The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, §6
Ethical goods are goods in relation to persons -- goods for persons. There are multiple persons, and these are divided generally into self and others. Ethical goods thus fall into two categories: goods for the self and goods for others. All ethical goods are autonomously defined by selves (i.e. people know what they like), except in relation to morality, which contains absolute ethical goods. The pursuit of goods for the self is self-interest, and in general it is no moral duty, only prudence, to pursue one's own self-interest. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter from 1814, expresses this nicely:
But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality....To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.
Non-moral goods are matters of ethical hortatives rather than imperatives, as explained in relation to the polynomic theory of value. Confusion about moral and non-moral goods, goods for selves and good for others, produces characteristic fallacies, as follows:
Moral duty does arise where goods for others, which may or may not overlap goods for the self, are concerned. Moral duty consists of respect for the autonomy of others, which means allowing the free exercise of the innocent, competent will of others in regard to their own interests.
It has become common to say that people have rights wherever they have interests, but this principle does not allow for "compossibility," the possibility that the rights can all be exercised at the same time, since many interests overlap and conflict. Such "rights" must necessarily be abridged, a dangerous characteristic, since any rights can then be abridged for any expedient reason. If not all interests are protected by rights, however, then rights can be moral and legal claims that cannot be abridged.
This formulation of the nature of moral duty is functionally similar to Immanuel Kant's version of the moral law as requiring one to act always to treat others as ends also and never as means only. Since treating others as means is to use them to further one's own self-interest (or some other interest), and this can be done in many completely innocent ways, the crucial question is what treating someone as an "end also" amounts to. An "end" clearly stops the action of the will, so that the will does not continue to some further good. That makes the "end" a good-in-itself. While we may value others as goods-in-themselves, we usually do make use of them for ulterior ends; and the only way to reconcile their function as both end and means is if they are willing to pursue some ulterior end in our behalf. Thus, Kant's formulation calls on us to respect the autonomy and dignity of persons, allowing them the freedom to help or not to help us in the pursuit of goods. If they are not willing to help us, then we cannot use them as means to our self-interested ends. That complements the version of moral duty given above. There we leave people alone to pursue their self-interest, while with Kant we do not force them to pursue ours.
I should note, however, that this interpretation of Kant is not consistent with Kant's own view of the moral law; for Kant actually states the rule as "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only" [Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Lew White Beck translation, Library of the Liberal Arts, 1959, p.47]. Thus, one should treat oneself as an end also as well as means. Since it doesn't make any sense that one could violate one's own will, Kant needed to have in mind more than just autonomy as the content of the self as an end. Since that is the area where Kant's theory seems indefinite, leading to endless interpretations over the years (including rejection by Schopenhauer as indeterminately vague), and would in any case involve duties to self, which don't exist, I do think that part of Kant's moral law can be amputated without real loss, and that it is appropriate to do so. Respecting the autonomy of others is a simpler, more definite, and more defensible principle than whatever it would mean to respect oneself, as well as another, as an end in itself. [note]
Leonard Nelson, although essential to the treatment of ethics here, with his theories of ideal ethics and of moralism, stuck too closely to Kant's first version of the moral law (to act so that the maxim of one's action can be universalized without contradiction), which is moralistic, and produced a moralistic formulation of the moral law himself. Thus, he calls the moral law "the principle of abstraction from the numerical determination of persons" [System of Ethics, Yale, 1956, p. 113] and says:
If we suppose that all interests affected by our action are those of a single person, if we suppose, in other words, that the interests of the person affected by our action are ours as well, we would favor the preponderating interest regardless of whether it is our own or that of the other person. [ibid. p. 114]
This makes Nelson's theory actually teleological, for right action is then to bring about the "preponderating interest" among all those affected by an action, though, dealing with actual affected interests, this is not quite as absurd as teleological theories that simply require that the "greatest good" be effected in every situation, which is actually beyond the scope of human cognition or action. Nelson's theory, nevertheless, is moralistic both because every action then becomes a moral issue, where the "preponderating interest" must be calculated, and because it can make some non-moral interest of others into the consideration which determines moral action, for there is nothing to prevent the "preponderating interest" from being a non-moral interest. Nor can the "preponderating interest" even be determined in a theory of value where most goods, the goods of ideal ethics, are not absolute and will often not, and could not, be agreed upon by different persons. Only where a moral issue is already involved will there be a "preponderating interest" that is absolute, determinable, and preemptive over non-moral and personal goods; and such a moral issue, as above, will always involve the respect for the innocent, competent will of others with respect to their own interests.
