persons depend for their existence on our present choices and actions.The basic source of puzzlement arises when we realize that which future persons will actually exist will depend in part on our present choices and actions. So consider the fact that it is now know that Thomas Jefferson had some descendants that the fathered with his slave Sally Hemings, probably two sons named Eston and Madison Hemings. As of 2007 there are several known descendants of Eston and Madison Hemings, but the descendants of another person who claimed to be desended from Jefferson, Thomas Woodson, have had this claim conclusively disproved by DNA evidence. (See Sally Hemings' Descendants)

Whether or not someone is or is not a descendant of Thomas Jefferson is a natural fact about them. It is not just a matter of an observer relative status attribution. Had Jefferson acted differently, those descendents of his whose other ancestor was Sally Hemings would not now exist. So then, suppose that Jefferson had not procreated with Sally Hemings. His sons Eston and Madison would never have existed, nor would their descendants, and theirs, and so on down to the present living descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

But a puzzling question now presents itself: Would Jefferson have harmed Eston and Madison and all of their descendents had he chosen not to have procreated with Sally Hemings? Generally speaking, to harm someone is to make them worse off than they would otherwise have been. But, Jefferson's sons Eston and Madison would not have been at all had he not had sex with his slave Sally, so it is hard to see how his not having done that would have harmed them. Is not existing a harm? Is existing a benefit? Who is it that Jefferson would have made worse off had he not had sex with his slave?

There are deep philosophical puzzles here that some of our best philosophical minds have been struggling to understand for the past twenty-five years or so. It seems that unless we can find some way to "fix" the reference to future persons in statements like "Future persons can be the objects of our present moral responsibilities," we cannot save the commonsense moral intuitions discussed earlier that lead to the conclusion that we ought to avoid doing things now that will likely cause harm to members of future generations.

I am not here going to offer an account of future persons that solves (or dissolves) these philosophical paradoxes concerning future persons. Instead I will adopt the strategem of referring to actual future persons, where that term should be understood to mean those persons who will come into existence because of chains of procreation that have actual causal links to present human persons. It does not include all of the possible future persons, who may or may not come to exist depending on what we do and do not do, but only those persons, who, from a "God's Eye" view of time, will actually come to exist, those who, like us and our deceased ancestors, have left, are leaving, or will leave scratch marks in the causal structure of the cosmos.

It seems clear to me that within a scientific ontology that regards what is real as everything that leaves scratch marks in the causal structure of the cosmos, actual future persons can be moral patients, that is, they can function as the objects of our moral responsibilities, the sorts of things towards whom we can have moral obligations.

To illustrate this notion, suppose that the set of actual future persons is non-empty, and that it includes someone who is my great, great, great grandson, whom I will call "John Smith." (For the record, I have no male descendants, but I do have three daughters none of whom have children at the present). John Smith does not now exist, he is an actual future person, because he will be connected to me by means of my DNA being passed down through my daughters, to their children, and from them to theirs, and from them to theirs, and from them to theirs, one of whom is John Smith. I can have a moral responsibility towards John Smith which includes my refraining from doing things that would harm him when he comes into existence, for instance, by using up non-renewable resources that he will need, or by making it the case that conditions of his life are more difficult or dangerous than they would otherwise be had I not refrained from doing certain things. I could, for instance, refrain from planting a bomb on a long-delay fuse under the spot where his elementary school will one day stand.

From a "God's-eye" or tenseless perspective, John Smith is thus vulnerable to me and is depending on me not to do certain things that would make his life more difficult or more dangerous. Under the Vulnerability Principle, I have a moral responsibility to refrain from such actions. I have this responsibility towards John Smith, who functions as a moral patient and as the object of my moral responsibilities, even though I will be dead when John is alive. From John's temporal point of view, I will be a former person, one of his ancestors. He will not be in a position to punish me or demand compensation for any harm that I may have caused him, because I will be dead, and therefore, invulnerable.

