Abstract
This paper considers three general views about the nature of moral obligation and three particular answers (with which these views are typically associated) concerning the following question: if on Monday you lend me a book that I promise to return to you by Friday, what precisely is my obligation to you and what constitutes its fulfillment? The example is borrowed from W.D. Ross, who in The Right and the Good proposed what he called the Objective View of obligation, from which he inferred what is here called the First Answer to the question. In Foundations of Ethics Ross repudiated the Objective View in favor of the Subjective View, from which he inferred a Second Answer. In this paper each of the Objective and Subjective Views and the First and Second Answers are rejected in favor of the Prospective View and a Third Answer. The implications of the Prospective View for another question closely related to the original question are then investigated: what precisely is your right regarding my returning the book and what constitutes its satisfaction?
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Notes
Ross (1930). Henceforth I will refer to this work as RG.
Ross (1939). Henceforth I will refer to this work as FE.
Prichard (1949): 18–39. First delivered in 1932.
Note the following points (which I will not pursue) concerning this formulation of the Objective View. (a) It presupposes that A is among the agent’s alternatives in the situation (and relies on some criterion for identifying alternatives and situations). An alternative is an action that the agent can perform. The Objective View (like the Subjective and Prospective Views to follow) thus presupposes that ‘ought’ or ‘obligatory’ (together with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) implies ‘can’. This is a principle that Ross explicitly endorses (RG, p. 5), although he doesn’t elaborate on the sense of ‘can’ at issue. I won’t elaborate on it either, except to say that I understand it to be the sense that is at issue in the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. (It may be that there is not just one sense but a set of related senses at issue in this debate. There is no room to explore this point further here.) (b) The term ‘more suits’ or ‘suits more’ is to be understood liberally. If two alternatives, A and B, are positively unsuitable to some aspect, S, of the agent’s situation, but A is less unsuitable than B, then A ‘suits S more’ than B. (Compare the common liberal use of ‘better’, according to which that term covers not only ‘more good’ but also ‘less bad’.) (c) In keeping with my introductory remarks (see in particular the third paragraph of this paper), my formulation of the Objective View is designed to be adaptable to substantive accounts of obligation other than Ross’s. For example, it fits G.E. Moore’s version of consequentialism, if suitability is cashed out in terms of instrumental value. (See chs. 1–2 of Moore (1965).) (d) My formulation of the Objective View draws a sharp distinction between ‘ought’ (or ‘obligatory’) and ‘right.’ Ross recognizes this distinction (RG, pp. 3–4) but then deliberately blurs it for stylistic reasons. I find little merit in these reasons and will not follow his lead in this regard. (e) My use of the term ‘prima facie’ accords with Ross’s (RG, pp. 19–20); ‘pro tanto’ would probably be better. ‘Overall’ is not Ross’s term; instead he uses ‘proper,’ ‘actual,’ ‘absolute,’ and ‘sans phrase’ (RG, pp. 19–20, 28). (f) An alternative formulation of the Objective View would tie degrees of rightness to degrees of suitability and degrees of wrongness to degrees of unsuitability. As far as I know, Ross doesn’t explicitly rule out this possibility for prima facie rightness and wrongness, but he does for overall rightness and wrongness (RG, p. 41). (g) An alternative, more restrictive account of overall moral obligation would state that A is overall morally obligatory if and only if A suits some aspect of the agent’s situation more than any alternative suits any aspect. (Similar accounts could be given of overall moral rightness and wrongness.) Ross seems sometimes to embrace this account (e.g., at RG, p. 19). However, at other times (e.g., at RG, p. 41) he suggests the more liberal account that I have given. The latter account accommodates the possibility that, by virtue of suiting more aspects of the agent’s situation, A suits that situation as a whole more than any alternative, even though some alternative suits some aspect more than A suits any aspect.
See, e.g., Goldman (1970).
Another possible account, that Ross doesn’t discuss, would restrict the relevant thoughts to those that concern normative matters: (c) an act is subjectively right just in case one would think that it (most) suits one’s situation, if one had an accurate understanding of that situation.
I pursue this issue at length in Zimmerman (2006).
Cf. McConnell (1988), p. 85.
Cf. McConnell (1988), pp. 85–86.
At FE, pp. 155–56 Ross quotes approvingly and at length from a passage in Prichard (1949) in which Prichard maintains that obligation is a characteristic of agents rather than acts. Both Prichard and Ross appear to believe that this claim somehow favors both the Subjective View and the Attempt Thesis. I have not managed to find a plausible reconstruction of the reasoning so that either thesis results, let alone both.
Regarding this assumption, see n. 4, item (a) above.
This confusion is also evident in Broad (1985), pp. 133–34.
This illustration is borrowed from Davidson (1980), p. 4.
For a related criticism, see Dancy (2002), pp. 233–34.
A particularly useful discussion is to be found in McConnell (1988).
That is: if one knew the proposition that constitutes its content. (It is of course possible to know that some view is true without knowing the proposition that constitutes its content. For example, someone might know, on the basis of some authority, that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is true and yet not have a clue as to its content.).
But cf. Frankena (1963), p. 161.