It is a shame that Nelson errs when it comes to the content of the moral law, but this provides an important lesson how mistakes can be made even in the context of a theory that is sound and fruitful. Similar problems occur with Nelson's view of Socratic Method and non-intuitive immediate knowledge.
A reconcilation of teleological and deontological ethical theories is possible when we note that some ends are not to be attained but simply, as already attained, to be respected. That will occur with persons as ends-in-themselves. A Utilitarian or other teleological theory that allows persons to be used, simply as means for some ulterior end, overlooks the status of persons as ends already. It has always been possible to argue for a teleological theory by saying that individual rights, etc. are among the appropriate ends that teleological ethics would be pursuing. One need merely add that they are not among "appropriate" ends but are absolute ends which absolutely restrict morally acceptable action. Since persons as ends are not purposes to be realized through action but are features of the moral universe that absolutely restrict action, it is more straightforward and revealing to see morality in deontological rather than teleological terms. Now, however, these can be translated into one another, and teleological theories that allow for expediency rather than morality can be revealed as relativizing, not morality in some abstract sense, but the moral worth of a person as an absolute end-in-itself and good-in-itself.
Goods for the self are interests of person, property, and contract. These translate into rights. "Interests of person" are the possession and control by a person of their own body, labor, and other attributes of their personal status (e.g. reputation, civil rights, etc.). "Interests of property" are the possession and control by a person of tangible and intangible assets, distinct and separable from the person, the ownership of which is recognized in custom and law, usually giving the owners powers of exclusive possession, use, and exchange. Interests of person and property impose duties of respect to refrain from the use of fraud and force against the person and property of others. "Interests of contract" are the agreements and promises through which interests of person and property are usually managed and altered, and so respect for person and property also becomes respect for contract.
Interests of person and property in general forbid wrongs of commission, i.e. fraudulent or violent damaging acts against persons and property, by others. Moral duty also forbids wrongs of omission -- or posits duties of commission (or duties to act) -- requiring positive actions for the sake of another because of contract (see below) or where fundamental interests, such as life and limb, are endangered. The distiction between duties of omission and commission is ancient, as Thomas Jefferson noted in 1813, in a letter to John Adams, about rabbinical law:
From the law of Moses were deduced six hundred and thirteen precepts, which were divided into two classes, affirmative and negative, two hundred and fourty-eight in the former, and three hundred and sixty-five in the latter.
The duties of omission (the negative ones) thus constitute 60% of the total. This may indicate their more fundamental and straightforward nature, as the Ten Commandments themselves mostly begin with "Don't" (Lô' in Hebrew). The duty to act in the cases of commission involves the judgment that the other person is in some respect physically unable or mentally incompetent to help themselves. The pursuit of goods for others is altruism.
Altruistic moralism is often a tempting doctrine because the rule for the specification of non-contractual duties of commission appears to be complex. There will be such a duty on a person only where:
A person who does more than is required by these conditions, i.e. who acts even at the cost of endangering themselves or damaging their own interests of comparable magnitude to those originally endangered, acts with supererogation, i.e. beyond the requirements of moral duty. Altruistic moralism denies supererogation. Since non-contractual duties of commission involve judgments of incompetence or physical disability, altruistic moralism implies paternalism, i.e. the judgment that the agent knows better the interests of others, and how to pursue them, than they do themselves. Paternalism and altruistic moralism thus will lead to basic violations of moral duty as the actual innocent and competent autonomous will of others may be abridged by force. That is a general problem with any form of altruism, that the self-defining character of what is good is transferred from the other to the altruistic agent, always raising the danger that another may be judged incompetent simply because their judgment about what is good for them may differ from the agent's.
