UC Berkeley

If I promise Stephanie that I will help her move house, then not only ought I help her, I also owe it to her to do so. If I fail to comply with this obligation, I not only do wrong, but I wrong someone, namely Stephanie. The duty to keep my promise is a directed duty, with Stephanie as its addressee. Directed duties and related normative concepts play a central role in non-consequentialist moral theories. For example, moral rights, which seem to rule out consequentialist moral theories, are closely connected to directed duties: if S has a right that J phi, then J owes it to S to phi. But directed duties remain poorly understood. For this reason, consequentialists dismiss talk of directed duties as justified, at best, by its tendency to promote good outcomes. I aim to characterize directed duties in a way that shows that treating duties as directed is not simply instrumentally convenient, but is a way of acknowledging an important dimension of morality.

An account of directed duties should answer three distinct questions: (1) Direction. Why is a particular duty owed to S rather than T? (2) Practical Difference. What difference does the directedness of a duty make to what we appropriately think and do? (3) Importance. What is lost when a moral community fails to acknowledge the directedness of duties? Distinguishing these questions allows us to adopt insights from theories that would otherwise be seen as competitors.

(1) Direction. In Chapter 1, I develop a contractualist account of direction: the addressee is the person whose representative role grounds a complaint which justifies the duty. For example, the act of promising establishes several representative roles: promisor, promisee, and third party. The duty to keep one’s promise is justified by the fact that, in a representative case of promising, the promisee has a generic interest in assurance, and this interest grounds a complaint that outweighs the complaints available to the promisor and third parties. Since the complaint attached to the representative role of promisee grounds the duty, in a particular case it is the promisee who is owed the duty. This means that the promisee—and more generally, the addressee of a directed duty—has a special place in an agent’s deliberation: it is the potential complaint based on their generic interests that determines how the agent should act.

(2) Practical Difference. Directed duties make a difference not only to how we deliberate intrapersonally, but, crucially, to how we hold one another accountable interpersonally. A directed duty gives its addressee special standing in the practice of accountability and moral repair: in particular, special entitlement to apology and redress, and special power to accept apology and forgive the wrongdoer. I develop this account of Practical Difference in Chapter 2, comparing it with competitors the Demand, Claim, and Blame Theories.

(3) Importance. In Chapter 3 I consider what would be lost if we failed to recognize directed duties. Observe that when J infringes a duty to S, the injury to S consists not only in the setback to her interests but also in the lack of recognition of those interests. Requiring that apology be directed to S in particular---that the apology be addressed to S in order to count as an apology---enables apology to serve as a form of recognition, one that serves to repair the original lapse of recognition. Observe further that S determines the significance to herself of how her interests have been affected, since she takes a stand on the value of what has been lost and the role that the loss will play in her life. Requiring that forgiveness be sought from S in particular enables the seeking of forgiveness to serve as a way of recognizing this fact. In sum, a practice of accountability that grants special standing to S acknowledges that she is the kind of creature who not only has interests but can take an interest in them, and can take an interest in whether others recognize them. In this way the practice of directed duties makes available a form of respect for persons grounded in their distinctive capacity to take an interest in how their interests are regarded by others.

Chapter 4 broaches the question of the relation between rights, duties, and wrongs, by engaging with Nicolas Cornell’s view that rights are not co-extensive with special standing in our practice of accountability. Since Cornell endorses the Hohfeldian claim that rights and directed duties are coextensive, his view poses a direct threat to the account I have been developing here. In Chapter 4 I argue that the threat is not a real one, that some of the interesting observations Cornell makes about contract law can instead be accounted for by weakening the Hoheldian claim, and that Cornell’s view makes it difficult to understand the scope of accountability.

Chapter 5 considers whether collectives, and in particular corporations, are the types of entities that can be owed directed duties. The view developed in this dissertation encourages us to think that there is no reason to think we owe moral duties to an entity that lacks an interest in recognition. Chapter 5 argues that collectives lack such an interest, and therefore cannot be owed moral duties. But this argument is compatible with the fact that collectives can be owed legal duties.