Directed Duties

May, Simon

doi:10.1111/phc3.12239

Cited by 52 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…(Hence, when we fail to abide by the reasons for action presented by an agent’s rights, we do not merely do wrong , rather we wrong that agent —cf. May 2015.) (4) That to fulfil an individual’s right is only to meet a minimal or required standard of moral behaviour, as opposed to doing anything supererogatory.…”

Section: Ontological Defencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency

Rumbold

2018

Res Publica

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For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’ (Raz in The Morality of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, p. 192), making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (Miller, in Cruft, Liao, Renzo (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement.

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Section: Ontological Defencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Kamm 2007, p. 246) Unfortunately, there is not sufficient space here to enter into an extensive discussion on this point (see e.g. May 2015, for more on this). However, I take it that, even if, from Kamm’s perspective, (2)’s formulation as it is set out above might appear a little clunky, (i.e.…”

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confidence: 99%

Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency

Rumbold

2018

Res Publica

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“…the duty that emerges from a promise made to someone – that seem, intuitively, to be relational; the action that is the content of the duty is owed to a specific individual, who holds the correlative claim‐right . More recently, such duties have come to be called ‘directed’ duties (Sreenivasan : 467; May ; Sumner : 24 speaks of ‘directional’ duties). But it seems that we also properly use the term ‘duty’ to refer to what we are required to do regardless of whether we owe it to anyone; and it is plausible to think that the term ‘duty’, understood in this sense, is also aptly used to pick out legal positions.…”

Section: Comprehensiveness and Fundamentalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One way of framing the traditional debate between Will theories and Interest theories of rights is precisely as a debate about the directionality of duties: see Sumner (: 24, 39‐53), Kramer and Steiner (: 298), or Sreenivasan (: 482). For recent overviews of the debate, see Wenar () and, in this journal, May (). To give a broad (and crude) description, Will theorists think that to have a claim‐right is to have normative control (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

Fundamental Legal Concepts: The Hohfeldian Framework

d’Almeida

2016

Philosophy Compass

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Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's account of legal rights is now 100 years old. It has been much discussed, and remains very inf luential with philosophers and lawyers alike. Yet it is still sometimes misunderstood in crucial respects. This article offers a rigorous exposition (with some revisions) of Hohfeld's framework; discusses its claims to comprehensiveness and fundamentality, reviewing recent work on the topic; and highlights the argumentative uses of Hohfeld's most important distinction.

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“…2 This is what we can call Hohfeld's thesis (Hohfeld 1923), or, as others sometimes call it, the thesis of correlatity (e.g. Hart 1955;Weinrib 1995;Thompson 2004;May 2015). The thesis explains how the obligee's claim or claim-right carries direct normative import for the obligation of another and thus distinguishes the obligee's claim from the concerns or interests of any uninvolved third party.…”

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confidence: 99%

Bipolar Obligations, Recognition Respect, and Second-Personal Morality

Vandieken

2019

J Ethics

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Any complete theory of "what we owe to each other" must be able to adequately accommodate directed or bipolar obligations, that is, those obligations that are owed to a particular individual and in virtue of which another individual stands to be wronged. Bipolar obligations receive their moral importance from their intimate connection to a particular form of recognition respect that we owe to each other: respect of another as a source of valid claims to whom in particular we owe certain treatment and, at the very least, an apology if we fail to accord that treatment. While some of the most prominent accounts of interpersonal morality fail to adequately accommodate bipolar obligations, I here investigate a recent proposal that explicitly seeks to improve on these accounts-Stephen Darwall's second-personal theory of morality. Ultimately, I object to Darwall's theory on the grounds that his secondpersonal theory normatively ties bipolar obligations too closely to non-directed moral obligations or those that we are under, period. The problem for Darwall's account is that any obligations that at first appear to be bipolar and owed to someone in particular turn out to be instances of non-directed moral obligations period that have their normative source in the representative authority of the moral community. Adequately accommodating bipolar obligations requires taking seriously a novel second-personal approach, according to which we locate the normative sources of our interpersonal obligations in the claims and demands particular persons and deliberate from what I call the pairwise or bipolar standpoint.

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Directed Duties

Cited by 52 publications

References 16 publications

Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency

Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency

Fundamental Legal Concepts: The Hohfeldian Framework

Bipolar Obligations, Recognition Respect, and Second-Personal Morality

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