But even though I will be invulnerable to John Smith, he will be vulnerable to me. This asymmetry of vulnerability is the result of the causal directionality of time: we cannot change the past, but we can change the future. There is no such thing as backward causation (despite what Broome has thought), but there is obviously such as thing as forward causation. My present choices and actions (and yours) can participate in causal chains that produce conditions in the future that will make John Smith's life more difficult and dangerous than it needs to be, given the causal structure of the cosmos.

Thus, there is also a sense in which John Smith, and all of the other actual future persons, are depending on us, to fulfill our moral responsibilities towards them. There is a kind of intergenerational interdependence in which our ancestors, former persons, depend on us to preserve what was best in their legacies, and future persons, like John Smith, depend on us to ensure that their lives are not more difficult and dangerous than they need to be.

The VP tells us that we acquire special moral responsibilities to protect the interests or "goods" of moral patients who are specially vulnerable or in some way dependent on our choices and actions. Hence it follows that we, present persons, have special moral responsibilities to protect the interests of the actual members of future human generations, whomever they turn out to be.

Responsibilities to Oneself

If you are reading this you are most likely a moral agent. Since moral agents can also be moral patients, it would seem to follow on my theory that moral agents can have moral responsibilities towards themselves.I will call these self-regarding responsibilities.

Most people are willing to acknowledge that they owe it to themselves to promote their own happiness, to care for their physical health and emotional well being, and to realize their potential as human beings. In some systems of ethics, such responsibilities to oneself are taken as the primary moral duties which all persons have. Self-regarding responsibilities are sometimes thought to arise somehow directly from our nature as rational beings. A basic ethical theory known as ethical egoism proposes that all moral agents owe it to themselves to maximize their own self-interest.

But there is a problem with this view. Duties to benefit oneself are not ordinarily thought of as moral duties, but rather are considered to be matters of prudence. Many moral philosophers distinguish between the demands of morality, which concern what we owe to others, from those of prudence. When speaking about moral responsibilities we are concerned to understand how moral agents should treat others who have wills of their own. But in discussing prudence, one is speaking about how one manages ones own will. One's own will is not generally regarded as an alien will; it is supposed to be under ones own control. Morality is concerned with controlling wills that are alien to ones own will, and so the demands of prudence cannot be moral demands.

The way in which Goodin framed his Vulnerability Principle reflects this distinction between prudence and morality:

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

As it is stated the VP excludes what I am calling self-regarding responsibilities. I think this is a fundamental problem with Goodin's statement of the vulnerability principle.

On the account I will prefer, there can be self regarding moral responsibilities, or responsibilities of "self care". Not all human individuals have such self regarding moral responsibilities; infants and young children, and persons suffering from various forms of physical or mental incapacity, for instance, do not have them or have them in a different way than do fully competent autonomous moral agents. So if there are self-regarding responsibilities it is necessary to specify how one comes to have them, when one is excused from them, and what specific kinds of duties they entail. Additionally, like other moral responsibilities, responsibilities to oneself, and the duties they entail, must always be balanced against responsibilities owed to others. However, one cannot lead a moral life and completely neglect the responsibilities which one owes to oneself.

So it will be necessary to reformulate the Vulnerability Principle so as to allow these kinds of self-regarding moral responsibilities to fall within its scope. I propose the following re-formulation.

(VCP) Moral agents acquire special responsibilities to care for and protect the interests of moral patients to the extent that those moral patients are especially vulnerable or in some way depending on the actions and choices of those moral agents for their care.

Since moral agents are also moral patients it follows that under the VCP moral agents can acquire special responsibilities to care for and protect their own interests, particularly when they are especially vulnerable or are depending on themselves for their own care or for the protection of their own interests. We can continue to refer to this subclass of moral responsibilities as prudential, understanding that they are now regarded as a special kind of moral responsibility. There are, I believe, situations in which we are vulnerable to ourselves and are also depending on ourselves to protect our own interests. Duties of prudence arise from the VCP, on this view, as a subspecies of the kinds of special moral responsibilities that derive from considerations of vulnerability and dependence to the extent that moral agents are vulnerable to and depending on themselves for their own care and protection.