| ETHICS | |
|---|---|
| Ideal or Euergetic Ethics, the good and the bad: goods for self (moralized into egoistic moralism) | |
| MORALITY | Ideal or Euergetic Ethics, the good and the bad: goods for others (moralized into altruistic moralism) |
| Morality, right and wrong: moral goods (de-moralized into egoistic [moral] aestheticism) | |
Interests of contract are reciprocal obligations undertaken in innocent (not agreements to do wrong), informed (without fraud), free (without force or threat), deliberate (with intention to assume an obligation), mutual agreement between competent persons. Most clear obligations of commission will be of this type, although some will be implied contracts with persons incompetent to contract in their own interest, e.g. between parents and their children, whose own interests the parents have a prima facie obligation to pursue in their behalf. Since children cannot agree whether to be born, parents in effect judge on behalf of children that life is good and that it is in their own interest to exist. Government and the authority of the state may also be based on implied contract (the "social contract"), not because the contractors are incompetent (although children born into the state actually are), but because the just authority of the state is merely derived from the need, for all and against all, to enforce rights of person, property, and contract and to punish wrongs of negligence, violence, and fraud. The contract is implied because by definition it is agreed to by all persons of good will per se, whose subsequent actual deeds and agreements are then accordingly judged right or wrong. This implied agreement is, of course, open to much abuse, since any ambiguity about the just powers of the state, especially if inspired by political or religious moralism, tends to be decided by those using political power in favor of increasing their power, easily rationalized as enforcing moral principles. As ambiguities continue over time, there will be a continuing increase in the power of the state.
Since children for some time really are incompetent and helpless, it is a good question to what extent the parental relationship is a contractual duty of commission or a non-contractual one: but if there is no duty to bring children into existence (which does not seem right outside of moralistic religious systems), then the act by the parents must be either supererogatory or in the parents' self-interest. In the latter case, which seems like the most reasonable motivation (since people derive considerable personal satisfaction from having children), the relationship established is clearly an implied contractual one, with the benefits of parenthood weighed against the obligation to pursue the interests of the children. In the former case the relationship would be more one of non-contractual duty, but of a peculiar type, since the parents are responsible for the very existence of the incompetent persons and so assume a primary responsibility that has much more of the flavor of a contract than as in the case of a good Samaritan who happens across someone with a preexisting need. A non-contractual relationship, on the other hand, would mean that parents really would get nothing in return, and this seems contrary to fact, and to expectation. Children have usually been considered great goods for parents.
The ability to enter into contracts, and to respect interests of person, property, and contract, is the mark of a rational being. Since animals lack abilities in some or all of these respects, they are not rational beings. That is different from judging them incompetent: they are not incompetent rational beings, simply competent animals. As such they cannot be persons in the same sense as human beings. Their personhood, however, can be defined differently than as identical with that of a rational being. An animal may be a sentient being, i.e. able to perceive and suffer. Respect for sentient beings imposes duties not to gratuitously or maliciously inflict suffering. This means that there are "animal rights"; but animal rights cannot be the same as the rights of persons in morality as given above, for animals cannot respect the rights of others and must lose some rights, at least, in consequence.
Nelson distinguished between beings as "subjects of rights" and as "subjects of duties." He denied that animals are subjects of duties (since they are not rational), but also affirmed that animals are subjects of the same rights as rational beings. This cannot be so, not just because bears, lions, and sharks cannot be allowed to roam around eating people (which they would do with, for them, complete innocence), but because animals do not exist at the same level of consciousness, of existence, as rational beings. Indeed, there is a continuum of levels of consciousness, and animals at the higher end are worthy of more respect, thereby possessing more rights. As Schopenhauer said, a human being suffers more from a mosquito bite than a mosquito does in being killed by the human. A mosquito is very low on the scale even of sentient beings, and thus has a life that is respected by virtually no human beings (apart from the Jains in India, who accord equal dignity and rights even to the smallest insects and bacteria). Since human beings are natural omnivores, and have over the centuries artifically bred many species (like cattle) for food or clothing, there is no intuitive or prima facie moral claim for vegetarianism. Whether animals have rights to the extent that they should not be eaten or otherwise used by humans leads, however, off into more general questions about respect for the dignity of beings in general and what kinds of duties are imposed by any objects as goods-in-themselves.
