A Theory of Moral Obligation.

Abstract

The dominant accounts of moral obligation today take as their main task the derivation of duties that are owed to other people generally, simply in virtue of their being rational agents or in some other way essentially “creatures like us.” These accounts begin by deriving our most general duties to others, and only then (if ever) do they address obligations to those closest to a person, like family and her friends. Yet a person typically first learns about obligations to family and only later about obligations to all others. Moreover, on the dominant accounts, some additional story must usually be told to justify giving preference to those about whom we care most. This, however, might signal that these accounts are missing something important. In contrast, my dissertation begins by looking at the obligations a person has to her family and friends. I argue that these obligations are grounded in loving personal relationships. These relationships are instances of a special kind of group membership, which I call corporate identity (CID). CID relationships are most prominently characterized by the fact that they involve an expansion of a person’s self-conception, which is effected in part by the kinds of reasoning involved in them, especially joint reasoning. The very things that make this expansion of a person’s self-conception possible also require that a person see others not merely as part of herself but as distinct agents – otherwise, genuinely joint reasoning would be impossible. More specifically, a person must recognize others as people who have authority to make morally obligating claims on her. This approach therefore avoids the problem of accounting for obligations owed especially to those closest to us as a special, non-central case. Moreover, it can explain duties to (and not just concerning) non-agents, such as infants and the mentally impaired. To explain duties to strangers, I appeal to a person’s relationship with God. Given God’s love for all, the fact that a person loves God commits that person to loving his neighbor and that these two relationships ground the obligations we are commonly thought to owe to all others.