Obligation
Agent-relative Obligations
Much debate in late twentieth-century moral philosophy has been over how deep the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral obligations goes and whether the existence of agent-relative obligations is compatible with utilitarian moral theories. Recall that agent-relative obligations seem to have a special attachment to the person whom they bind. This is particularly the case regarding moral obligations: I see children who need caring for and can with no cost to myself care for one but not all. I have a moral obligation to care for one, then, but it does not seem to matter which. Indeed, everything else being equal, any other person in my place would have this obligation too. By contrast, suppose one of the children is my own son. It seems that I ought to care for my son over the other children, that it now matters morally which one I care for and that I do the caring. This is an agent-relative obligation: I have an obligation that I care for my son. The puzzle is that every child is equally valuable in objective terms; my son's care has no more and no less intrinsic value than the care of anyone else's child. Of course, he is more valuable to me, but that is not an objective measure of his value. Further, it would be abominable for me to care for my own child, but justify it by saying "I can't care for all children, so I flipped a coin and my son won." I seem to have an obligation to him, and he has a claim on my care that no other person has. How is that possible if there is no more objective value in my son's care than in the care of any other child?
To take another example, we are morally obligated not to torture. But suppose you could reduce the number of torturings in the world by a few by torturing some one innocent person. It is very tempting to think that you still have an obligation not to torture that person, even if by doing so you could bring about the reduction in torturings. You seem to have here an agent-relative obligation that you should not torture, rather than simply an agent-neutral obligation to prevent torturings. How is this possible? Surely if one torturing is evil, two are more evil, three even more so, and so on. Surely you should bring about as little evil as possible in the world. Moreover, if we increase the number of torturings you could prevent, there will be some number at which everyone will relent and say you ought to torture to prevent other torturings. So how could it be wrong to prevent more of the very same ills that one thinks one should bring about oneself, and only in some cases but not others? Much late twentieth-century work on obligation has focused on just this question.
Utilitarianism has been most often associated with the view that there are no genuinely agent-relative obligations, that all of our obligations are agent-neutral. Our fundamental obligation is always to bring about the better state of affairs. This is indeed a very intuitive position: How could it ever be impermissible to bring about the most good? Shouldn't one always do this? Some, such as Samuel Scheffler (1994), have argued that agent-relative permissions can be defended, but not agent-relative obligations. That is, we can be permitted, but not obligated, to tell the truth even when our lying would bring about more truth-telling. What justifies a permission here for Scheffler is the agent's need to preserve his integrity (or, for Thomas Nagel, his autonomy) as a moral agent. Others have taken a stronger position that there are genuine agent-relative obligations. For example, you have an obligation not to torture even if by torturing you would bring about fewer torturings overall. Nagel argues that such an obligation is justified on the grounds that one must never be led by evil. Whether these or related arguments will ultimately prove successful is an ongoing concern of moral philosophers.
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Robert N. Johnson
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