Even if objects are neither rational nor sentient, their dignity can impose duties, e.g. not to vandalize nature. Since beauty, sentient beings, and rational beings are all goods-in-themselves, this indicates how morality and ethics are actually embedded in aesthetics, the theory of goods-in-themselves, and gives us a clue about the source of moral duty: that some goods-in-themselves simply involve moral duties, perhaps of different types. Goods-in-themselves are ends-in-themselves that restrict action to different degrees, imposing different degrees of respect. Animal rights advocates (e.g. PeTA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) who think that animals must be treated with the very same respect as people, or environmentalists who think that nature must be treated in much the same way, forbidding human "exploitation" of nature (e.g. Earth First!), have absolutized the value of sentient beings or natural objects to the same level as rational beings. No human cultures, except perhaps the Jains, have done anything quite like this -- and the Jains, who refuse even to be farmers, are absolutely dependent for life on the activities of others.[note] Even hunting cultures, who respect their prey as spirits or gods, nevertheless still kill them. They simply do so reverentially (as one sees Russell Means, one of the activists in the American Indian Movement, doing at the beginning of the 1992 movie The Last of the Mohicans) -- though "reverentially," paradoxically, could even mean ritually torturing them. 
D'Arcy Moses, a Montreal fashion designer who works in furs at Natural Furs International, refuses to concede the ethical case of anti-fur activists precisely because he relies on the principles of his own background -- he is a Canadian Indian -- where furs are essential to life and pose no moral difficulty. Moses deliberately uses "Native," as he says, design motifs in his work [example shown]. Although anti-fur enthusiasm was once common in the fashion industry, it has now receded.
The modern objection may be less to the killing and use of animals or the use of nature than to the mass culture and the division of labor which now means that animals are raised in vast numbers on farms by corporations and killed in slaughterhouses rather than given individual attention by consumers. It may, indeed, be reasonably questioned whether "reverence" is possible under the conditions of mass production. In Japan, where business and production are usually still protected by the Shintô kami (gods), to the point of having Shintô shrines even in laundromats, one may say that the old observances survive even in modern form. However, in the United States this is usually not regarded as desirable: Religion is being actively driven out of business, since a specifically Shintô, Christian, or Jewish workplace is regarded by law as religiously discriminatory (a "civil rights" offense). At some point such paradoxes are going to have be resolved: if reverence is demanded for animals and nature, then traditional sources of reverence will have to be respected also. One often suspects, however, that anti-corporate and anti-modern activists would look more benignly on Shintô-blessed business than on a Christian-blessed one, out of bias and antipathy against monotheistic religions of transcendent reverence, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islâm, which devalue nature in relation to God.
What probably underlies Kant's formulation of the moral law as involving duties to self as well as to others is a conception of human nature that goes all the way back to St. Thomas Aquinas and to Aristotle. Thus, we must have moral respect, not just for the will of other persons, but for human nature as embodied both in other persons and in ourselves. This is a normative conception that posits substantial duties. Thus, the notion that homosexuality or sodomy was unnatural and a crime against nature was the basis of secular laws against these practices (so that the law therefore did not need to invoke Biblical prohibitions). This is also what we see in Thomist conceptions of natural law, whose conservatism is at odds with Enlightenment versions of natural law and natural rights.
Even if Kant is drawing on an originally Aristotelian and potentially conservative view of human nature, the context of his own thought is the Enlightenment, the aftermath of the liberalism launched by John Locke and the American Revolution, and the metaphysical structure of Kant's own philosophy. It is difficult for Kant to have as full a conception of human nature as Aristotle or St. Thomas when our knowledge in Kant's own Critical Philosophy is limited to the world of appearances. The true content of human nature is hidden among things in themselves. What we do know of human nature, and what is of theoretical and moral significance to Kant, is that we are rational beings. This is much more abstract and limited in comparison to the Aristotelian conceptions. Indeed, Locke himself, in speaking of the "Law of Nature" said, "Reason, which is that Law."
