The Moral Nexus by Wallace R. Jay;

Author:Wallace, R. Jay;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

5.2. Interests, Claims, and Moral Wrongs

In chapter 1, I noted that interests are distinct from moral claims. That this is the case is established by the familiar example of third-party beneficiaries from a promissory transaction. It might well advance the third party’s interests if A keeps the promise that was made to B, but it doesn’t follow from this that the third party has a claim against A to keep the promise. The claim, if there is one, is held by B, the promisee, and it seems that it is B alone who is eligible to be wronged by A through the breach of the promissory obligation.11

Even if interests and moral claims are distinct notions, it is tempting to suppose that there is some connection between them. In section 1.1, I hazarded a conjecture about how these notions might be connected; the suggestion was that moral claims, in the sense relevant to the relational approach, must be anchored somehow in the (nonnormative) interests of individual claimholders. In the present section, I wish to return to this conjecture, and to marshal some considerations in support of it. The leading idea will be that there is nothing specific that I owe to particular members of the extensive manifold of moral persons if it is not the case that the interests of those individuals stand to be affected, in one way or another, by exertions of my agency. In developing this idea, I shall also address the question of the kind of interests that matter to questions about the specific moral claims we have against each other.

The first thing I wish to emphasize is that it is no part of my project to propose that directed moral duties and their correlative claims can be analyzed in terms of nonrelational notions, including the notion of an individual interest. There is a lively debate about the nature of rights, for instance, which divides the landscape of theoretical options into “will” and “interest” theories. This debate is often understood to be one in which it is taken for granted that there are obligations or duties under different systems of norms, construed (for instance) as things that people ought all things considered to do, within those systems. Only some of these obligations have direction, in the sense of being owed to another party (in the way that corresponds to a right on the other party’s part to performance). The question, then, is what needs to be added to a generic obligation to make it one that is directed to another party, and to entitle us to say that that party has a corresponding claim right?12

Proponents of the will theory appeal in this connection to some notion of normative discretion on the part of an individual who is the beneficiary of the dutiful action, including a power to enforce the obligation, as well as the power to waive it (or to waive the duty to compensate in case of nonperformance). A theory of this kind is often attributed to H.

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