One could, for example, accept both the Second Answer and the Objective View, because one took my attempting to keep my promise to you to be what is in fact most suitable to my situation. It is worth noting, also, that the Subjective View does not imply the Second Answer. If I did not believe that my attempting to keep my promise to you was most suitable to my situation, then the Subjective View would not imply that I was obligated to make this attempt.
As noted in Section I, this might not be correct. My direct obligation, according to the idea underlying the First Answer, is to fulfill my promise to you. If returning the book is distinct from fulfilling my promise, then my obligation regarding the former is merely indirect.
Cf. Frankena (1963), p. 163. On p. 326 of Mason (2003), Mason says something that suggests the following answer: I have an obligation to aim at your receiving the book because I have a reason (but not an obligation) to return it to you. She says that having a reason to do something is not sufficient for having an obligation to do it, since one can have a reason but not an obligation to do something that one cannot in fact do. Perhaps so, and perhaps toxin-puzzle sorts of cases also show that reasons don’t suffice for obligations. (Cf. Kavka (1983).) But in those cases (such as the present case involving my returning your book) in which no such puzzle is at issue and one can do what one has a (moral) reason to do, it is unclear to me why having such a reason should not be thought sufficient for one’s having a (prima facie moral) obligation to do it.
McConnell (1988), p. 92.
Moore (1965), pp. 81–82. Note, however, that Moore does not explicitly address the distinction between prima facie and overall obligation. Concerning Moore’s credentials as a proponent of the Objective View, see n. 4, item (c) above.
Jackson (1991), pp. 462–63.
Even if the difference between 25 and 30 minutes is drastic – a matter of life and death, say – it is still not the case that you ought to take route B. Rather, what you ought to do is take either route B or route C.
There are responses to this objection that may be made on behalf of the Objective View. I discuss and reject them in Zimmerman (2006).
A very important question, that I cannot undertake to investigate here, is what constitutes some body of evidence being ‘available’ to someone. However exactly this term is to be construed, we must recognize that people can affect what evidence is available to them and can thus have obligations regarding what evidence is available to them. For example, it could be that you had the opportunity to discover which route the roadworks were on and that you had an obligation (in light of the evidence then available to you) to have discovered this. Even if this is true, however, it would not affect the fact that, in light of the evidence now available to you (evidence that does not indicate which route the roadworks are on), you ought to take route A.
Ross at times seems uneasily aware of this. See FE, pp. 157–58.
I will say, however, that whatever the final account of ‘most reasonable’ turns out to be, it should presumably accommodate the possibility of supererogation. Consider a book-borrowing case in which I have a choice between two delivery services, A and B, and it is very likely that A will return the book to you by Friday and only slightly less likely that B will do so. If service A would be extremely expensive but B not, it may be that I am not obligated to use A, despite its evident superiority.
A similar view is adumbrated in Section 4 of McNaughton and Rawling (2004).
This claim rests on the idea that intentionally doing something requires knowing how to do it, and that under the circumstances I don’t know how to keep my promise. This is a controversial matter, but there is no space to pursue it here.
I don’t pretend that it is self-evident that this qualification should be made, but I do contend that it is plausible.
The classic source for this thesis is Hohfeld (1919), pp. 35 ff. Hohfeld is there concerned with legal rights and obligations; the present thesis is to be construed as a thesis about moral rights and obligations. The thesis concerns in particular rights of the sort that Hohfeld calls claim-rights. The rights may be either overall or merely prima facie, depending on whether the correlative obligations are overall or merely prima facie.
Cf. Montague (2004), p. 72: “A person violates no right of yours and acts contrary to no requirement simply by making it probable that she reveals the contents of your diary. Your right is violated only if the person actually reveals...the diary’s contents.”
Something like this proposal is made in Broad (1985), pp. 127 ff.
Etymologically, the term ‘obligation’ invokes the idea of an association (a link, a tie, a bond, a ligation) between obligor and obligee, but its sense has broadened so that it expresses a contrary of wrongdoing generally. Not all wrongdoing need involve wronging someone, in the sense of infringing someone’s rights.
A particularly dramatic sort of case in which obligations and rights can part company is one in which the person whom the obligation involves does not exist. Suppose that, after lending me the book on Monday, you die before I have the opportunity to return it to you, but that I have every reason to believe that you are still alive. Then I will still be obligated to do that which provides me the best prospect of returning the book to you by Friday, even though you, being dead, no longer have a right against me that I do so. (In so saying, I am of course rejecting the claim that you have a posthumous right to this effect.) Once again, this is perfectly in keeping with the Correlativity Thesis, since the obligation in question is not an associative one; that it, it is not one that I owe to you.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Krister Bykvist, Terry McConnell, David McNaughton, and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen for comments on previous drafts. Also, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for support during the writing of this paper. This paper appeared earlier in electronic form in the collection Hommage à Wlodek – Philosophical Papers in Honour of Wlodek Rabinowicz, edited by Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Björn Petersson, Jonas Josefsson, and Dan Egonsson (2007, link at http://www.fil.lu.se/).
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Zimmerman, M.J. On the Fulfillment of Moral Obligation. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 9, 577–597 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9037-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9037-3