In this way, Locke and Kant focus on one feature of human existence as being of moral significance. Respect for the rational nature of persons makes it a matter of inference and so dispute whether things like homosexuality or sodomy would be crimes against that nature. We must ask exactly what it is about rationality that might be offended by such practices. An Aristotelian argument that all sexual practices or preferences must serve the end of reproduction, which presupposes the axiom that there is a purpose to human sexuality that is limited to such an end, is not obviously the only possible construction of "rationality," even as it does not involve the only possible construction of the purposes of human sexuality. At the same time, Kant believes that an essential feature of rationality is its "legislative" and rule-making powers, i.e. its moral autonomy. If we then posit that moral respect is owed to rational autonomy, this leads us very close indeed to the respect for the will of others that I have posited and away from a conception that provides a place for duties to self. Thus, as Locke and Kant have already drifted a good way from a full Aristotelian conception of human nature, we need merely nudge things a bit further, beyond the point where conservative, paternalistic, or illiberal interpretations can be put on natural law principles.
In his mature thought, Kant held that the only truly good thing is good will, and the only truly pure motive for moral action is the rational determination of duty. A younger Kant, however, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), was aware that people have various motives for good actions, not all of them unworthy. This is examined in more detail elsewhere, as an example of a 
typology of temperament.
Using the ancient theory of the four humors, Kant distinguished those who act out of principle (the melancholic), those who act out of goodhearted impulse (the sanguine), those who act with their honor and reputation in mind (the choleric), and those who act out of self-interested prudence (the phlegmatic). While reputation may often be a matter of self-interest, those who worry about their honor often act in irrational, foolish, and imprudent ways (one thinks of Don Quixote). Those who act from goodhearted impulse may err through being too credulous and overly trusting. For the mature Kant, all the motives but the first fall short morally, since goodhearted impulse is not a matter of will and determination but of feelings that may be accidential and irrational, appearances of honor may have no moral or prudential connection at all, and self-interested prudence may reject immoral action as merely inexpedient -- or embrace it as the opposite. What the mature Kant seems less aware of is that those who act from principle may be embracing the wrong principle, by which, as has been truly said, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions. The younger Kant was clearly aware of this:
Among men there are but few who behave according to principles -- which is extremely good, as it can so easily happen that one errs in these principles, and then the resulting disadvantage extends all the further, the more universal the principle and the more resolute the person who has set it before himself. [Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, translated by John T. Goldthwait, University of California Press, 1960, p.74]
Rationality, if deceived into embracing vast and impressive but fallacious theorizations (e.g. Marxism), can produce a magnitude of evils far beyond the errors of the goodhearted, the proud, or even the covetous.
What we might expect from a fully rounded human being is elements of all -- a consciousness of principle, goodhearted feeling, an awareness of appearances, and a healthy and prudent sense of self-interest. The possible errors of one are thus checked and balanced by the others. Thus, the person who, out of principle, might believe in the extermination of kulaks (the prosperous peasants murdered by Stalin), could ideally be restrained by compassion and sympathy. Certainly, those who robbed and murdered the kulaks can be condemned as unfeeling, as well as evil.
Thus, if we ask why someone would not commit a murder, the melancholic answers, "It would be wrong," the sanguine, "I couldn't hurt anyone like that," the choleric, "I would embarrass and dishonor my parents and myself," and the phlegmatic, "I might get caught." The motivation descends from the most purely moral to the least, but it will always be good if each exists and reinforces the others. The younger Kant consequently can be credited with a better sense of human nature, even if the mature Kant was correct that the properly moral motive is that concerning moral principle.
PeTA has had a long running campaign, "I'd rather go naked than wear fur," where they get fashion models and actresses to pose naked to attract attention to their cause -- as with Dominique Swain at right. The shoots for these ads have often themselves been public events, with the press and spectators directly inspecting said nakedness. Attention this certainly does attract. One might wonder about its politically correct propriety, however. Using women's bodies to engage public interest, especially male interest, may not be as bad as commercial advertisements or pornography with naked women, but it does seem to violate the political moralism of the feminist condemnation of using women's bodies for anything irrelevant to female hygenic purposes. Also, this sometimes results in some awkward sequels. As fashion designers have tended to return to the use of fur, some model veterans of the "naked" campaign, like Naomi Campbell, have been spotted sporting such fashions. Nevertheless, this is certainly a more aggreable means of publicizing the animals rights agenda than the assaults of paint throwing and vandalism that have otherwise characterized the movement.
