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This chapter offers a sustained critique of Robert Goodin's use of his Principle of Protecting the Vulnerable. Goodin does not succeed in demonstrating that the vulnerability principle, which explains special obligations, also supports individual and collective obligations to distant strangers; in addition, his claim that the principle yields a kind of consequentialism seems mistaken. An ethics of responsibility that focuses on actual distributions and practices of responsibility, however, is especially revealing of how differentiated moral and social positions are constituted. As feminist care ethics illustrates, being held responsible in certain ways, or being exempted or excluded from responsibility of certain types, forms individuals' own senses of responsibility and others' expectations of accountability. Close attention to practices of responsibility also reveals why a purely instrumental account of responsibility assignment misses the multiple functions of responsibility assignment in expressing and reproducing shared moral understandings and expectations.

By attaching significance to the distinction between doing and failing to prevent and by recognizing special obligations to family members and others, common‐sense morality limits the size of an agent's moral world. Consequentialism, by contrast, upholds a more expansive notion of normative responsibility that neither assigns intrinsic moral significance to the distinction between doing and failing to prevent nor recognizes special obligations as a fundamental moral category. The conflict between restrictive and expansive notions of normative responsibility has a parallel in modern political life, in the opposition between nationalism and other varieties of particularism, on the one hand, and globalism or universalism, on the other. The opposing pulls of global integration and ethnic fragmentation pose a political problem that, Scheffler argues, we are unlikely to resolve without attaining greater stability in our thinking about normative responsibility more generally.

It is often suggested that the researchers use of the subject or that the interaction between investigators and subjects generate ethical obligations for researchers that go beyond those to which the parties might reasonably agree. Call that the interaction principle. It is argued that it may be worse for researchers to use subjects and not provide those benefits than not to use them at all, even though subjects benefit from participation. Researchers owe more to those they use than to others who may be worse off. This chapter asks whether the interaction principle can be defended. Although the principle is intuitively attractive, the chapter argues that this principle is difficult to defend.

We typically think that morality prohibits certain kinds of behaviour, such as killing the innocent, stealing, breaking promises, etc. This chapter explores rule‐consequentialism's ability to underwrite these prohibitions, and, in particular, to underwrite our views about when such prohibitions should be amended or overridden. Argues against absolute prohibitions and explores the role of judgement in rule‐consequentialism. The final section explains how rule‐consequentialism can endorse rules giving agents special obligations towards family and friends.

The chapter argues for the deontic equivalent thesis: the thesis that, for any plausible nonconsequentialist moral theory, there is a consequentialist counterpart theory that is extensionally equivalent to it. It is argued that, from this thesis, we can infer that consequentialism can accommodate all the essential features of commonsense morality (e.g., supererogatory acts, special obligations, agent-centered options, agent-centered restrictions, etc.), but that we cannot infer from this thesis, as some have claimed, that we are all consequentialists. Lastly, it is argued that consequentialism can do a better job of accounting for certain commonsense moral intuitions than even victim-focused deontology can.

According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots. This chapter interrogates what precisely constitutes the relationship and/or set of interactions that are supposed to ground compatriotic special obligations that, in turn, are supposed to justify restricting immigration. It argues that whatever special obligations are owed by citizens (or residents) of wealthier polities to their domestic poor, they do not justify restrictions on immigration by the global poor. Even the most promising putative grounds for compatriotic special obligations fail to challenge the justice argument for more open borders.

This chapter deals with the challenge that loyalty poses to universalist (or impartialist) understandings of morality (and vice versa). It looks at solutions that prioritize one or the other and that subsume one under the other, as well as those that work with a more nuanced pluralism, in which special obligations are seen as sui generis. Inter alia, the work of William Godwin, Bernard Williams, Alan Gewirth, R. M. Hare, Stephen Nathanson, and Andrew Oldenquist is discussed.

This chapter undertakes the first two justificatory tasks: making a complex moral case for having a system of international legal human rights similar to the one that exists and making headway on the question of which specific norms ought to be included in it. With respect to the former question of justification, the chapter sets out three distinct justificatory arguments. The first identifies seven important benefits a system of international legal human rights similar to the existing one can provide for a wide range of actors, including states. The second argument shows that having such a system is morally obligatory, given the risks that the existing international order imposes on individuals by conferring eminently abusable powers and privileges on states. The third argument shows that states and the governments that act in their name have a special obligation to support such a system, because they are the chief benefiaries of the flaws of the international order that the system helps ameliorate. The latter part of the chapter provides fairly detailed sketches of justifications for representative rights from each of the major categories of human rights: civil and political rights, economic rights and economic liberty rights, the right to democratic government, and rights of physical security.

This chapter applies the moral theory of the book in an account of general deontic duties forbidding killing, lying, causing injury, and theft, and also in an account of our special obligations to those with whom we have personal relations.

In addition to setting wages, transnational corporations also regularly confront choices about where to locate facilities. This can involve uprooting production to move elsewhere. There is basically no normative work on what issues arise here. This chapter dismisses some unconvincing ways of faulting relocation decisions and explains how complaints about relocation are plausibly understood as complaints about exploitation. It proposes conditions under which relocation is exploitative and explains what policy measures may still render it all-things-considered permissible. At issue is both the decision to relocate from the corporation’s country of origin (often a choice to relocate from the developed to the developing world) and relocation between foreign countries.

Chapter Seven, “The Duty to Treat Others as Equals: Who Stands Under It?,” focuses on the obligations of governments and private individuals to treat people as equals. The author considers several arguments for the claim that governments owe those whom they govern a duty to treat them as equals. The author then turns to the duties of individuals. The author argues that we do not acquire a duty to treat others as equals only when we occupy certain institutional roles. Rather, we always have an obligation to treat others as equals, in the specific senses discussed in this book: we must not unfairly subordinate some to others, or infringe their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or deny them access to a basic good when it is in our power to give it to them. The author argues that this obligation is not too demanding, and distinguishes it from the duty to give equal concern to everyone’s interests in one’s deliberations. The author tries to show that this duty is consistent with recognizing the importance of a variety of individual freedoms, and that there are often good reasons for the state not to use anti-discrimination law to regulate decisions made in more personal contexts. The author also explains why, nevertheless, the state has an obligation to help us fulfil our obligations in these more personal context, by creating the conditions under which we can relate to others as equals.

Why are lies told among friends especially vicious? This chapter argues that friends must regard each other as entitled to claim each other’s trust. It defends this claim by appeal to a conception of friendship that involves a special kind of knowledge between friends, born of voluntary acts of self-disclosure. Yet treating someone as entitled to claim your trust also leaves you especially vulnerable to that person: you must be prepared to let her shape your conception of what the world is like. In extreme cases, you may even find you are obliged to believe things you know you cannot justify to others. The viciousness of lies told among friends can be understood in terms of this special and thoroughgoing form of vulnerability, which a lying friend exploits.

In examining the case of Thomas Jefferson, the author shows how the impediments to good moral deliberation—cultural pressures and norms, the complexity of consequences, emotions, and self-deception—played a role in his thinking about slavery. The chapter also shows how these impediments play a role in our own thinking about our treatment of nonhuman animals and how the tools of moral philosophy can serve as a way of dealing with those impediments. We have to learn how to balance our own interests against those of others, and how to balance the interests of loved ones against the interests of strangers. We cannot leave moral action to the mercy of conscience, if we mean by conscience whatever we happen to think is the right thing to do. Employing the tools of moral philosophy in moral education can help us to raise good moral deliberators and, hopefully, good moral agents.