What Are the Three Requirements for Legal Obligation and Moral Responsibility

The issue of moral limitation on the treatment of human cadavers was discussed a few years ago with practical application to product development when it was decided to resume the use of human cadavers in motor vehicle safety test accidents. The treatment of cadavers is also of practical importance in establishing the practices of teaching hospitals that sometimes allow aspiring doctors to perform medical procedures on cadavers before rigor mortis sets in. This practice offers aspiring physicians the opportunity to hone their skills before applying medical procedures on live patients. Laws requiring family consent for any cadaver surgery are common and reflect the disgust with which most people in the United States view the instrumental use of cadavers. However, this legal reluctance is often circumvented by the trick of delaying the declaration of the patient`s death. The widespread granting of rights to beings who do not make informed decisions has spread in the United States in recent decades, along with increased concerns about the welfare of nonhuman animals. However, the fact that someone assigns rights to nonhuman animals does not entirely determine the person`s opinion of how these animals should be treated ethically. In practice, there is only a very general tendency for those who believe that animals have rights to think that animals should be treated in the same way that we treat humans. Many who are reluctant to attribute rights to nonhuman animals recognize people`s obligations to them. As mentioned earlier, a moral prohibition of animal cruelty is widely recognized and supported by some laws. I am focusing here on the ethical issue. If you find yourself in this situation, if you have income that you could hide from the IRS or another tax authority, and if you know that about half of your fellow citizens evade taxes and about half pay it honestly, what is your moral obligation? Tax laws serve a morally important purpose.

They try to organize support for morally important public goods such as public safety and do so fairly. Of course, some people do not pay their share, and that is unfair. But you would compound the injustice if you chose to join their numbers. The right thing to do is to declare your income honestly and pay taxes. This is an example of a general principle that there is a moral obligation to obey laws that are not or not enforced, and it is important in part because there are sometimes good reasons not to apply the law. For example, there may be resource constraints on the part of law enforcement agencies or there may be privacy considerations. It may be impossible to enforce a law effectively without the need for undue interference with the law. For another important account of responsibility in generally talkative terms, see Shoemaker`s discussion of the kind of moral anger associated with holding others accountable for their behavior (2015a: 87-117). For other defences and articulations of the conversational approach to accountability, see Stephen Darwall (2006), Miranda Fricker (2016), and Colleen Macnamara (2015). It is often assumed that moral obligations and moral rules apply to the treatment of human corpses and nonhuman animals. Taking these claims into account illustrates how moral obligations and moral rules can be recognized in the absence of corresponding rights. Consider the treatment of human corpses.

Some religions believe that the treatment of corpses is about the person whose body it was, but most people recognize the moral rule that they must treat human corpses with respect, even if they subscribe to such a belief. (The behavior considered respectful depends on the culture. For example, autopsies are considered disrespectful in some cultures.) There are a variety of reasons to believe that people should treat corpses with respect. A very common one is that if we don`t treat human corpses with respect, we risk becoming insensitive to living people. Another, more common in ancient times, is that a person can be confused with dead. Do our responsible practices take into account different forms of moral responsibility? Are there different senses in which people can be morally responsible for their behavior? The contemporary interest in these possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary Watson. Among other things, Wolf`s important 1990 book, Freedom Within Reason, offers a critical discussion of “true self” theories of responsibility. According to these views, a person is responsible for behaviour that is attributable to his or her true self, and forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility justify responsible practices by focusing on the positive consequences that can be achieved through these practices. This approach has had an influence in the early twentieth century (as well as before), had fallen out of favor in the last decades of this century, and has recently been the subject of renewed interest. A moral obligation is something you have to do in a certain ethical system. Philosophers, lawyers, and politicians have argued for centuries about what constitutes a moral obligation, and two people can argue strongly about these obligations.

For example, your employees may feel that you have a moral obligation to increase the cost of living annually. Certain moral obligations are generally accepted and codified by law. Few would deny that we have a moral obligation to avoid murder. The above reasoning can be applied not only to cases where a person is not aware of the consequences of his or her act, but also to cases where a person is not aware of the moral status of his or her behaviour. For example, a slave owner might think that slavery is permissible, and therefore, for the reason considered here, he will only be guilty if he is guilty of his ignorance of the moral status of slavery, which requires, for example, that he ignore the evidence of their moral status, even if he knows that it is something he should not do (Rosen 2003 and 2004). For the psychological mechanism that produces behavior would not be “in an important agent-specific intuitive sense” (1998: 197; Emphasis added). In response to this kind of concern, Fischer and Ravizza argue that responsibility has an important historical component, which they attempt to capture with their representation of how agents can “take responsibility” for the psychological mechanisms that generate their behavior (1998: 207-239). (For a critique of Fischer and Ravizza`s account of taking responsibility, see Levy 2011: 103-106 and Pereboom 2001: 120-22; for completely different accounts of taking responsibility, see Enoch 2012; Freemasons 2019: 179-207; and Wolf, 2001. For the general importance of personal stories for accountability, see Christman 1991, Vargas 2006, and D.

Zimmerman 2003.) The four rights that were considered fundamental human rights in the late eighteenth century—the right to life, liberty, the “pursuit of happiness,” and property—were considered freedoms, not positive rights. Other people were generally considered morally forbidden to interfere with the pursuit of another`s life, the exercise of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or the preservation of property. They had no moral obligation to save other people`s lives, secure their freedom, promote their happiness, or provide them with goods. Moral responsibility must also be distinguished from causal responsibility. Causality is a complicated issue, but it is often quite clear that a person is causally responsible for an event or outcome, that is, they are the main cause (or one) of it.