It is noteworthy to see that Buddhism, for instance, did not elevate animals to equality with humans. There is one story in the Buddhist canon where a snake impersonates a human being in order to become a monk. One might think that a snake that was able to do this would thus be a rational being and would qualify for membership in the Order. Not so. When the identity of the snake is found out, the Buddha says to him:
You, verily, are a serpent, and not capable of growth in this Doctrine and Discipline; go you, remain in your state as a serpent, and keep fast-day on the fourteenth, fifteenth, and eighth day of the half-month; thus shall you gain release from your state as a serpent, and quickly become a human being. [Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations, Atheneum, 1987, p. 402]
Thus, the best that the snake can hope for is rebirth as a human being. The idea that only human beings can achievement enlightenment and salvation is universal in Indian religions. The Jains, otherwise exemplars of non-violence, vegetarianism, and regard for animals, nevertheless only allow (on a particular interpretation, to be sure) that male human beings can achieve salvation: Women must be reborn as men in order to practice as naked monks. At least, this was the traditional belief -- I would not be surprised to hear it contradicted today. The Buddha himself did not originally allow women into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic order.
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.Benjamin Franklin, in "The Encouragement of Idleness," 1766
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
Contracts imply that some balance, in the informed estimation of the contractors (where that is possible), has been struck between the interests pursued by one in behalf of the other (the goods or services rendered), and those pursued or rendered in return. Since a contract is an exchange of goods, it contrasts with non-contractual duties of commission, which call on the agent to act for the good of others without certainty of recompense, or with privileges (rights, powers) of necessity, which compel another to provide certain goods, but with a positive duty on the beneficiary for later recompense. Normally anyone is free to give supererogatory aid and assistance out of charity and compassion -- goods for nothing in return -- but making this a general obligation, as altruistic moralism does, erases the existence of contracts -- an agreement to exchange goods is hardly necessary when one is obliged to give goods anyway, for nothing in return.
A line therefore must be drawn between goods for others that will only concern us through contractual actions rebounding to our self-interest, and those goods for others that may make demands on us to act out of moral duty for the sake of those others even without expectation of benefit to ourselves. This motivates condition #2 above, that there is an duty where the other is in danger of serious and irreversible harm, the situation where someone would acknowledge their helpless state, perhaps, just by crying, "Help." Such a "help," however, cannot always be taken at face value. Some people may be in need of help without being able to acknowledge it; others may ask for or continue asking for help when they actually are not in need of it -- their helplessness can become a way of using others and so wronging them rather than being responsible for their own self-interest. That helplessness can be real fraud, a deliberate manipulation of others, or it can arise merely from incontinence, which like negligence is a moral weakness or carelessness of will. This is the problem with Marx's principle for the utopian society: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; for according to that principle it is worth the most to each individual to have as little ability and as many needs as possible. Ability is easily concealed -- and many abilities are not even revealed except under stress and real need -- and needs are easily claimed, with any critical response attacked as heartless and selfish. It is a lot easier to claim need rather than exert oneself to develop and apply abilities.
No agent can remedy the moral weakness of will of another except by forcing them to be responsible for their own self-interest -- i.e. by denying aid. (Hence the sentiment of Benjamin Franklin above that the poor become richer when less provision is made for them.) The agent faced with acknowledging non-contractual duties of commission must judge whether the need of the other is genuine, fraudulent, or incontinent. In case of doubt, of course, one must tend to assume genuine helpless need; but a consistently credulous attitude towards need, or a determination that even incontinent need should be answered with charity and compassion, can only aid and abet incontinence. Such charity and compassion can even become morally culpable if they become the means of perpetuating moral helplessness: and the dependency of the helpless thus promoted can validate the moral superiority and self-righteousness of the agent -- i.e. the self-interest of the agent in using the other as a means to moral self-satisfaction and power over others. Thus the agent uses the helpless and wrongs them. It is these issues of competence, incontinence (or negligence), and motivation that result in the complexity of the rule for non-contractual duties of commission.
