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Obligation, Responsibility, and History

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Abstract

I argue that, each of the following, appropriately clarified to yield a noteworthy thesis, is true. (1) Moral obligation can affect moral responsibility. (2) Obligation succumbs to changes in responsibility. (3) Obligation is immune from changes in responsibility.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Zimmerman (1996: 98–100), Haji (2002: 47–52), and Vranas (2007: 175–79).

  2. See, e.g., Feldman (1986: ch. 2). See, also, Zimmerman (1996: ch. 2), and Haji (2016a: ch. 2).

  3. See, e.g., Zimmerman (2006: 602), and Haji (2012: 30).

  4. I address permissibility in Haji (2016a: 27–28).

  5. Alternatively, Impermissibility/Can Refrain can easily be derived from Impermissible/Obligation Possibility.

  6. The following clause may be added to DBWC to capture obligation’s dual ability requirement. S, morally ought, at t, to see to the occurrence of a state of affairs, p, only if there is a world, w*, accessible to S at t in which S refrains from bringing about p. See Haji (2012: 61, 2016: 34). See, also, Zimmerman (1996: 26–27), and Hebert (2016: ch. 3).

  7. See Herbert (2016) for an elegant development of this sort of account of ability.

  8. See, e.g., Mellema (1991: 87), Smith (1991: 271), Widerker (1991: 223), Copp (1997, 2003: 286–87), Fischer (2006: 218), Arpaly (2006: 91, n. 3), and Campbell (2011: 33–34).

  9. One may also attempt to question BRI by counterexample.

  10. Zimmerman also favors a principle of this sort. See, e.g., Zimmerman (1988, 1997, 2014). Note that, as it stands, the possibility of suberogation calls BRBI-1 into question.

  11. Refinements may be found in Haji (2016b).

  12. I thank Erik Wielenberg for pressing me to differentiate these two theses.

  13. See, e.g., Pereboom (2001).

  14. Compare this view with Ross’ two-worlds objection (Ross 1930: 138). For simplicity, I assume that the pleasures and pains are sensory pleasures and pains. Nothing of substance would change if these the pleasures and pains were attitudinal.

  15. Many agree it is welfare that people fundamentally deserve to receive, and that lack of fit between welfare received and welfare deserved lowers intrinsic value. See, e.g., Kagan (1997, 2003), and Skow (2012).

  16. See Carlson (1997), Persson (1997), and Arrhenius (2003) for critical discussion of these axiological principles.

  17. Feldman (2016: 39–39) proposes that some deserts may not be a plus or a minus, a benefit or a burden.

  18. On desert bases, see, e.g., Rescher (1966: 73–83), Feinberg (1970), McLeod (1996), and Feldman (2016: 41–43).

  19. See, also, Waller (2015).

  20. See, also, Mele (2016: 73).

  21. See, also, Mele (2016: 73–74).

  22. See, also, Mele (2016: 75–76).

  23. See, e.g., Haji (1998: 115–22, 2009: 61–67, 2013), and Haji and Cuypers (2008: 15–41).

  24. Responsibility libertarianism is the conjunction of responsibility incompatibilism and the view that, at times, persons perform free actions for which they are morally responsible.

  25. Each of these theories can be better reformulated in the form: at t, it is permissible for S to do A at t* (roughly) if and only if S does A at t* in at least some of the best worlds accessible to S at t. I won’t, however, worry about the reformulations here.

  26. Another difference is that whereas the latter may well presuppose that agents be the ultimate sources or originators of their actions, the former does not. See Haji (2017).

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Acknowledgements

I’m most grateful to Ryan Hebert for his astute comments on an earlier draft. This paper was written during my tenure of a 2017–2021 Social Sciences and Humanities (SSHRC) grant. Many thanks to this granting agency for its support.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada

    Ishtiyaque Haji

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Haji, I. Obligation, Responsibility, and History. J Ethics 22, 1–23 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9263-z

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