Duties and Demandingness, Individual and Collective

Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (4):563-585 (2022)
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Abstract

Concern regarding overly demanding duties has been a prominent feature of moral debate ever since the possibility was famously sounded out by Bernard Williams nearly fifty years ago. More recently, some theorists have attempted to resolve the issue by reconsidering its underlying structure, drawing attention to the possibility that the duties to respond to large-scale moral issues like global poverty, systemic racism, and climate change may be fundamentally collective duties rather than indi- vidual ones. On this view, the relationship between potentially overly demanding individual duties and large-scale moral issues is mediated by the fact that the duties are, first and foremost, ours together rather than each of ours on our own. We believe this theoretical shift constitutes an important development for moral theory regarding large-scale moral problems, but in this paper we focus on two dis- tinct reasons to think that the interplay between collective duties and demanding- ness is more complicated than has typically been appreciated. First, we argue that in cases in which risks or burdens are indivisible, the move to collectivize duties fails to fulfill its promise to alleviate demandingness concerns, and moreover that those kinds of cases are far more widespread than they may initially appear to be. Sec- ond, we argue that if concerns over individual demandingness could block a putative obligation from becoming an actual moral duty, then, in some cases at least, con- cerns over collective demandingness could do so as well. These complications help elucidate the fact that while the move to collectivize duties can address demanding- ness concerns in a particular subset of cases, in others doing so may merely relo- cate—or even exacerbate—the problem.

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Author Profiles

Marcus Hedahl
United States Naval Academy
Kyle Fruh
Duke Kunshan University

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References found in this work

Moral demands in nonideal theory.Liam B. Murphy - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The All or Nothing Problem.Joe Horton - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (2):94-104.
Distant Strangers: Ethics, Psychology, and Global Poverty.Judith Lichtenberg - 2014 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The impotence of the demandingness objection.David Sobel - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-17.

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