An important point that results from all this is the right of personal privacy. The denial of altruistic moralism means that the primary business of life is the pursuit of goods for the self, and these are the goods of private life. Public life and public goods only exist in so far as they ultimately serve the goods of private life. Because different things can appear (non-morally) good to different people -- i.e. some people devote their lives to baseball, others to medicine, to art, to charity, etc. -- public life cannot provide directly what everyone wants, since that cannot be predicted or anticipated. Instead each is provided the freedom to (innocently) seek what satisfies them. Altruistic moralism, which makes it our duty to provide personal goods to others, erases the distinction between private and public. That opens personal affairs to public scrutiny and also moralizes them: personal choices become subject to public judgment about their worthiness; and since aesthetic variety cannot be certified in such a way, an anaesthetic and anhedonic condemnation will be lodged against anything not regarded as morally worthy. This is all a move well represented in the slogan, "The personal is political," and it is an important effect, again, of paternalism.
The same effect renders non-contractual duties of commission a category to be carefully constrained and not needlessly expanded: for judging others incompetent and helpless removes their privacy and, so that need can be properly evaluated, opens all their preferences to examination by the intervening agent. That examination will not be moralistic so long as the intervention is directed to establishing (or reëstablishing) autonomy in the helpless other. Indeed, this now gives us a general rule for non-contractual duties of commission:
Just as duties of omission are to avoid violating the autonomy of others, non-contractual duties of commission are solely to establish, preserve, or reëstablish that very autonomy, so long as the agent is able to do so and his own autonomy or preëxisting duties are not disproportionately compromised -- which is to say that contractual duties of commission, if involving necessities, have priority over non-contractual duties of commission.
Duties of omission are to respect privacy, while duties of commission, although violating privacy, view this only as a necessary evil which all efforts must directed towards remedying. Moralistic altruism and paternalism militate against respect for privacy or for autonomy -- privacy and autonomy are by definition selfishness, willfulness, and anarchy -- and so there is no point in trying to break or abridge the relationships of dependency that they establish, or to restore any personal privacy. Such dependency, however, essentially means abject and demoralizing peonage.
Although the emphasis above has been on the duties of agents towards the needs of others, the other side of the principle is the moral right of needy agents to enforce those duties. If you emerge from the desert on the verge of death from lack of water, you have the right to take water from a well, even if the owner of the well doesn't want to give the water to you or even sell it at a reasonable price. Indeed, if the owner of the well tries to stop you from taking water by force, you are justified in using force to take the water. On the other hand, if you simply encounter someone in the desert who has some water, but it is not enough water for them to survive if they give you any, you have no right to it and the owner has the right to defend it by force. If they believe it will not be enough for them to survive, but it actually is enough, then they paradoxically have the right to defend by force what you have the right to take. On the other hand, you do owe the owner for the value of the water, and what you owe is some fair value of the water -- what the owner would have gotten if you had not needed it out of necessary -- and not what the owner might want to ask for it. If you are really on the verge of death, it might seem like a good deal to sell all your possessions or even your freedom for the water. But that would not be just. If the owner cannot be reasonable about the value of the water, some judicial resolution might be necessary.
These rights based on necessary may be called "powers" or "privileges" of necessity. It is a category of rights that suffers from the same uncertainties and possibly the same abuses as anything that is based on estimations of needs and abilities. It is a category that clearly justifies the classic case of "stealing to feed starving children," but in specific cases whether the stealing is really necessary to feed the children is often a good question. The principle is susceptible to false generalizations: since everyone needs employment, many are tempted to posit a "right to a job" which amounts to a power to compel someone in particular to offer a job. Since in a large and fluid market jobs could be obtained from many people, and jobs could even be obtained by self-employment, it is not clear how the "right to a job" could be reasonably enforced on the basis of the real ability and opportunities of any specific person. The "right to job" also easily becomes the "right to the kind of job, with the kind of pay, I would like." Freely handing out legal powers in that direction ends up damaging the employment of others in often hidden ways. If jobs and wages for some are bought at the cost of a crippled labor market that leaves 10% or 20% of the labor force unemployed (as during the Great Depression, when high wages were promoted by both Hoover and Roosevelt administrations -- or as in Western Europe today, where legally manipulated high wages translate into an average of 11% unemployment), then a very peculiar, self-defeating trade-off has been effected. Privileges of necessity thus properly must refer to immediate necessities, not generalizations about what people "need" in general when there are multiple ways in which those "needs" can be fulfilled.
Continued in: Morality, Justice, and Judicial Moralism
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