Deontologists believe in two key exceptions to the duty to promote the good: restrictions forbid us from harming others, and prerogatives permit us not to harm ourselves. How are restrictions and prerogatives related? A promising answer is that they share a source in rights. I argue that prerogatives cannot be grounded in familiar kinds of rights, only in something much stranger: waivable rights against oneself.

The practical phenomenon of moral diversity is a central feature of many contemporary societies and poses a distinct problem to moral theory building. Because of its goal to settle the moral question fully and exclusively and/or to provide better understanding of moral disagreement, traditional first-order moral theory often does not provide sufficient guidance to address this phenomenon and moral agency in deeply morally diverse societies. In this article, I move beyond traditional first-order moral theorizing and, based on multilevel social contract (...) theory (Moehler 2018, 2020a), develop a practically sound notion of moral agency for morally diverse societies. The interrelational and dynamic notion of integrated moral agency developed in this article demands that agents actively exercise their rational and affective capacities, are receptive to the capacities of others, and are aware of the type of moral interaction in which they engage with others. The notion of integrated moral agency helps agents to reconcile conflicting first-order moral directives and to maximally protect agents’ autonomy in morally diverse societies. (shrink)